Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!wuarchive!decwrl!ucbvax!BIRK.CS.CHALMERS.SE!bernerus From: bernerus@BIRK.CS.CHALMERS.SE (Christer Bernerus) Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: Observations on ATK, PL6. Message-ID: Date: 16 Aug 90 10:54:36 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 62 Excerpts from info-andrew: 16-Aug-90 Observations on ATK, PL6. Christer Bernerus@cs.chalmers.se (3302+0) > 4. Reading the info about compchar makes me confused: > How do I specify an argument to a proc in a *init file ? > The "ascii" field in the Composites File Format section isn't > described, only specified in the syntax. I may guess it's use > since I've been involved a bit in the matter of composed > characters, but I bet others will be confused. I'd also have > wanted to see more examples in the Quick reference section. > Btw. I found out about the extistence of compchar by reading the > RCS diffs in patch.08r. I found no file telling me what > functional changes have been made to ATK with the 2.1 Mbyte sized patch #6. Blush! The sole example in cpchar.help described exactly what I wanted, I think I'll RTFM better next time I complain. Nevertheless I miss the description of the "ascii" field and the "changes-since-last-patch" description. > 5. It seems to me (by reading the manual) that there is no way to > specify a default translation of ascii to ATK without having to answer > at least one question. We had this possibility with Tom's "swedish" > proc's. But now this seems to be gone. Is there maybe another > (undocumented) argument to ASCIIToATK that enable me to design a menu > entry which does what I usually want to do. I.e. translating a piece of > swedish ascii text (with {}|'s) to the real stuff and back again without > having to answer silly questions (since I'm always knowing what I'm > doing :-) . Poking around a bit more makes me even more confused: ASCIIToATK enables me to translate a selected text region to ISO characters, but doing the reverse (ATKToASCII) operates on the whole document/inset or whatever. If this is a bug, I think it deserves a fix. If it's a feature, I'd strongly oppose this design. The user interface to ATK is already quite confusing. What you do is that you design procs that appears to be their reversals both by their names and their results. Why do these procs have to have different UI's ?? Suggestion: 1. Modify the UI of ASCIIToATK to include the possibility of specifying a parameter in the .*init file. This parameter should be used as a "go right away and do it" flag. (I did this, it was fairly simple) 2. Use the same UI routines for ATKToASCII. 3. Do this right away before people here in Europe start using this. Otherwise I'm quite pleased with the way you designed the cpchar package. Now we'll go doing some troff hacking -:) Chris. bernerus@cs.chalmers.se ---------------------------------------------------------- Christer Bernerus (SM6FBQ) ! E-mail: bernerus@{cs,utc}.chalmers.se Chalmers University of Technology ! Phone: +46 31 721000 Department of Computer Science S-412 96 Gothenburg, SWEDEN