Samuel Heywood 16 Jan at 20:41 -0500 asked about using a favourite
external editor with Arachne. The Arachne gurus helped me with this many
months ago so, for what it is worth, here is my solution to the problem.
I find it best to do all my text composing off-line in WordPerfect 5.2
for Win3.1 where I have ready access to all those familiar text handling
facilities. No one here ever mentions this oddity that works for me so
well! The gurus showed me how to achieve the same result whilst on-line
with Arachne, but that required me to fire up WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS
which was wasteful of my PS/2 20 mB HD capacity and introduced unfamiliar
and limited key/mouse manipulations. Moreover, it required some APM work
that, at that time, was either broken or unreliable. I have never tried
APMs since having never seen an "all fixed" message re APMs on this
Digest. (I'll take a look at what I am missing as soon as v160b1 settles
down and I take the courage to install it).
These are the elementary steps I take in the process:
- Compose in WP5.2 the text for the body of the intended message. Save
it in DOS (ASCII) format to C:\TEMPFILE\TXTx. (I always use \TEMPFILE
instead of \TEMP so that I can detect whenever a program creates any
such sub-directory. SET TEMP[and TMP]=C:\TEMPFILE takes care of
everything else)
- In Arachne when ready to compose mail, select the appropriate MAILTO
address from HOTLIST or press key C (for compose mail).
- When in the message part of the screen, press F3. A dialogue box with
the word "TEXTAREA" appears.
- Press Ctrl-Y to clear the contents of the dialogue box.
- Type C:\TEMPFILE\TXTx and execute. The prepared txt appears where
you want it. Minor and trivial text editing can be done there in the
usual manner should you wish.
NOTES
1. This procedure is not limited only to e-mail messaging. I find
it works superbly in contributing to such message lists as
InsideTheWeb where often I enhance the text by inserting various
HTML formatting commands for which I have compiled a few macros,
not having an HTML editor to hand -- any freeware suggestions anyone?
2. If I want to quote any text from incoming messages, I (P)rint them
to FILEx.TXT, or merely extract them from the HTML format of the
incoming mail, or from otherwise-saved (F2) HTML pages when I
forget -- Quite Easily Done (QED).
3. In v150src I cannot append attachments while running from a RAM
disk -- a known bug. I work around this by running Arachne
(somewhat more slowly but effectively!) from C: on the rare
occasions I need to do so. Michael P and his gurus know about this.
Perhaps it has been fixed in v160b1.
4. Michael P confirmed many months ago that the CC part of the MAILTO
page was broken in some way in v150src. Maybe fixed in v160b1
but CC works for me if I confine it to a single addressee and
send it (or save it to OUTBOX) as an original (not amended) msg.
5. This procedure used for transmission of this msg. Very interested
in seeing the solutions of others in the Digest.
My apologies should this msg seem too elementary for this Digest.
Yours, Aye,
Stephen.
-- Arachne V1.50;s.r.c., NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://home.arachne.cz/
