The Sinclair QL Forum

Just a thought...

For character stripping and conversion I sometimes use UNIX sed (stream editor), not sure if at all usefull in this case.

E.G.

#!/bin/sed -f
# translates german umlauted chars and ss
# from ATARI encoding to latin1

:lbl {

s/\d129/\xfc/;t lbl # u umlaut
s/\d132/\xe4/;t lbl # a umlaut
s/\d137/\xeb/;t lbl # e umlaut
s/\d142/\xc4/;t lbl # A umlaut
s/\d148/\xf6/;t lbl # o umlaut
s/\d153/\xd6/;t lbl # O umlaut
s/\d154/\xdc/;t lbl # U umlaut
s/\d158/\xdf/;t lbl # ss

}

Can leave out sequences of certain chars from the stream, can add HTML tags for LF, CR, and for speciffic formating sequences <P>...</P>, <H2>..</H2> etc.

Tom

Thanks to some sterling work by tcat to further develop the automatic conversion tool, the first version of the SBASIC/SuperBASIC Reference Manual is now online at:

http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/SBASIC_re ... eword.html

JOBS to do.... - volunteers are required, as I will not have time for this - it is now going to be a community project

If you don't come forward with changes, then they are unlikely to be done!

a) Write a home page to form the main link to the manual
b) Improve CSS and layout
c) Some more work on the conversion tool to handle the non-English characters - especially needed for Appendix 8 and 9.
d) tcat to add the latest version conversion tool source to the forum for comments / changes to be suggested and made - you might spot more ways in which it can be improved to reduce the amount of manual effort needed.
e) Volunteers to take ownership of a specific page and hand edit it to improve the layout - remove some of the line breaks for example in each paragraph.

At the moment only one person has expressed an interest in this project... Disappointing...

If you do want to edit the HTML source - I can email it to you or you can use right click - View Source, Save As... to get the page onto your computer.

You may also need the CSS file:

http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/SBASIC_re ... lStyle.css

If someone wants to set up some sort of online system where people can edit pages (eg. a wiki ?) then let me know and I can send a zip with all of the HTML files.

Rich,

I am having some difficulty with CSS styles used. I tried on UNIX different browsers and iPAD Safari, The sideBar seems to overlap the main text, and links are not clickable.
Perhaps we may need to add in the code, a browser type detection, if that is possible at all.

Would you mind adding for a start this a very much simplified style? This renders on Mozilla and Safari like browsers as captured in the picture, I will be posting the convertor source shortly here.

Many thanks so far
Tom

That is why I hate CSS - works fine under Windows on Opera, Firefox, Chrome & IE11.

Safari doesn't render it correctly for some reason - should now be fixed - I removed the position:absolute from the CSS for the mainText element...

Hmm - someone needs to spend time looking at the CSS - I don't have time to do this and it is after all supposed to be a community project....

Dilwyn has hand edited one of the pages, but it does not display correctly on Firefox - see

http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/SBASIC_re ... rdDJC.html

compared to

http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/SBASIC_re ... eword.html

Can't spot anything in the CSS unless I add position:absolute; back in to for the #mainText - but then that stops it working on various browsers...

Rich,

Can you please try using in the #mainText,
margin-left:245px;
in place of
padding-left:15px;
?

The idea is to keep side by side view, that is sometimes broken, even when browser window is maximised, and the main Text shows below the side Bar, rather than right to it.

Generally how can we submit the changes to you, not to make an extra time overhead?

I will be running a new batch at the end of the day, hopefully improving on non-English characters, they mainly appear in Appedices 8 and 9, but also in Keywords K, and scarcely in some other files.

Tom

I have made more changes to the CSS which should help.

I could potentially offer FTP access for specific users working on the reference manual - but ideally some form of Wiki or project sharing site should be used - not sure if a project sharing site would be any good for people wanting to browse / use the book though!

RWAP wrote:I have made more changes to the CSS which should help.

Thanks Rich, yes it does seem to help me at any rate.

Tomas: please could the character translates for the copyright symbol - CHR$(127) on QL although I don't know what the Text 87 output for it is - convert to something more identifiable than a comma, it is hard to spot those as it stands - as an example, there is a list of copyrights in the Introduction section.