Out Now - Drag 'N Drop Vol 5 Iss 2

Drag ’N Drop is a quarterly magazine in PDF, mainly for users of RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi but content will be of interest to all RISC OS 5 users.

Volume 5 issue 2 is chock full of RISC OS stuff:

News, Beginner’s Tips, Application Updates

GPIO for beginners – control LEDs from the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO port with Morse code and dancing LEDs listings.

Winglebith – arcade game: guide Winglebith around the maze disposing of radioactive cannisters. Full sprites and listing.

Stick ‘N Drag – Want a quick way of processing something you drag to the icon bar but don’t want to learn that Wimp stuff? This is for you…

Writing you own App – …on the other hand, you can start writing a calculator applicaton with our illustrated guide.

Mr Frog’s Armcode – an irreverant look at programming in machine code with Mr Frog.

Anatomy of a Drawfile – create dazzling Draw displays of fonts with the second part of our series investigating the structure of Drawfiles.

Mae2PMS – Music publishing made professional with our Maestro-to-PMS converter.

Colour Co-Ordinated – learn about 256 colour modes.

WinEd Tutorial – learn how to use the template editor to create windows for your Wimp programs.

Music with PMS – we round off our series on Music writing with Philips Music Scribe

Working with Unicode – how it’s (just about) possible on RISC OS.

Book Reviews – Rasperry Pi RISC OS System Programming is one of the books under our spotlight.

BBC Games Retrospective – the last part of our look into BBC Micro games.

Articles are written in an informal style designed to encourage new or returning users and programmers.

STOP PRESS STOP PRESS
We are now set up on !Store. Drag N Drop cost £4.00 per issue when purchased this way but you also get the “type in” listings as well!

Each issue of Drag N Drop costs £3.00 on a pay-as-you go basis when purchased through the Drag N Drop website at http://www.dragdrop.co.uk. You can “try before you buy”: free samples are available for free download.

If using Netsurf and Paypal to purchase Drag ’N Drop please remember to disable javascript¹ . We also recommend viewing Drag ’N Drop in !GView² rather than !PDF.

¹ Click menu on Netsurf’s Iconbar icon > Choices > Content > Disable JavaScript
² Ghostscript for RISC OS can be downloaded free from http://www.mw-software.com/software/gview/gview.html

I found that PDF (3.02.1.24) displays DnD5i2 more fully and more clearly (and a lot quicker) than GView 1.52.

Try PDF (3.03.1.25alpha 8) from Chris Gransden’s site.
http://www.cgransden.co.uk/downloads.html

Working with Unicode – how it’s (just about) possible on RISC OS.

On page 58 (page 18 of the sample PDF) it says:

One of the advantages that PC users have over us, is that they can just cut and paste Unicode text from Explorer, straight into WordPad, if they want to make notes as they go along. This is something that I do all the time.

This doesn’t work in NetSurf at the moment. If you try it, you just get a line of question marks where the text should be.

NetSurf already does exactly what it should be doing, and doesn’t need to change. When you copy text in NetSurf to the clipboard it gets converted to the RISC OS system alphabet. You can change the system alphabet to UTF-8 with:

*Alphabet UTF8

Then your characters won’t be converted to question marks and the Unicode values will be preserved. Also, if you then paste from another application into a NetSurf textarea, incoming text will be treated as UTF-8.

However, don’t expect (m)any other applications to support non-latin alphabets. Even the WIMP menu text fails to handle non-latin alphabets correctly. After trying RISC OS with the UTF-8 system alphabet you’ll probably want to go back to what you were using before. For example:

*Alphabet Latin1

Use *Alphabet to get the alphabet name of the current alphabet.

(I’m looking forward to the day when it does work with NetSurf, however!)

NetSurf’s already there. You need the rest of the desktop to handle it. :)

Also, if you then paste from another application into a NetSurf textarea, incoming text will be treated as UTF-8.

Is there a good reason not to transcode from the system alphabet to UTF-8, to mirror the behaviour the other way around?

I’m working on MPro at the moment, and that’s the model I’m working towards. Default behaviour will be:

Clipboard → MPro: Convert from system alphabet to UTF-8
MPro → Clipboard: Convert from UTF-8 to system alphabet

(There are actually some user options to alter this behaviour, but that’s the default.)

Is there a good reason not to transcode from the system alphabet to UTF-8, to mirror the behaviour the other way around?

It does. My comment referred to the situation once the system alphabet has been set to UTF-8.

I’m working on MPro at the moment, and that’s the model I’m working towards. Default behaviour will be:

Clipboard → MPro: Convert from system alphabet to UTF-8
MPro → Clipboard: Convert from UTF-8 to system alphabet

That’s exactly how NetSurf behaves. Also, when NetSurf owns the clipboard it keeps its own copy as UTF-8, so:

NetSurf → NetSurf: Always UTF-8, regardless of system alphabet.

It does. My comment referred to the situation once the system alphabet has been set to UTF-8.

Sorry, I see what you mean now. All clear. I find it useful in MPro to have a way to override the conversion from UTF-8 to system alphabet, so that you can, eg. paste text into !Zap and view it in a UTF-8 capable mode, regardless of what the system alphabet is set to. Might be nice if Netsurf had an override, too.

Also, when NetSurf owns the clipboard it keeps its own copy as UTF-8

That’s a good idea. I may mimic that in MPro.

All in all, I believe that, as Ben Avison has said before, we need to actively work towards having the default system alphabet as UTF-8. Anyway, off topic!

I find it useful in MPro to have a way to override the conversion from UTF-8 to system alphabet, so that you can, eg. paste text into !Zap and view it in a UTF-8 capable mode, regardless of what the system alphabet is set to. Might be nice if NetSurf had an override, too.

NetSurf’s philosophy wrt options is to avoid them were possible. Better to do the right thing than have options that:

1. are unlikely to be used,
2. are unlikely to be understood,
3. make NetSurf behave incorrectly,
4. add to the haystack in which the useful options must be found.

More options also increase the support burden.

In this case it’s probably as easy to issue an Alphabet star command either side of the copy/paste as it is to find the right option, set it, and save choices before and after. Especially as the Alphabet route should work for all apps that behave correctly.

If someone copied from MPro and pasted into a NetSurf textarea, it would only work if MPro is set to save in the system alphabet, any of MPro’s other settings will lead to breakage.

That’s a good idea. I may mimic that in MPro.

It’s the only way to ensure internal copy/paste works with Unicode characters, since nobody runs RISC OS with a UTF-8 alphabet. :)

All in all, I believe that, as Ben Avison has said before, we need to actively work towards having the default system alphabet as UTF-8. Anyway, off topic!

Yep. I was just commenting on the article, which claimed NetSurf needed updated to work with Unicode text, when in fact NetSurf is one of the only apps which is has been fully ready for years.

NetSurf’s philosophy wrt options is to avoid them were possible.

Yes, I’ve always admired Netsurf’s interface in this respect. In many ways, Netsurf is a truly model application.

I suppose it’s because at the moment MPro is evolving in this area, so the UTF-8 export without transcoding is useful for development. In the future, I may look to remove it, when MPro’s internal editor can cope.

Thanks for your thoughts. Interesting!