Documents created using MS Word 6 & 7 of Word can be read by EasiWriter professional 4.08. (Version 5 can also read documents created using Office 97/98 - upgrades are available from Icon Technology).
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| If the document has the filetype MSWord it can be opened by double-clicking on it or by dragging it on to the Easi/TechWriter icon on the Icon bar. |
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| If it has the filetype DOS it can only be opened by dragging it on to the Easi Writer or TechWriter icon on the Icon bar. |
Documents are saved in a format that is compatible with Word version 6, 7 & 8.
EasiWriter professional can save documents as HTML and read HTML documents.
When saving HTML it uses InterGif to convert Pictures into the Gifs (Graphic interchange format) it needs. InterGif can be dowloaded from its authors (Peter Harlley) site. A link to this site can be found on the Icon Technology site
http://icontechnology.net - click on links on the index page.
The following notes have been lifted from Jim Lesurf's TechWriter tips pages:
http://www.st-and.demon.co.uk/TechWrite/Tips.html
where you will also find information on an 'undocumented' feature that allows you access to a palette of pastel shades for backgrounds.
From version 4.08 onwards, the 'Pro' version of EasiWriter has the ability to automatically save illustrations as GIFs. This means it is now easy to create documents in HTML format.
The output HTML can be tweaked in various ways...
Inside the !EasiWrite.Messages file you can find the lines:
x48:<BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff" TEXT="#000000"
x49:Intergif
x50:Intergif -i
x51:Intergif -i -t
x52:Intergif -i -best 256 -t
(Note that lines x49 to x52 have a space at the end.)
By altering the x48 string you can alter the default page background and text colour. By altering x49 to x52 you can adjust the way InterGif processes equations and Drawfile illustrations. These strings, followed by an appropriate filename, are sent to InterGif by EWPro. If you want to understand these strings, have a look at the help file that comes with !InterGif.
Each line controls the following items:
x49: Equations (TechWriter only)
x50: Draw files converted to 256 colour sprites
x51: Sprite files dropped onto EW
x52: 'Deep' sprites dropped onto EW
JPEGs are copied out and linked without processing as it is assumed that any extra processing might lead to an unwanted degradation of the image quality.
Illustration Drawfile are saved with a scaling factor determined by the scale factor used to display them in the EW document. Any border on an illustration will cause a border to be placed around the exported image.
You can control the output using settings held in the EW Choices file. This will probably be inside the machine boot structure at
!Boot.Choices.EasiWriter.Choices
Another setting you can make is 'g<ihgedcba>'; where the <ihgfedcba> is a bitfield that controls six different aspects of the way in which GIFs are created. The meaning of each bit is summarised as follow:
a = 1 (the final digit) suppresses anti-aliasing equations before passing them to InterGif. This means that fraction dividers, root signs and some large symbols will not be anti-aliased, but the conversion will be slightly faster.
b = 1 suppress setting the top left and bottom right pixels of the bitmap generated for equations in HTML export non-transparent. Some Browsers do not handle GIFs with rows of transparent bits correctly - setting the corners to a non-transparent (white) pixel should avoid such problems.
c = 1 suppress telling InterGif to generate a GIF image with a transparent background for equations.
d = 1 suppress telling InterGif to generate a GIF image with a transparent background for draw files.
e Not implemented
f Not implemented
g = 1 Forces EasiWriter/TechWriter to save the file names in the HTML source as uppercase. Useful if you are using a DOS filing system that changes the GIF file names to uppercase.
h Not implemented
i = 1 tells InterGif to use the standard Acorn 256 colour palette for converting illustrations instead of defaulting to the 'Netscape friendly' 216 (6 x 6 x6) colour cube. This feature is implemented in version 4.10 onwards.
The bitfield value ignores leading zeros (which are assumed by default) so both 'g0100' and 'g100' are legitimate ways to specify that the equation GIFs should have a white background rather than a transparent background.
In my case, my choices file contains the string:
d g10 n120 q33 r1600 uReport
So I have arranged for the 'white' corner pixels to be suppressed and for all the equations to by at 120% scale.
Although the created output is - technically - excellent, you may wish to tweak it a little more after being saved. For example, 4.08 currently uses the BASEFONT SIZE tag to set the size of the body text of the HTML. Alas, some browsers (e.g. Fresco V1.69) ignore this. So you may want to change this to the plainer FONT SIZE tag which seems more browser-reliable.
When saving HTML it is best to use Image FS2's Options... to make JPEGs and GIFs inactive.