Hello Glenn and Greggy -
Before I say anything further, I want to thank Glenn for the
suggestions he provided, but also indicate that I completely
agree with Greggy regarding a structured and documented approach
to making changes in the Arachne package that is distributed.
At the risk of sounding defensive, I had always assumed that any
suggestions/problems expressed on this list would elicit help from
someone (nowadays mostly Glenn since he is most knowledgeable) and
only secondarily be EVALUATED for possible changes in a next version
of Arachne.
The matter with the PRINT/EXPORT/CAPTURE functions struck me as
inconsistent treatments, and so I outlined how they seemed to work
on my system and how I thought they SHOULD be working.
^^^^^^^^^
With Glenn's aid, analogy, a lot of trial and error, and the discovery
that the .AH files in the system/gui subdirectory can be changed, I
managed to address come of the things that I outlined in my last
message. You can skip this if it does not interest you.
==================================================================
The following changes in MIME.CFG (in the main directory) and in
PRINT.AH and PRTBMP.AH (in the system\gui subdirectory) now do
the following for me: ALL output is now saved in the main directory
as a PAGE (or changed name) file with the appropriate extension
(i.e., TXT, PS, BMP, or JPG) when pressing the P, Alt-P, or CTRL-P
keys, respectively. A small "File saved" messages appears to let you
know something has happened. And the heading of the CTRL-P option makes
it clear that the screen can be saved EITHER as BMP or as JPG (by the way,
as I learned from the list, CJPEG.EXE is necessary for this; I downloaded
it from the web, but it should, again in my opinion, be included with the
Arachne package). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I moved the bmp2jpg line from Glenn's section to the place in the
original where the export lines are located (one of Glenn's seemed to
duplicate one of the originals anyway?!).
They now look like this:
;KAH----------------------------------------------------------------------
file/export.dgi |[100]COPY _4prt.txt $s>NUL
\n del _4prt.txt \n if exist $s echo FILE SAVED
file/exportps.dgi |[100]COPY _4prt.ps $s>NUL
\n del _4prt.ps \n if exist $s echo FILE SAVED
file/exportbmp.dgi |[100]COPY _4prt.bmp $s>NUL
\n del _4prt.bmp \n if exist $s echo FILE SAVED
file/bmp2jpg.dgi |[100]cjpeg -q 95 -outfile $s _4prt.bmp
\n del _4prt.bmp \n if exist $s echo FILE SAVED
;KAH---------------------------------------------------------------------
(Lines split to fit on page)
I took out the sections from PRINT.AH that pertained to slicing up
a digest email, and I removed those things in PRTBMP.AH that did
not work for me anyway. So, no unresponsive clicks.
Needless to say, I saved all of the old files.
I was not able to do anything with the PRTSCRN function; my only
question is: Why does it overlay a DISPLAY onto what one is looking
at while hittingthe PRTSCRN key? If it did not do that, but only flashed
a small "File saved" notice, there would be no problem. Of course normally
PRTSCRN prints to a DOS printer, but Arachne cannot do that without external
programs in any case, so why bother when one can use ALT-P and get the whole
page rather than just one screen. Again, just another opinion!
====================================================================
But I want to reemphasize that I DO understand Greggy's point and I
agree completely.
And thanks again, Glenn.
Klaus Hameyer
Burlington, VT (USA)
