On Sun, 7 Jan 2001 09:58:37 +0100, Bernie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Day wrote:
>> two 39 char columns looks a lot like a book or magazine article, and
>> is gonzo easier to read onscreen. Then, I tried adding ANSI color for
>> dialogue with male voices in blues and fems in reds. Ordinarily, we
>> see short lines of he said: something.
>> then she said: something else
>> and he tried to put in: a word here
>> and then she went on: with more here.
> Wouldn't that just be complicated when five people talk? How would you know
> which person said what then?
May be. but so far, I only have two or three. If it aint dialogue,
it is more often monologue or soliloquy, and the couple instances
where I have a group, it aint a big deal to put in the name behind
a voice which dont often say much.
Another advantage is in the editing; with having a unique color marker
by each character, it is duck soup to use search routines to extract
every statement by any given character. You could always say at the
point of enounciation who is speaking, but writers have always moved
that around in the text for the sake of varety.
>> the result is a lotta wasted space on the page or screen. by using
>> color, the lines of dialogue can follow one another without wasting
>> space saying who said what. I can change the foreground color in
>> HTML, but when I try background, it wants to change the color of the
>> whole page.
> Yes of course, since you are using BODY BACKGROUND= you do change the
> entire page. You need to put it in a TABLE, and then you can set the color.
> Beware that not all older web-browsers can handle this (something like NS
> 2.x, IE 3.x).
Yeah, I found out about that. but for one, I did not find color control
very consistent, so I would not know of two different shades of blue
would show up well enough on all systems. The ROM BIOS text mode color
is consistent across all x86 systems; dont matter what video chips are;
dont do nothing fancy. The same color drivers that come up in a CMOS
config menu.
Then too, the whole idea of coding tables for hundreds of pages drove
me over the brink. A novel is a linear form, HTML is interactive and
non-linear... a dozen pages is reasonable, not 400.
>> But- I cant find a dos text editor that will let me make macros with
>> the escape key which ANSI wants. as in {esc}[0m ... I cant put the
>> escape key here either.
> Edit can IIRC, if all else fails you can always do it in debug. After doing
> it once you can easily copy it to every place you need it in while inside
> your favorite editor (assuming it has cut'n'paste).
I forgot to mention, I am working with a 400k document now, and have one
more that is already 900k. A lotta these editors dont like anything
over 64k.
but Ive since found another solution. I insert hi-ascii, from 160 to
180 as a tag for where I want color to start and end. Then, I came
across SLICE.COM which says it will chop the text into, (in my case)
42 row segments automatically numbered by the extension.
So, looks like I can use FOLD.EXE to make the two column text from the
long original ASCII draft (500-900k). Then is to write a small batch
file which will take one of these small editors that can have permanent
macros, and feed it each page and let it do a search on the hi-ascii and
replace with ANSI color.
Then, because some old dos only allows 256 entries in a directory, put
all the pages and the display tool in an archive, and include a reader
batch which will extract 'chapters' of pages as needed and increment a
pg-dn key count to use as a book mark.
Should work fine even on an xt with EGA.
Since I hacked togather the page display tool, and NASM.EXE says it can
port, I should easily get a LINUX version. dunno what to do for mac.
uncopywritten- do what you will with it.
-- Arachne V1.68, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
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