I am writing a trilogy in HTML, following where Jane Auel
left off with the mammoth hunters, and working out what
evolved after the mammoth went extinct...
Been using Dexter which I downloaded from simtel; so far
it beats doing it in winx or linux. The first novel runs
5000 odd lines, and the search routines in other operating
systems is excruciatingly slow, where as text mode dos
flips from the first page, where the internal links are
defined, the <A REF="#... to the position of the referents
<A NAME="#... in a couple seconds.
Dexter also provides fairly simple macro coding for the
installation of standard HTML tags, <P>, <I>, <font color,
et al. So far, I use a set of 10 macros.
What it does not do, which I have seen other text editors
do, is open the document at the point where you last were
editing. Does not allow you to select your own screensaver.
Does not autosave; I live in a rural area with occassional
outtages.
The block copy and move are disconcerting in that after
you mark the end of the block, it seems to be deleted.
The search mode is fast, global and replace ok, but it
cannot search backwards; you havta go to the top of your
document.
Something I'd like to see again, was the Applewriter II
use of the backspace key, which put letters in a LIFO,
and then with a control right spit them back out again.
In editing paragraphs, one often wishes to move just a
word or few around within a few lines or so, and the tag
block method is cumbersome
Does anyone know if Dexter, or any other dos text editor
are still under development? HTML is a universal format,
displayable on every computer in every OS, and in the
public domain so neither users nor authors havta mess
with royalties and custom software. With liberal use of
internal tags, the readers have convenient and automatic
book marks set by the browsers when the document is closed.
With a decent set of macros, the author can hand code the
document easily, and it does not get cluttered with lots
of redundant tags which WYSIWYGs implant.
in dos dexter closes quickly so you can open up a viewer,
but I've not found a satisfactory HTML viewer. Arachne can
not display such long HTML documents correctly, and having
to open up such a complex app when all I want to do is look
at the screen output is aggrevatingly slow.
no copywrite; do what you will with it.
-- Arachne V1.67, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
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