16 Mar 1995 - Preliminary Information
If you begin by expecting every document element (every paragraph, image, list, or point) to act like a Workplace file, then you have a fairly good starting view of how to use SpHyDir. The only complex point is positioning new elements in the tree, since OS/2 objects don't have an order.
Drag the WPS object for an HTML file and drop it on the SpHyDir Workarea window (if SpHyDir is running) or on a WPS Program Object representing the SpHyDir program (to Launch SpHyDir and read in the file). SpHyDir opens the file, parses the HTML, and builds the tree representing the document structure.
Only one document can be in the workarea at a time, so if a second document is dropped on the first SpHyDir will ask permission to clear the first document and replace it with the second. Save any changes that you want to keep first before starting to edit a new document.
The text in a paragraph, list point, or definition is treated like the "contents" of the document object. Double-click on the paragraph or point object and it appears to "open", presenting the Text Edit window in which changes can be typed. To speed things up, the text edit window also has buttons to go forward to the next paragraph, back to the previous one, and to insert a new paragraph after the current one and begin editing it.
Section titles, the alternate text of images, and the term being defined in a definition list are treated as if they were object Names (like the file name under a Workplace file icon). In some cases you can use WPS file renaming conventions (point to a Section title, hold down Alt while clicking on the text, then change the text in place and click somewhere else at the end). However, is rather awkward in practice. There is an entry area at the top right of the workarea window. It can be used to edit the "name" of the currently selected document element in the tree below.
If the question applies to the three ordinary ASCII characters ("&", "<", and ">") that HTML uses to delimit control features, just type them. SpHyDir removes the HTML control features when the document is read in and recreates it when the document is regenerated.
For foreign language (ISO 8859-1) characters, SpHyDir currently doesn't have explict support. The author is in search of an appropriate entry area control or simple text editor that will allow these characters to be displayed and edited directly.
Because the paragraph boundaries are represented by objects, the user can enter a line break (<BR>) by simply typing Return to split the current text.
Drag the object to the WPS shredder. Alternately, select the object and press Ctrl-D.
At the top left of the workarea window there are a set of icons alternately viewed as the "Toolbar" and as "Templates". They act to the document much like the OS/2 Template folder acts to the rest of the workplace. Drag the icon for a Section, Paragraph, Image, List, or other tool and drop it where you want the new element to go. This creates an empty element that needs to be filled in.
To create a hypertext link to a file in the local library, open the Workplace folder containing the target file. Now hold Ctrl-Shift down and drag the icon of the file over and drop it on the paragraph, point, or image from which the link is to be made. If you drop on an image, then there is no further work. Images can have only one hypertext link and the entire image is the link. If you drop on a paragraph or point, then the Hotword Selection window opens displaying the available text. Drag the mouse to "select" the word or phrase that will represent the link. Click the OK button. Hotwords are delimited in the text by an opening and closing triangle character. You may change the contents of the hotword area, but do not delete the funny triangle characters or SpHyDir will get confused.
SpHyDir has a Link Manager window to handle URL links to Web documents out there somewhere in the network. The Link Manager displays documents in a browser hotlist. A supplied XSpO (an external Rexx program) can be dropped on a paragraph, point, or image to create a link to whatever network document the IBM Web Explorer is currently displaying.
When the workarea has the input focus, press F2 to generate HTML and continue editing, F3 to quit without generating, and F4 to generate HTML and then quit. The status message at the bottom of the window will indicate that HTML is being generated and then has been written. If you press F2 and nothing happens, then click once on the workarea to make sure it has the focus. If you try to quit and have modified the file in the Workarea, a message will pop up asking whether you want to Generate or Discard the file.
You can drag an individual paragraph around, but only within the visible window. To move more data, to move a greater distance, or to move between files, there is special support to mark a range of objects, copy them to a "clipboard" and paste them somewhere else.
SpHyDir wants to create the image of selecting a range of objects, moving them around, copying them to the clipboard, and pasting them back into the file. However, the native support for selection, movement, and the real OS/2 clipboard are not able to handle this problem correctly. Reluctantly, SpHyDir has been forced to reinvent some of this infrastructure.
The user can select a range of objects to move within a document or to copy to another document. First select one object and press Alt-L as if you were establishing a "line mark" in the EPM or Kedit editors. Once you begin to mark a section of the document, you may extend the marked area forward or backward, but only within the current level of the document tree. The mark can be extended over but not into lists or subsections. Nor can the start or end of the mark be extended outside the section or list in which it is started.
Marking creates two new objects: Mark Start and Mark End. Initially these objects are placed around the currently selected object when Alt-L is pressed. The Mark objects can then be "slid" forward or backward along the line that represents the current level of the tree. They cannot be slid into a subsection or list (to a lower level) nor can they be slid outside the section or list in which they started. The Mark can also be automatically adjusted by selecting another object at the same level of the tree and pressing Alt-L again (expanding the scope of the Mark just as additional lines are added in the EPM editor when you move to another line and press Alt-L a second time).
Once a section has been marked, you can copy it to the Clipboard by pressing Ctrl-Ins (the standard OS/2 keyboard sequence for Copy). However, the OS/2 Clipboard really doesn't know how to hold SpHyDir objects, so the same effect is achieved by opening a new Window and copying all of the objects between the two marks (including all the objects contained in subsections and lists) from the workarea window to a second container that SpHyDir calls "The Clipboard". In the current release, the Clipboard window becomes visible (for debugging) though it can be minimized or can be dragged over to the side of the desktop.
The objects in the Clipboard can then be moved to another part of the original document by selecting a destination object and pressing Shift-Ins (the OS/2 standard for Paste). They can be copied to another file by dragging another HTM file to the workarea (replacing the original source document) and then pasting from the Clipboard to a second document.
However, Clipboard objects cannot be copied to another part of the same document. This fell out from the way the Clipboard got coded and, at the moment, it seems to be a useful feature. When the user marks objects and presses Ctrl-Ins, there were two programming choices. One choice copies all of the objects to the Clipboard. The alternative creates what is essentially a Shadow of the original record in the clipboard (what VX-Rexx calls a "shared record"). Like the Workplace shadow, the two objects are actually different views of the same data. If you were to edit the text of a paragraph after copying it to the SpHyDir Clipboard, the text of the Clipboard copy would also change. However, while a Workplace shadow cannot exist when the original is deleted, a VX-REXX shared record continues to exist until all of its related objects have been deleted. Thus the Clipboard copy of the data continues to exist after the original object in the workarea has been deleted or the entire document has been replaced.
A shared record can exist in two different containers, but there can be only one copy of the record per container. By choosing to use Shadows in the Clipboard instead of full copies, SpHyDir does not support duplicating large blocks of text within the same Hypertext document.
When you select another location and press Ctrl-Ins, the SpHyDir Paste tries to copy the shared record from the Clipboard back to the original document. However, since there is already a copy of the record in the workarea and no container can have two copies of the same record, the Paste operation actually moves the old record from its previous location to the new position. If you delete the document in the workarea and load a new document (even a new copy of the original document) then a new set of records are created. Now the Clipboard has the only copy of the old records and Paste copies the information into the new document.
I am a bit suspicious of any feature that takes this much time to explain. On the other hand, a hypertext document should be short and it doesn't make a lot of sense to duplicate large blocks of text within such a file. There is a strong sense that the way this Mark and Clipboard logic works is probably the Right Way to handle this particular problem with this particular set of data. Only by gaining experience with this technique will it become clear if this is really the best approach.
Note that the SpHyDir specialized Clipboard, Cut, and Paste apply only to the management of objects from the Workarea. Within the Text Edit window opened by double-clicking a paragraph or point, the behavior of text selection, Cut, Copy, and Paste is completely normal and operates through the normal OS/2 clipboard. Text data can be exchanged between another OS/2 program and the Text Edit window through the ordinary cut and paste mechanisms.
Copyright 1995 PCLT -- SpHyDir Web Document Manager -- H. Gilbert
May be distributed with SpHyDir program
This document generated by SpHyDir another fine product of PC Lube and Tune.
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