Questions, questions

[Carl L. Distefano (70154.3452@xxxxxxxx)]

To Charles Herold:

I'll take a crack at a few of your queries.
>>XyIII+ always truncated long files.
>>For example, if I edited the XyIII+ help file, it would only save
>>part of it. Has anyone encountered this and found a way around it?

The XyIII+ Help file (I assume you mean the factory-issued LONG.HLP) is
only about 200K in length. I routinely edited and SAved files longer than
that in III+ with no loss of data. My guess is that you're editing
LONG.HLP while it's an active, LOADed Help file. No can do: as you've
seen, the file gets corrupted when SAved to disk. The solution: Don't edit
a loaded Help file in III+! A good practice with Help files is to edit a
master copy of the file (which never gets loaded) but always load a *copy*
of that file.

The only other way that III+ would trash a file would be if it runs out of
memory -- which can happen if you attempt to edit a *very* long file. But
not a 200K file -- unless perhaps you have many other files open at the
same time and this causes out-of-mem. I s'pose I should ask you how much
memory you have...
>>1.  If I put "df dr=d:\,c:\xy4" into my settings.dfl file, I
>>find "va dr" will give me "d:\" and I've found that when d: fills
>>up XyWrite does not start using c:\xy4 for .TMP files. So I just
>>use "df dr=c:\xy4". Does this work properly for anyone else?

The secondary drive spec may be for XyWin only. I don't have a Xy4
Customization Guide handy; is the second drive documented for DOS?

But.... I see that it doesn't even work in XyWin! VA/NV DR still returns
only the first spec. Haven't tested whether this is merely a bug in the
VA/NV command, or whether the second spec actually never takes hold. TTG
Development ought to look into this one. The secondary spec is useful;
drives (esp. RAMdrives) do run out of space.
>>2.  Certain key combinations don't work in XyWrite, even though
>>they work in other programs. ... Some key
>>combinations worked at first and now don't; such as Ctrl+F5.
>>Ctrl+R worked, then didn't, but now does. ...

Tough to address this one based on what you say. In general, any key
combination should work in Xy4 if your .KBD file syntax is correct. For
starters, what were you doing "then" that you're not doing "now" (or vice
versa)? How do/did your .KBD file assignments read for the keys in
question?
>>3.  Is it possible to load dict.spl some way other than by
>>typing a word with auto-correct on or running the spell checker.
>>There's a considerable pause when it loads, and I'd like to just
>>get all the waiting done at once, instead of this lag time after
>>I type something. (Due to lack of memory, when dict.spl loads I
>>get the "creating temporary file, do not remove drive c:"
>>message. ...

You could add a macro to STARTUP.INT that checks the spelling of a single
word, to force DICT.SPL to be loaded at the beginning of each session.
With Automatic Window turned on (default NW>0), this line should work:

[BX_](ne)test[PW_][SO_][BX_](wait)[BX_](ab/nv);*;
>>5.  The Fix Spell in Xy4 has been my main nemesis. ...
>>I have put an XPL program in my command set file which stores the
>>cursor position and goes back to it. There are two main problems.
>>First, if the word has been corrected and is no longer the same >>length,
I will be off a character or two. ...

How about adding a func PW, which would always bring you back to the first
letter of the previous word?
>>7.  In my fix of the spell checker, I needed to capture function
>>keys and pass them on. I found I could not do it directly, and
>>wonder if there's a way.

Don't try to do it directly; it's a dead end. Why? Because first you have
to deal with the fact that if the key has a string of functions assigned to
it, > will capture only the first. You have to keep on looping
back to the RC command and *concatenate* the contents of S/G 10 into
another S/G until you've got the last func in the key assignment. But how
do you know when you've reached the last func? You don't. That's one
problem. Another is that  stops dead in its tracks when it encounters
funcs BN BX H@ HF HL JH JM OP SH VH, so that nothing following these funcs
will be recorded. Even the concatenation method fails here.

The best way to accomplish what you're after would be to test for the Key
Code (VA$KC) associated with the function key in question, then state the
associated action explicitly. (Rather than , use , which discards
everything after the first character or function assigned to a key.) This
way it doesn't matter what's actually assigned to the key in the .KBD file;
your macro retains total control. (For a variant of this approach using
Scan Codes, take a look at a frame called Keypad in my SmartSet package
[SMART251.ZIP].)

Personally, I'm a big fan of spell-checking to a file. I hate stopping at
each word and facing menus and answering questions. I'd much rather scan
down a list of "questionable" words and see at a glance which ones need
fixing. I have a macro that automates the correction of individual words
from the list, in case you're interested.

That's about it for now. I hope this helps (and apologize to others for the
length of this msg!).

--------------
Carl Distefano
70154.3452@xxxxxxxx