Is there a text editor for Pico?

John McCarthy has extracted the text from the TWIN PDF and is working on a TechWriter version with a view to ouputting (sic) a RISC OS friendly PDF.

Yes, I am. I’m well on course with it but there are some examples of typography which are difficult to reproduce without resorting to using in-line images.

I’m also changing my name by deed poll! :-)

My father and his elder sister were the only two of five siblings to be registered as McCartneys. The others were all McCartheys. All five were grandchildren of an Irishman who couldn’t get away from Co Kildare after the famine.

I’ll put it down to your age, Mr Rackman, no need to apologise.

parallel effort

Is that someone working to get Twin running correctly on RISC OS 5? If so, I shall stand down and let folk do that – let’s not reinvent the wheel several times.

Is that someone working to get Twin running correctly on RISC OS 5?

Absolutely not! It is someone (or two)
trying to make the old documentation readable on a RISC OS machine. Not going near the code but happy to update the docs as things progress.

Triffic. I will have a look at the code and see what needs to be done.

Absolutely not! It is someone (or two) trying to make the old documentation readable on a RISC OS machine. Not going near the code but happy to update the docs as things progress.

As John says, the PDF was unreadable – in the sense of the reader running out of patience waiting for it to load. That was on my ARMX6. Others with an ARMX6 tell me that changing from page to page is equally tedious. There’s something odd about that file – it’s only 15 MB and !PDF has loaded bigger files than that as far as I can remember.

Apart from the formatting, I’ve found a few wrong spellings from the original and a few more which Foxit Reader’s OCR has thrown into the mix. I haven’t spell-checked it yet, I’ve just corrected things which I’ve spotted as I’ve worked my way through it.

Ironically, I’m not a programmer and have no need of TWIN. I’m just relishing the challenge of bringing the documentation into the 21st century. However, it’ll need close inspection by someone who knows what they’re talking about and lots of feedback about the impact of changes to the code on the contents of the manual.

There might well be a hiatus for a few days as I’m going walking tomorrow and (hopefully) I’ll be picking up my new car (not ‘new’ new – it’s a year old) on Tuesday so I’ll be too preoccupied to do much else until Wednesday.

I’ve done enough for today. Me ’ed ’urts.

in the sense of the reader running out of patience waiting for it to load.

It might have taken time to unpack bitmaps?

Try mine. It’s a ~4¹/₂MB PDF built using monochrome scans. I made them JPEG and assembled them in OvationPro. Doesn’t look great, but it’s readable. Might even be clear enough to extract meaningful content with OCR? (I don’t have any such software so cannot say)

I will have a look at the code and see what needs to be done.

Have fun! I didn’t do much more than get it working for the sake of getting it working because, well, I use the UI so can have an arbitrary number of files open as and when. ;-)

But certainly, if it can be rescued and modernised, it might be useful to have a simple little full screen text editor available.

But certainly, if it can be rescued and modernised, it might be useful to have a simple little full screen text editor available.

I used it all the time at Acorn and got on well with it. Bit odd that we didn’t ship it with Arthur, looking back. But we didn’t have text config files to worry about then! I do see it as being useful in the RO5 world when the desktop doesn’t start for whatever reason.

Bit odd that we didn’t ship it with Arthur, looking back.

Perhaps somebody felt it was too liable to be confused with ARMBE? That was in Arthur, wasn’t it?

Edit: nope, it seems somebody thought they could get thirty three quid for it rather than bundling it with the machines. http://heyrick.eu/random/acorn_september1989_retail_price_list.pdf

Had a go at saving out the text of the Twin PDF manual – just need copies of the pics.

bq.Had a go at saving out the text of the Twin PDF manual – just need copies of the pics.

I hope we’re not going to duplicate our efforts here.

I realised that there is only one image which needs to be just that. It’s the screen dump on page 50. The others are easily recreated as text – much as they were in the original.

I’ve seen this before – the text seems in there unless Calibre Win Prog does auto OCR on PDF sprites.

Various !Pdf versions here VRPC RO 5.29 would just crash out when trying to load the Twin Pdf file.

OK, I got PICO (the PINE editor) to compile and it even seems to work fullscreen.
arrow keys don’t work in a graphtask.

I would like to clean it up a little before pushing it back to github or zipping it up and dropping it in my webpage
(unless there’s a desperate need for it?)

I confess to very mixed feeling here. As a long-time EMACS guy I hated pico when I saw it but this might be useful? Maybe that only applies to UNIX, so it’s ok under RISC OS? :-)

ack! duplicate post! Sorry about that.

(Pico does also seem to work in a Nettle ansitask
But the included !Run seems to think it would work in a plain taskwindow. It does not. (at least not in a stronged taskwindow, do I need to try it in !edit?))

It does work in a Zap taskwindow! Even the arrow keys! Impressed I am.

But not in Edit, SrcEdit, StrongED, or NE taskwindows.

NE in particular can not handle.

With a lot of these full screen editors using numbered Modes – are there any useful larger numbered screen Modes been created?

Ie 1024 × 768

Back in the day we wrote modules to extend the number of modes for our whizzy new multisync monitors, using Service_ModeExtension. It’s all 26 bit and VIDC1 stuff, so I’ve no idea if it is still supported.

The main problem with doing this is that everyone picked different mode numbers, and then forgot about it. So you would get a program using say MODE 105, and then not have a clue as to what resolution and colour depth it was on the authors system.

OK, I got PICO (the PINE editor) to compile and it even seems to work fullscreen.
arrow keys don’t work in a graphtask.

Given that I produced a built version, and it’s all pretty simple C code, that should have been a trivial operation. It’s not meant for use anywhere other than full screen really. In Zap it worked fine, and the main reason for allowing the ANSI versions to work was so that you could use it as a will within a session connected with TelnetD. But where it’s really useful is full screen editing.

I would like to clean it up a little before pushing it back to github or zipping it up and dropping it in my webpage.

Fork it and raise a pull request.

There might well be a hiatus for a few days…

The hiatus is over and I’ve reproduced the content of the TWIN manual as close to how the original was presented as I can. It’s down from 15 MB to about one sixtieth of that and it opens in RISC OS without any problems.

John Rickman has suggested that I upload it to the public repository he created on github and as soon as I find out how to proceed, I’ll post the link here.

Well, it looks like John Rickman has already uploaded the PDF file for me. It can be found here

I have already spotted an error in the new version: on page 4 (page 5 in the original) the command (set mode)D should have no parentheses and the words “set mode” should be in Homerton bold.

I’ll upload a corrected version in due course but not until I’m made aware of all the other howlers and had a chance to correct them as well.

As and when TWIN itself is updated, I’ll be happy to incorporate changes to the document. John has suggested to me that I could make the TechWriter original available for anyone who has the application to make their own changes. The text itself can easily be extracted from the PDF file whichever OS you view it in.

I’m open to any and all suggestions for changes.

Many thanks John – we need to keep this one around to reflect Twin from those pre-Archimedes (Brazil on ARM 2p) days; our friends at stardot would no doubt be interested. You might not have been aware that there is a slightly revised version of the Twin manual for Archimedes systems? Drop me an email so that we can coordinate efforts: info@croftnuisk.co.uk – I’m working on making the source a wee bit more readable for future maintainers at present; it still builds the same binary as it did before. Then to make the steps towards working on modern RISC OS.

Is there a way of translating pdf’s to other languages like English to German?

It would be interesting to be able to convert the German Arc msg to English.

Well done for the updating of Twin Pdf – Docs for RISC OS tend to be scarce.

Drop me an email so that we can coordinate efforts: info@croftnuisk.co.uk

Done.

Well done for the updating of Twin Pdf – Docs for RISC OS tend to be scarce.

Thanks. I’ve enjoyed doing it though, to be honest, some bits were somewhat repetitive.

Before his death, I’d been in touch with Jim Nagel about scanning, OCRing and pouring into Impression, Ray Favre’s Dr Wimp’s Surgery. The original files and even the A4 printing masters had gone walk-about and Jim had failed to locate them. He was keen to get an updated manual to match the updated application.

I’d completed a couple of different versions of a sample chapter. He’d emailed to say how pleased he was and then there was silence. The next I heard was the announcement of his death.

Interesting. My one says it’s version 1.0, 1987, first published 1987.
And yours says it’s version 1.0 from 1986.

;-)

I wonder what the differences are?

I wonder what the differences are?

Probably nothing – just printed in different years perhaps.

Feel free to compare them line-by-line. You’ve still got most of the week end available!

Report back when you’ve satisfied your curiosity.

;-)