Re: Bits 'o business

["Bob Brody" rabrody@xxxxxxxx]

> Add custom menus to XWMENU.MNU. Clone something that's already
> there. Put the programming itself (if there is programming) in
> U2 (you use the JD command to call it from .MNU -- frankly, I
> forget whether JD can be made to call PMs in U2, you might have
> to put them in .DLG, gotta experiment).

Excellent. XWMENU.MNU was the missing ingredient in what I was
looking for. Once I got that to screen, it all made sense. No
problem adding my own item(s) to the main menu bar. Ditto
altering existing items if I want to. Interestingly, my new
addition (a drop down menu on the menu car called Stuff, for
instance) implanted itself on the menu bar as soon as I hit SAve
to the modified XWMENU.MNU. Didn't have to reload for it to
take. Nice.

So it appears this main menu bar is a Type 0 frame. Cloning from
what's already there, albeit naming it &Stuff, created the
addition to the menu bar, Alt-S pops it open. The frame calls a
Type L frame which contains the items to list when the menu drops
open. There's a Symbols explanation at the beginning of
XWMENU.MNU which offers the necessary info for how you want to
code each Type L item listed within the dropped down menu. It
appears I can include function calls within the Type L listings
if that's all the respective menu item is supposed to do (such as
a RD to rubout defined block, etc.) I see some XPL here as well
but for involved routines it looks like it's calling keywords
which are in the XWDLG.DLG file frames, and also calls to
routines in the U3 file. (Probably should be able to call to
SMARTSET.U2 as well.)

If the menu item calls to a dialog box routine in XWDLG.DLG then
I of course will have to have created the dialog frame
respectively. That file you uploaded, DIALOG.XW4, has been
helpful in understanding dialog box creating and once I saw a few
in XWDLG.MNU then I had some good working examples to go by. No
problem there.

Everything's working, the main menu bar has what I want it to
have including my own custom stuff which is now readily
accessible via Alt-whatever hotkey. Much better.

One note of interest. In creating these XWMENU.MNU items, they
each end with an ASCII 9 character. However, typing Ctrl-Alt-9
to insert the character inserts a character that the menu doesn't
read. When I opened the menu, the text didn't end but included
trailing garbage. So I simply copied an ASCII 9 character from
one of the existing items and it worked fine (no more trailing
garbage).

One mishap along the way: I had some other programs open and when
I performed a SAve for XWMENU.MNU something caused a mega
depletion in System Resources. My warning meter popped up and
said System Resources have dropped to 1% (which is a death blow),
everything locked up, XyWin went into kaleidoscopic test patterns
and a Protection Fault message popped up. Windows was dead in
the water. Rebooted and started XyWin. The XyWin screen was
purple with lines waving across it, then the Protection Fault
error reappeared. Seems XWMENU.MNU was kaput and corrupted
during the SAve lockup.

Instead of using a safety backup, I wanted to see how
comprehensive XyWin's selective reinstall is. Worked well. I
put the install diskette in, a:install, chose to add files to
existing installation rather than install everything anew, typed
in the name of the file when asked (XWMENU.MNU) and it extracted
it from respective diskette folder. XyWin started up fine and
everything was back to normal. Loaded XWMENU.MNU, made my
customizations, SAved and it's all working. Important lesson
there is once modifications are made to these files, XWMENU.MNU,
for instance, and everything works, be sure to make a safety
backup of the modified file 'cuz reinstalling from diskette
installs the factory version and mods will have to be redone lest
you have a last-known-good version backed up to port from.

Other than that the procedure went smooth and accomplished what I
wanted to do.

> Hey! Did ES=0 turn WAVe files back on, or not?

I'm familiar with ES 0/1 and checked for that early on. I'm not
inadvertently set for ES 1 so that's ruled out. What I've been
doing is forcing errors to see what if anything will trigger a
beep. Some errors do, other errors do not. Most don't. I've
concluded XyWin just doesn't handshake with Windows' varied sound
effects per specific kinds of messages (because when a message
does occur, and if there's a beep, it's always the Windows
default beep regardless which kind of message it is; Question
mark, Exclamation mark, whatever). As for why XyWin isn't
emitting beeps for routine errors remains a mystery. If I
execute a bogus command on command line I get a pop up error
message but no beep. Ditto if I try to search for something Not
Found. Yet if I try to click a menu item outside an open dialog,
I might get a beep. Beats me.

I gave up trying to figure that one out especially if XyWin
doesn't distinguish Windows' sound effects settings per specific
kinds of messages. The fun is being able to have different
sounds for different messages. Less frivolous, for blind people,
being able to distinguish messages based on sound is important.
I'm not going to make long distance transcontinental toll calls
to TTG support when there's a perfectly competenet online
discussion list available over the Internet. If they don't want
to jump in here or make their notes available on 'net, that's
their choice. I wish my competitors were just as disinterested.

XyWin is not a polished program (menu calls to keywords that
don't exist, incomplete, limited or ill-conceived feature
implementations, inaccurate or non existant documentation, and so
on) and if the program has no future a la bug fixes or upgrade,
I'll move on to 32 bit Word for Windows and Office 97 (and maybe
Red Hat's Applixware integrated package for Linux).
Notwithstanding there's still something about XyWrite that
remains addictive (the flexibility to make the kinds of
personalized modifications I just made, for instance).

Thanks for the help. Project completed and now I'll have to find
something else to do while watching the Stupor Bowl.

Bob