DrawText
Alex Hayward


BRIEF OUTLINE

This application is designed to assist the importing of text into Draw, giving greater control over text size, font, colour and positioning than most word processors, as well as allowing large pieces of text to be combined with graphics.

Text can be imported in both ASCII and 1st Word Plus formats.


GENERAL USE

To convert a file into Draw-compatible text, install the application on the icon bar, then set the options in the DrawText window. Finally, name the file in the 'Create File' part of the dialogue and drag it to a filer window. Alternatively, you can work directly with text saved from Edit or 1st Word Plus Release 2 into DrawText, and drag the converted file straight from DrawText to Draw.

Most of the options are self-explanatory. As in DTP packages and word processors, line spacing can be controlled either by the text size or by de-selecting the 'as font height' button and entering a figure in points. The aspect ratio of text can be controlled by unpressing the 'as size' button and altering the height and font size independently.

Fonts can be selected by clicking Menu over the arrow to the right of the font names, then choosing a font from the font list. The alignment settings are the equivalent of justification controls in word processors.


IMPORTING 1st WORD PLUS FORMAT FILES

DrawText takes 1st Word Plus format (file type &AF8) files and converts them to text files suitable for loading into Draw or Draw+ as text areas. DrawText sets up font references, paragraph and line spacings, margins, alignment and the number of columns, which are entered into DrawText in the Drawtext window. A font is selected for normal text, italic text and so on. All four types of 1st Word Plus space are converted to a normal space (ASCII 32).

Left align, right align and centring will result in spaces being inserted in the text, i.e. they will be correctly aligned if the text column is the same width as the ruler length. Setting the 'convert Returns to line-breaks' option precedes all Returns with the Escape character (\). This will also insert a line-break where 1st Word Plus performs word wrapping, fixing the number of characters per line in Draw to be the same as in 1st Word Plus. When loaded into Draw, a single Return is treated as a space. More than one is converted to n-1 paragraph spaces.

Escape sequences (commands starting with a '\') within the file will, if the "Leave Escape Sequences" option is not set, will be converted to '\\', instructing Draw to insert a backslash character. The following are ignored: footnotes, headers and footers, page breaks. Alignment is as selected in DrawText, unless the justify option is set in a ruler, in which case the text is double justified. When changing the ruler to a different text size (e.g. elite) the font sizes are automatically adjusted.


IMPORTING ASCII TEXT FILES

DrawText takes text (&FFF) files and converts them to textfiles suitable for loading into Draw as text areas. DrawText sets up font references, paragraph and line spacings, margins, alignment and the number of columns, which are entered in the DrawText window. Escape sequences within the files are ignored. When selecting fonts, normal text means font 0, italic means font 1, bold means font 2 and so on.

Escape sequences (commands starting with a '\') within the file, if the 'leave Escape sequences' option is not set, will be converted to '\\', instructing Draw to insert a backslash character. The following Escape sequences are recognised by Draw:

Alignment:

\A+     L  -  Left     R  -  Right
\A+     C  -  Centre   D  -  Double

Colour:

Background colour tint

\B<R> <G> <B>  Terminated by / or <newline>

Text colour

\C<R> <G> <B>  Terminated by / or <newline>

Fonts:

Define font reference
\F<font no.> size width(optional) Terminated by / or <newline>
\<font no.> select font n

Spacings:

Line
\L<line spacing>  Terminated by / or <newline>
Margins
\M<left> <right>  Terminated by / or <newline>
Paragraph
\P<paragraph spacing>
Vertical move
\V<no. of points> Terminated by / or <newline>
Line break
\<newline>
Paragraph space
No of paragraph spaces=Number of newlines-1

Other:

Underline
\U<position> <thickness>  Terminated by / or <newline>
Soft hyphen, if necessary
\-
\ Character
\\
Comment
\;






Version 1.1




 RISC User 1993
