User Guide small corrections (Rev #125)

User Guide small corrections

This page was established to log subediting and other small corrections during the development of the RISC OS 5 User Guide issue 1, published in April 2018 in support of RISC OS 5.24, and available as a paperback book from ROOL here. A big thank you to everyone for their careful checking!

As of May 2019 that content is cleared (though archived by the wiki) to make space for a log of suggested corrections to the latest published User Guide, whether resulting from mistakes in the text or from changes in the software that affect the use of the system or its built in applications. Such notes will be of great value in the lead-up to a new stable release of RISC OS that merits a revised User Guide to be published.

Please preface your entry with “Chapter Number/Chapter Title/Page Number/Line Number:” of the published version, e.g. 27/Alarm/390/12:

User Guide, issue 1, April 2018

9/The desktop/67/-:
Objects pinned to the desktop are pinned relative to the bottom of the screen, not the top. If you increase the display resolution (e.g. from 800×600 to 1280×1024), an object previously pinned to the top of the screen will now appear part-way down the screen.

10/Managing the desktop/78/6:
Add “Note 3: The system may be unstable after using System Monitor to quit a task. Save as much work as you can, then shut down and restart.”

11/The Boot application/118/10
“Commenting out lines in a Desktop boot file” should read “Commenting out lines in a Desktop settings file”.

26/Paint/355/14:
In the section “Create the middle of the flower”, the numbered list should start from 1 (not 3).

29/Chars/399/11:
“permissable” should be “permissible”.

Appendix B/Built in application options/513/-
This chapter refers to “the Desktop boot file” throughout. It should be called “the Desktop settings file”.

Appendix B/Built in application options/513/12:
When you configure and save Alarm choices (see page 389) they are saved in file PreDesk.Alarm. If you change the choices but do not save them, the changed values are saved in any Desktop boot file that you create and, if executed during a boot, will supersede those in PreDesk.Alarm.
Bug Tracker Enhancement Ticket 471 also refers

Appendix B/Built in application options/513/14
Two of the options (“-timeout” and “-weekwork”) are mentioned but not described in detail. In addition, the “-format” option is described in a slightly repetitive fashion. A better layout would be something like:
-timeout: Number of seconds an Alarm beep sounds.
-weekwork: Days of the week that constitute “the working week”, represented as a single number (Sunday=1, Monday=2, Tuesday=4, Wednesday=8, Thursday=16, Friday=32, Saturday=64). The default setting is 62 (i.e. Monday+Tuesday+Wednesday+Thursday+Friday).
-format: The format of a user-defined clock display (see “Time and display formats” on page 392). The default setting is “%z12:%mi:%se %am. %zdy/%zmn/%yr”.

Appendix B/Built in application options/519-520/-:
Edit’s configure string is unlike the others’ in that the single character flags (R,D,O,T) are turned on/off by their presence/absence rather than by appending +/-. This is not really explained. (Better possibly might be the ~ (tilde) convention used by Filer).

Appendix B/Built in application options/520/-:
Edit’s N (font name) option can also take a spec like ‘N\FCorpus.Bold\ELatin1’ when an encoding is needed. (And also \M matrix definition, I wonder?).

Appendix E/Old-type screen modes/532/22:
Move the list of monitor types to the “Monitor types” section on page 535. Amend the text of this section to reference the new location of the list.

Appendix E/Old-type screen modes/535/-:
Add a new sub-heading “Low-colour modes”. Some platforms – notably the Raspberry Pi – cannot display modes with fewer than 256 colours. In this instance, choosing an old-style screen mode with fewer than 256 colours will cause the corresponding 256-colour mode to be used instead (e.g. mode 31 requested, mode 32 delivered). Programs that fail to take account of this substitution could misbehave as a result. In addition, a program minimally modified to produce the correct colours (in the mistaken belief that mode 31 was a 256-colour mode) would misbehave when transferred to a platform that can display low-colour screen modes.

Appendix E/Old-type screen modes/535/20:
In the “Monitor types” section, add a note that a monitor type of “Auto” is typically restricted to the modes supported by monitor type 4 (SuperVGA) in the table. (This won’t be true in all cases, but the vast majority of monitors will support VESA modes, which correspond most closely to “SuperVGA” in the table.)