From cbmvax!uunet!CUVMB.BITNET!LOJBAN Mon Jul 6 07:36:40 1992 Return-Path: Received: by snark.thyrsus.com (/\==/\ Smail3.1.21.1 #21.19) id ; Mon, 6 Jul 92 07:36 EDT Received: by cbmvax.cbm.commodore.com (5.57/UUCP-Project/Commodore 2/8/91) id AA09751; Mon, 6 Jul 92 07:37:48 EDT Received: from pucc.Princeton.EDU by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA16768; Mon, 6 Jul 92 01:48:52 -0400 Message-Id: <9207060548.AA16768@relay1.UU.NET> Received: from PUCC.PRINCETON.EDU by pucc.Princeton.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 3887; Mon, 06 Jul 92 01:48:22 EDT Received: by PUCC (Mailer R2.08 ptf033) id 2252; Mon, 06 Jul 92 00:43:16 EDT Date: Fri, 3 Jul 1992 03:34:52 -0500 Reply-To: cbmvax!uunet!viikki21.helsinki.fi!vilva Sender: Lojban list From: cbmvax!uunet!VIIKKI21.HELSINKI.FI!VILVA Subject: Re: a new Lojban project - for all of you To: John Cowan , Eric Raymond , Eric Tiedemann Status: RO From lojbab: > Can you repost the infor from alt.galactic.guide - not everyone on > this list has access to the newsgroups, and I for one am trying to > drop newsgroupsrather than add them. I have been looking for software to manage all the Lojban material accumulating from various sources. In the process I also checked a program called The Guide (TG!, The HitchHiker's Guide to the Known Galaxy) which is a rather handy article reader originating from a group of people writing fact/fiction/both articles in the spirit of the original THGTTKG. It wasn't very suitable for my original purposes but could be utilized for our Tales-project. (I'll return to the materials management in a later posting.) The TG! program is presently available for MS-DOS but there is work going on to make it available for other platforms (at least UNIX; unfortunately I have no details about this as the news management at our site had just purged most of the articles from alt.galactic- guide) I prepared a rather condensed doc about TG! from the material still available in the news group and from the articles accompanying a late beta version of the program. I have tried out this version of the program and its seems to be OK. Of course there are details which I'd have handled differently but the program is available NOW and the format of the entries is such that it will be quite easy to convert them to another format later on if so desired (the articles must be archived in the original ASCII format for this eventuality). Without the reader the originals are just ASCII files with a standardized header and as such accessible to everybody. So we could adopt the format in lieu of a better one and those of us who have a PC available could use the TG! reader. Veijo PS. we could try posting articles to this original Guide for publicity. (The guide.zip file contains 20+ articles at the moment so those of you who are interested enough to download it will get the flavour.) ----- AUTHOR : Steven W. Baker (swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu) DATE : 06/07/92 FACTUALITY : FACT ----- The Guide! an experiment in Turbo Vision/OOP to implement The HitchHiker's Guide to the Known Galaxy Pre-Release (ie, beta-test) Documentation slightly revised 06/07/92 (anonymous ftp : vela.acs.oakland.edu:/pub/swbaker/guide.zip) 1.0 Introduction This is my "vision" of The Guide!, a PC-based article reader. This doc file is just a brief glimpse of what the program can do; The Guide! is a full-featured, multi-windowed, pop-up and pull- down menu'ed, mouse-supporting anomaly. It reads in new entry articles from standard ASCII files, and supports multiple entries per .NEW input file (archive). TG! features a powerful search and query engine which allows you to search in many different ways. The following are verbose examples of searches you may request: * Give me all entries which have the word "wazoo" in the title, are written by Joe Schmoe, and are completely factual. * Show me all entries written between Date1 and Date2. * I want any articles with "meatball" in the summary, written before Date1, which are both fact and fiction. ... and any combination of title, summary, author, date, and factuality (being fact, fiction, or both) you can imagine. The Guide! also offers a full index, as well as cross-references which link articles together. If an article has a cross- reference to a second article which has not yet been added, The Guide! is aware of that "incomplete" xref and will update it, automatically, when the second article is eventually added. 2.0 Adding entries to The Guide! The Guide! is designed to be very flexible with its data input. It will read in as many new archive files (files which contain articles) as you want to throw at it, providing they meet these criteria: 1. Each ASCII file must end with a [ .NEW ] extension, ie: FOO.NEW BAR.NEW This way, whole batches of files may be processed at once, following the simple idea that every .NEW file shall be added to the system. 2. Multiple entries may reside in a single ASCII file, but they MUST be delimited with this special flag: *EOA* which means "End Of Article." This flag must appear in the FIRST column of a line, and must be the only item on the line. Update options and user-interaction are fully supported. In particular, you may: 1. Automatically accept each and every article found, including duplicate articles. When an article with a title duplicate to one already in the GuideNET is added, a special message is appended to the new title. This ", Entry x" message denotes that the article is the 2nd, or 3rd, or xth, article with the same title. 2. Automatically accept only new, unique articles, and skip any duplicate articles found 3. Accept new articles, and also automatically update existing articles with data from new articles with matching titles 4. Manually decide whether or not to accept each article found. You are shown the new article's title, summary, author, date, and factuality. 2.1 Format of new entry files Entries in the HHGTTKG have a very specific format to allow for easy parsing by third-party readers. Sample Format: %t Title %n identification number %s summary %a author %d date (in yyyymmdd format) %x xrefs (unlimited number) %i index (unlimited number) %e Entry beginning This is a sample entry. %e Entry end. %t Title: Should not wrap around an 80-column screen, if possible. This is the subject title of the entry. %n ID Number: This string is composed of three main parts: editor ID, reality index, and message ID. The editor ID is the number up until the reality index, and the message ID is the number after that. Every editor will have a unique ID number. The reality index is a single character, either R (for Real articles) or U (for Unreal articles). The message ID number is in hexidecimal, and may contain chars A- F. For example, the 19th real article editor 4 makes will have the id number of 4R13. %s Summary: Should not wrap around an 80-column screen, if possible. This is just a short one-liner about the entry, without going into too much detail. %a Author: Your name, in straight first-middle-last fashion. In parenthesis, add your email address after your name, so that people can figure out who to talk to if they have questions %d Date: The date you wrote the article. The fashion is yyyymmdd, so December 25, 1991 would be written 19911225. %x XRefs: Cross references. Your entry can contain any number of logical cross references. Each should be on a separate line starting with the %x marker. These lines should contain the names of ACTUAL ENTRY TITLES. %i Indexes: These are names by which the Title might also be known by. Your entry may contain any number of these, so long as each is on a separate line marked by the %i marker. %e Entry Markers: These indicate the beginning and ends of the entries. These markers should occupy a single line by themselves. Everything after the first %e is the entry, and the entry is ended by another %e on a separate line. ENTRY FORMATTING: For readability, space considerations, and technical reasons, the editors of the Guide ask that your entries be written in a specific format. Tabulation: The beginning of every paragraph should NOT start with a tab. Paragraph spacing: There should be an extra blank line between paragraphs, but NOT after the final paragraph, which should be followed by the %e. Underlining: Things that should be underlined (like book names) should be preceded by an underscore "_" and then ended with an underscore "_", but there should NOT be underscores between words. Hyphenation: Words should NOT be hyphenated at the end of a line. Several extensions have been added to this format, which I believe have been mentioned in the newsgroup: * %f [ FACT | FICTION | BOTH ] * %f [ -10 .. 10 ] Another suggested way of handling factuality. These are converted as follows: -10..-4 : FICTION -3..3 : BOTH 4..10 : FACT * Of course, if the 'U' or 'R' is present in the %n field, then that'll work also ('U' = FICTION, 'R' = FACT ). Case is not sensitive (ie, you can have either '%t' or '%T'). Recall that The Guide! uses a special marker [ *EOA* ] to define a "break" between articles in an "archive" .NEW file The Guide! ignores any non-key lines in the input files. This way, users can simply capture new articles from the newsgroups, save them as ASCII files, and let the system handle the rest. Comments, remarks, etc may also be inserted before, between, and after articles. 2.2 Adding new entries into the system : use UPDATE.EXE 2.3 Duplicate entries, indexs, and cross-references (in UPDATE.EXE) TG! allows duplicate entries, indexs, and cross-references. It takes care of all the busywork, and lets you get on with using TG!. The Guide! distinguishes between original entries and subsequent duplicates (if allowed into the system; see 2.0 above) by appending the phrase ", Entry x" to the duplicate's title. Any index and cross-reference links to duplicate entries access that duplicate entry, just as any index and cross-reference links to the original entry access that original entry. From the article displayed, you may Browse forward/backward to other duplicate entries. 2.4 Saving the data (in UPDATE.EXE) The Guide! supports multiple data files, and each file may have a 50-character description associated with it. Thus, you may maintain several GuideNET files by choosing Manual Control in the Update option, and selecting desired articles for each collection. You defined the GuideNET name and description before the system performed the updating process. If you wish to rename the current GuideNET file, you may use the "Save [A]s..." function, in the ile pull-down menu, to modify the name and description. 3.0 Search and query (in GUIDE.EXE) The searching is probably the neatest thing about The Guide!. Pull down the earch menu, or use the hot-key F8, to define the various search parameters you wish to use. These parameters can even be saved so you may restore them later. Note that these parameters are conjunctive; that is, if you define a string for specific titles (ie, "Bob") AND a particular author string (ie, "Joe"), then the search will return only the artitles with "Bob" somewhere in its title AND "Joe" somewhere in the author field, not EITHER. Thus, the more parameters you define, the more specific your search becomes! The index and cross-references, as well as both forward and backward browsing, are accessed through the onsult menu, and also through their respective hot-keys. In addition, "Browse backward/forward" buttons are defined on the bottom "status line" for you mouse- users. The index list, cross-reference list, and search results list are shown in "list-boxes". 4.0 Print and save You can print and save the active entry (ie, the current on- screen article, which is "active" with its window boarder highlighted). The output of Print and Save (both accessed from the indow menu, and also via hot-keys) is similar to what is diaplayed on-screen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Veijo Vilva vilva@viikki21.helsinki.fi