Following are the Protext Tutorial Files. The original files were in the form of four files, intended to be loaded into Protext. Thus the text below assumes that you have loaded these files into Protext, and are currently editing the files. However, you may use this file simply as reference, and edit any of your own documents in place of this file. The principles will still be the same, requiring only a little extra thought on your behalf when msrking blocks, etc. Thanks to Paul B. for the original docs, which were merged into a single file, scaled down to 80 column text, and edited extensively by Sewer Rat. On with the docs ........ ---------------------- PROTEXT TUTORIAL FILES ---------------------- TUTOR 1. CURSOR MOVEMENT. PROTEXT is supplied with a number of tutorial files for the purpose of providing a quick and easy method of learning the most commonly used commands. Each tutorial covers a particular aspect of word processing. Once you have worked your way through the tutorial files you should be ready to carry out all the commonly used functions of word processing. Only the most frequently used commands and processes are covered in the tutorials, but as experience is gained or when you want to make use of the more advanced features of PROTEXT, the manual gives full details of all the commands and how to use them. Throughout these tutorials a consistent form is used to describe which keys to press when carrying out 'editing' commands. Examples:- CTRL-A -means hold down the CTRL key and press the key marked A CTRL-( -means hold down the CTRL key and press the key marked ( There is NO need to press the SHIFT key as well. SHIFT- -means SHIFT and the right cursor key. CTRL-@ 1 -means press CTRL and the key marked @, release and press the key marked 1 On occasions you will be asked to use certain commands which will take you to other parts of the text. What to do next will be described in a box similar to the one below:- ----------------------------- | This is an example only. | | Do not Press CTRL- yet | ----------------------------- This first tutor will teach you the quick and easy ways to move around a document. One of the main features of a word processor should be the ability to move the cursor around with the minimum of effort and PROTEXT is particularly quick and flexible in this respect, so it is worth taking a short while to get to know all these commands before progressing on to greater things. PROTEXT has two different HELP options, one for command mode and the other for edit mode. The edit mode HELP is an 'intelligent' one, to the extent that it can provide information which is relevant to the type of line of text the cursor is on at the time help is called. Alternatively you can just call up help and look through all the commands. To call help from edit mode, which is the mode you are in now, simply press CTRL-H when the cursor is on a normal line of text. Pressing CTRL-H again will display the next page of help and so on. To scroll back through the help, you should press SHIFT-CTRL-H. Help can be turned off at any time with CTRL-V H. If you press CTRL-H when the cursor is on one of the 'stored command' lines (these are lines which start with a 'greater than' symbol) you will be provided with help about stored commands. Command mode Help is obtained by typing 'HELP' when in command mode. This will call up a menu giving a number of categories of help which are available. Typing 'HELP' followed by the name of any command will give a brief explanation of that command. The cursor keys when used on their own will move the cursor around one character at a time. You have already used the down cursor to scroll the screen, so that you could continue reading. Now try using the cursor key and you will find that the text stays where it is and the cursor moves up one line for every time you press the key. After a few lines, use the cursor to bring the cursor back to this line. If you now try using the cursor key you will find that it will move along to the beginning of the line. Similarly with cursor, only this time you will find that it goes past the end of the line of text and if you keep pressing for long enough you will find that the screen will scroll sideways. Try using the cursor key now until the screen scrolls sideways. The reason that the screen scrolls across is because PROTEXT can handle documents of unlimited width and when the text is wider than the screen, it is scrolled across so that you can see what you are typing. Normally this will happen completely automatically, but unless you are creating a document that is wider than the screen, which is most unusual, you will not come across it very often. PROTEXT also allows you to move across the screen more quickly, either by jumping a word at a time, or from one end of the line to the other. Press SHIFT- now and you will find that the cursor now hops from the start of one word to the start of the next. When it reaches the last word on a line, it will continue on the next line. If you now use SHIFT- it will hop backwards through the text, always with the cursor on the first character of a word. If you now press CTRL- you will find that the cursor will hop immediately to the end of the line and pressing CTRL- will return the cursor to the beginning of the line. Either of these commands can be used from any position on the line as a quick means of getting to the start or end of a line. So far the only way that you have moved up and down through the document has been by pressing the and cursors. If you now try pressing SHIFT- you will find that the text moves up the screen in a similar way to before, but with one big difference. The flashing cursor remains on the line that it was on when you started pressing SHIFT- . You will find this particularly useful when you try editing text at the bottom of the screen as it lets you move the text up so that you can read the following text, but without losing your place in the text. SHIFT- does exactly the same thing, but in the other direction. There are also several commands which allow you to jump up and down through the text more quickly. The first of these use the and cursor keys in conjunction with the CTRL key. If you now press CTRL- twice you will find that the text jumps a little less than a full screen with each press. This provides a very convenient way to quickly scan through the contents of a document and because something less than a complete screen is scrolled each time it is easy to maintain continuity of reading. PROTEXT also has two commands which let you jump straight to the beginning or the end of the text in memory. Notice that we said 'text in memory'. With smaller documents this will be the beginning and end of the document, but with larger documents which are too big to be held completely in memory, repeating the command a second time will let you jump to the beginning and end of the complete document, no matter what size it is. Before using the commands to jump to the beginning and end of the text, you will need to know about another command that will enable you to find this part of the tutor after you have experimented with jumping from one end to the other. This command lets you position markers in the text which you can jump back to at a later stage. These markers are positioned in the text by typing CTRL-@. Just press CTRL and the key with the '@' on it and you will notice that the top status line has changed and contains a message telling you to press a number between 0 and 9, or some other symbols. Press the '0' key on the top of the keyboard for now, to select marker 0. The status line will return to normal, but now, instead of containing the message 'No markers set', it will contain the message 'Markers 0' as an indication that marker 0 is in use. You will also find that the character '0' will be positioned in the text at the cursor position, but in inverse. You can leave these markers in the text for as long as you want and they will be ignored when printing takes place, but if you want to remove one, it is simply done by positioning the cursor on the marker and pressing the DELETE key. Position the cursor at the end of the NEXT paragraph now and set marker 9 by the method described above, and then continue reading the tutor. Having now marked your place in the text with a marker, it is time to try out the commands for jumping to the beginning and end of the text in memory. CTRL and either the opening or closing square brackets, which are on keys to the left of the RETURN key, are used for this. To jump to the beginning of the text in memory you should press CTRL-[ and to the end of the text CTRL-]. Try jumping to the start first, then to the end of the text. You should now have returned to here from the end of the document by using the marker command. You will have discovered that to return to a marker you simply follow the same procedure that you used to first set the marker. If no marker is set, then one will be set. If a marker is set, then the cursor will jump to its location. There are numerous uses for the place markers, one of which you have already seen. Another use is to put place markers in the text in positions which you might have to refer to frequently during the course of creating a piece of text. If the document you are working on is very large, it may not be possible to fit it all in memory at once, in which case PROTEXT will automatically load and save the text as you progress through the document. You will be unaware of this happening most of the time and one of the few occasions you will notice it is when you have used the CTRL-[ or CTRL-] commands which will only take you to the start or end of the text in memory. To get to the start or end of the complete document you should press CTRL-[ or CTRL-] a second time. There are also two commands which let you jump a paragraph at a time. CTRL-< (The 'smaller than' symbol) will move you back one paragraph to the start of a paragraph, whilst CTRL-> ('greater than' symbol) will take you to the start of the next paragraph. Try them now and come back to this paragraph. You will probably have discovered that repeated pressing of one or the other will step you forwards or backwards any number of paragraphs. It is also possible to step through the text a page at a time. A page means a page as it will be printed, not a screen page. If you look at the top of the screen you will find the message 'Page n Line nn'. PROTEXT always keeps a note of which page you are on and also which line and column the cursor is on. Before going any further, set another place marker, any one that is not already in use (you can easily tell which are in use by looking at the status line). The commands to move a page at a time are CTRL-( and CTRL-) and in a similar fashion to the way that the other brackets have been used, the opening bracket will take you back to the start of the page and the closing bracket will take you forwards to the start of the next page. Watch the Page number on the status line as you use these commands. Try them now and when you have finished, use the place marker you set to return to here. Most of the main commands for moving around the text have now been described, but there are one or two more which have special purposes. CTRL-L will always take the cursor back to its previous position if one of the 'jump' commands has been used to move to another part of the text, so that if you press the wrong key by accident and jump to the wrong place, you can always get back to the right place quite easily. Try pressing CTRL-< and then CTRL-L. Moving the cursor around on a line, or one line at a time will not have any effect and pressing CTRL-L will still return you to the place in the text from which you originally jumped. Finally there is a command which lets you jump straight to a specific page, line, or column. If you press CTRL-G you will find a message appear on the status line at the top of the screen requesting you to enter P, L, or C and number. Entering P and a number will cause the cursor to jump straight to the start of the specified page, whilst prefixing the number with C will take the cursor across the screen to the relevant column number. Using L as the prefix, or omitting the prefix altogether will send the cursor to the line number. You should note that the line number is the actual line number in the text, which will not be the same as the line number displayed at the top of the screen, on the status line, if 'page mode is selected. Page mode can be turned off at any time by pressing CTRL-P, which results in the true line number being displayed on the status line and back on again by a repeat press of CTRL-P. Set another place marker and try the CTRL-G option now and then return to here using the place marker when you have finished. All the above commands are standard PROTEXT commands, which may be found with only minor differences in all versions of PROTEXT, on whatever machine, but most of the special keys have been configured to function in a similar way to normal and may be used as an alternative to the standard PROTEXT commands. It is recommended that the PROTEXT commands are learnt, as it will then be easy to use versions of PROTEXT running on other machines. The 'special' key functions, are listed below, together with their equivalent PROTEXT commands:- ST KEY PROTEXT COMMAND FUNCTION Home CTRL- Go to start of line CTRL-Home CTRL-[ CTRL-[ Go to start of file Help CTRL-H Call up help facility Undo CTRL-U Undelete Insert CTRL-TAB Insert/overwrite mode That completes the first of the tutorial files and whilst you haven't yet found out how to enter and edit text, you should now be able to move around a text file quickly and easily, which will make progress in the remaining tutorials a lot quicker. TUTOR 2. TEXT ENTRY AND EDITING. PROTEXT is supplied with a number of tutorial files for the purpose of providing a quick and easy method of learning the most commonly used commands. Each file covers a particular aspect of word processing. In this tutorial you should learn the different methods by which text can be entered, corrected and moved around. Before continuing, you will notice a strange line of dashes and exclamation marks near the top of the screen and another one just above this paragraph. You don't need to worry about them for the moment, as they will be explained in detail later in the tutorial. For now you can just accept that they are 'ruler lines'. Throughout this tutorial you will be encouraged to insert, remove and generally chop up the contents of this document. There is no need to worry about damaging the document, as the original will still be on the disc and unless you save the modified one back onto the disc (which you shouldn't), no permanent damage will result, so experiment as much as you like. PROTEXT has two distinct modes of operation, 'Command mode' and 'Edit mode'. Edit mode is the mode in which all entry of text is carried out, whilst command mode is where all instructions relating to printing of documents, saving and loading of files and many other operations are carried out. You have already encountered both modes, perhaps without realising it. When PROTEXT is first loaded it is in command mode, which is indicated by the 'banner' line about two thirds of the way down the screen, which gives details of the version number of PROTEXT that you are using as well as the selected printer driver and directory. When you entered the command 'LOAD TUTOR2' you were in command mode. The ESC key is used to 'toggle' between command and edit modes whenever you want. Pressing ESC will always switch you into the other mode. When in edit mode, you will see that the command mode banner line disappears, leaving only the status lines at the top of the screen and the text (if any) on the remainder of the screen. This is the first of several toggle commands that you will come across during the course of the tutorials. PROTEXT has two methods of entering text. These are 'Insert' and 'Overwrite' modes. By default, when you enter PROTEXT edit mode, you will be in insert mode. This means that when you type in any letters or numbers, the cursor will push any existing text ahead of it, rather than 'rub it out', or overwrite it. Position the cursor in the middle of this line and type in some more letters. You will notice that the remainder of the line, to the right of the cursor, will be pushed further to the right as the new letters are inserted. If you look at the top of the screen you will find the message, 'Insert', on the status line. If you now hold down the CTRL key and press the TAB key, the message will change to 'Overwrite'. Alternatively, the INSERT letters in the middle of a line and you will see that this time the new letters will replace the existing ones. It is still possible to insert extra characters whilst in overwrite mode and this is achieved by pressing CTRL-SPACE, which has the effect of moving the text under and to the right of the cursor across one column, leaving you room to enter the letter you want to add. CTRL-TAB is a 'toggled' command, which means that pressing it again will restore it to the original setting. Overwrite is useful for correcting or changing the occasional word and for other more specialised uses, but for the moment go back into insert mode, which is the most commonly used method of entering text. One of the big advantages of a word processor is that it is very easy to insert, alter and remove words and letters. For now we shall concentrate on entering and removing single letters. In the blank line below this paragraph try entering three or four lines of text. Copy part of this paragraph if you can't find anything more interesting! Just type the letters as you see them, using the space bar to insert a space between each word, but do NOT press RETURN when you get to the end of the line. To obtain a capital letter you should hold down one of the SHIFT keys whilst pressing the appropriate letter key. Similarly, to obtain one of the characters marked on the upper part of some of the keys, you should also press SHIFT. If you want to type a considerable number of upper case letters, it is more convenient to press the CAPS LOCK key, which will result in all further letters being treated as upper case letters. Pressing CAPS LOCK a second time will toggle the keys back to lower case. Don't worry for now about the odd spelling mistake as we shall correct them in a minute. When you get to the end of a line, don't press RETURN, as you would with a typewriter, simply keep on typing and you will notice that if you were in the middle of a word when you got to the end of the line, PROTEXT will automatically move the part complete word to the start of the next line and continue entering letters as fast as you type them. You will also see that PROTEXT automatically inserts a new line when it gets to the end of a line, so that any existing text is pushed down to make room. This process of not splitting words is called 'word wrap' and is another feature of a good word processor. If you look at the top of the screen again, you will see the message 'Word-Wrap' on the status line. Press CTRL-W and the message on the status line will change to 'W-W Off'. Try typing in some more words and see what happens. This time the cursor keeps moving across the screen, completely ignores the right hand margin and carries on until the screen scrolls. You would not normally use this method of entering text, though it can be useful on occasions. For now, press CTRL-W again to switch Word wrap back on. The only time that you have to press the RETURN key is when you reach the end of a paragraph. Pressing RETURN has the effect of ending the paragraph and moving the cursor down to the next line. If you are in insert mode, which is normal, a new line will be inserted into the document and the cursor will move onto it. If you are in overwrite mode however, the cursor will move down to the next line, but no new line will be inserted. If you made any typing mistakes whilst entering the paragraph of text, it would be a good idea to correct them now. Simply move the cursor back to where the mistake is and position it over the character you want to change, then press the DELETE key. The incorrect letter will disappear and the remainder of the text on that line will move across to fill the space. You can then type in the correct letter if necessary and the text will move back to the right to make room for it. If you need to remove more than one letter, then position the cursor over the first incorrect character and press DELETE as often as necessary. If the mistake had been noticed when you were typing it, you could have corrected it at the time, simply by pressing BACKSPACE, which has the effect of deleting the last character typed. Try deleting a few characters and see the different effect of the DELETE and BACKSPACE keys. DELETE always deletes the character under the cursor, whilst BACKSPACE deletes the character to the left of the cursor. In both cases the space is closed up. The effect of this is that DELETE deletes letters to the end of a line and BACKSPACE deletes characters towards the start of a line. One very common mistake is to get two letters the wrong way round in a word, such as 'teh' instead of 'the' and PROTEXT has a command to take care of this without the need to delete and replace letters. Position the cursor on the first of the transposed letters and then press CTRL-A. It will work equally well with a space and a letter, such as 'whol e', which is another common typing error. This is a good time to introduce another command, which really belongs in the tutorial on formatting text, but as you will inevitably be disrupting the appearance of your text during the course of this tutor, we shall explain it now. Pressing CTRL-F will reformat a paragraph from the cursor position to the end of a paragraph. Positioning the cursor at the start of a paragraph and pressing CTRL-F will reformat the whole paragraph. Pressing SHIFT- CTRL-F will automatically reformat the whole of the paragraph the cursor is in. Try deleting a few characters, or words, from this paragraph and then reformatting it. Sometimes you will find that you want to delete more than an odd letter and PROTEXT provides a number of commands which permit you to delete part words, words, lines and whole blocks of text. SHIFT-DELETE and SHIFT-BACKSPACE let you delete a word or part of a word. If you position the cursor on the first letter of a word and then press SHIFT-DELETE, you will find the complete word disappears. Similarly if you position the cursor on the first space after a word and press SHIFT-BACKSPACE, the previous word will disappear. In both cases the gap will be closed up by the remaining text moving across to the left to fill the space. To delete the last part of a word, position the cursor on the first letter you want to be deleted and use SHIFT-DELETE. To delete the first part of a word, position the cursor on the first letter you want to remain and press SHIFT- BACKSPACE. As you have probably noticed by now, PROTEXT follows a general principle (though for practical reasons this is not 100% true) that using a command on its own, such as the cursor keys and the DELETE keys has a small effect on what happens, whilst using it with SHIFT has a slightly greater effect, so it will probably come as no surprise to find that PROTEXT has commands which will also delete part or all of a line. CTRL-E and CTRL-BACKSPACE have the effect of deleting the text from the cursor to the end and the start of the line respectively. Try it on a line or two of the above text, to see the effect. You will notice that if you delete all the text from a line, either by pressing one key after the other, or because there wasn't any more text on the line, it doesn't delete the line itself from the document, merely the text from the line. If you want to actually remove a line from the document, whether it be an empty one, or one containing text, CTRL-keypad* is the command to use. This will remove the complete line from the document and cause the remainder of the text to move up a line to fill the space. Some of the above commands are fairly severe in their effect on the text, so PROTEXT provides a command which can help to undo any mistakes you may have made. CTRL-U is the 'undelete' command and has the effect of restoring the last piece of text deleted by the last use of any of the delete commands. Note that it can only restore the last bit of text deleted and that any subsequent use of the deleting keys will cause previously deleted text to be forgotten. There is one final delete command, which is SHIFT-CTRL-BACKSPACE which has the effect of clearing the complete document from memory. This command will prompt you for confirmation that you want to erase the complete file before doing so. It has exactly the same effect as the CLEAR command in command mode. So far you have learnt several ways to delete text from lines and even to delete whole lines, so perhaps this is a good time to learn how to insert new lines into the text. If you just want to insert an empty line at the end of a paragraph, then all that is required is to press the RETURN key a second time. As many lines as wanted can be inserted in this way, when in insert mode. If in overwrite mode however, pressing RETURN will only make the cursor move down a line. PROTEXT provides a command, CTRL-I, which moves all the text from the line that the cursor is on, down a line and inserts a blank line into the text where the cursor is. You will quite frequently find that you want to split lines into two and join two lines together. There are two different ways to do this, depending on whether you are in insert or overwrite mode. If Insert mode is in use, which it will normally be, positioning the cursor where the line is to be split and pressing RETURN results in the cursor and the remainder of the text being moved down onto a new line beneath. If you want to join two consecutive lines together, you can do this easily, either by moving the cursor to the end of the first line and pressing DELETE, or by moving the cursor to the start of the second line and pressing BACKSPACE. If overwrite is in operation, pressing RETURN does not split the line, but merely moves the cursor down to the start of the next line, so two commands are provided to enable lines to be split and joined. CTRL-* (the * on the 8 key) will split a line at the cursor position and CTRL-+ (on the = key) will join lines together. Any leading spaces that would have appeared at the start of the new line will be discarded. Finally there are a couple of commands which are for the purpose of changing the case of letters. If you press CTRL-/ when the cursor is over a lower case letter it will change into an upper case letter. Keeping the keys pressed results in the cursor moving along the line of text changing any lower case letters into upper case. You do not need to worry about numbers and punctuation marks etc., as these are just passed over. The reverse of this command is CTRL-\, which turns all upper case letters into lower case. Both of these commands can prove to be very useful if, after creating a piece of text, you decide that certain parts, perhaps a heading, should be in upper case or vice versa. So far most of the frequently used editing commands have been covered, though there are a number of others which are detailed in the manual. One form of editing which hasn't been covered at all yet is the subject of moving, copying and deleting blocks of text. This is such a powerful and versatile feature of PROTEXT that it has a tutorial all to itself, so if you wish to continue to the next tutor file, press ESC to go into command mode and type:- That's the end of part 2 of the Protext tutorial, now on with part 3 ... TUTOR 3. CUT AND PASTE EDITING and FIND AND REPLACE. PROTEXT is supplied with a number of tutorial files for the purpose of providing a quick and easy method of learning the most commonly used commands. Each file covers a particular aspect of word processing. Cut and Paste Editing is one of the names given to the functions which enable you to move, copy or delete areas of text. PROTEXT is particularly flexible in this respect. The procedure is initially the same whether a block of text is to be moved, copied or deleted, in that you must set two markers, one at the start of the block of text and the other at the end. It does not matter which is set first, as PROTEXT automatically adjusts the markers so they are the correct way round. Move the cursor to the start of the first line of the preceding paragraph and press CTRL-Z. You will see that the block marker is represented on the screen as an inverse video square bracket. The first one set will always be an opening square bracket. Now move the cursor down to the start of the first line of this paragraph and press CTRL-Z a second time. This time an inverse video closing square bracket will mark the text. You have now marked a block of text consisting of all the text between the two block markers. You will see that on the Status line which previously said 'No markers set', there will now be two square brackets to indicate that both block markers are set. If you find that you have positioned a marker in the wrong position it can easily be removed by positioning the cursor over it and pressing CTRL-Z yet again, or by using the appropriate DEL key. Alternatively any block markers which are set can be cancelled by pressing CTRL-K. If both markers are already set when you try to set a marker, a beep will sound and a message appear on the status line to inform you. You must press the ESC key to return to edit mode. If you know you do not want the old markers then CTRL-K can be used to delete them before setting the new ones. On the other hand, you might want to have a look at them before removing them and PROTEXT provides a command to enable you to quickly find them, without having to look through the text. In an earlier tutorial you learnt how to set place markers in the text and how to find them by pressing CTRL-@ and then the place marker number. In a similar way, we can use CTRL-@ with either the opening or closing bracket to jump straight to whichever bracket was chosen. Press CTRL-@, release and then press the square bracket key and the cursor will position itself on the block marker. Having selected the block you can then decide whether to move, copy or delete it. We shall describe the copy command first. Move the cursor down and position it at the start of this paragraph and press CTRL-INSERT. You will find that the block of text has been copied down to the cursor position. You will also find that the block markers have moved with the block. If you look back in the text, you will find that the original piece of text is still there. You could have moved the block of text instead of copying it and to show how this works we shall now move the block down from where we copied it, to immediately after this paragraph. Move the cursor down to the start of the next paragraph and this time press CTRL-M to move the text. If you look this time, the block of text will be at the end of this paragraph, complete with markers, but if you look at the start of this paragraph, the text will no longer be there. It has been moved, rather than copied. As the block markers are still set it is a good time to look at the third of the block commands, the 'delete block' command. Just press CTRL-DELETE, and a message at the top of the screen will request confirmation that you want to delete the block, before doing so. Blocks of text may be any size and anywhere in the document. In the examples shown above, complete lines were moved. This was done deliberately, as this is one of the most common uses of the block commands, but a block can start and end anywhere and could be as short as one letter, though this would be rather pointless. Moving a few words around a sentence or paragraph is a fairly common use as well. Try moving a few words around in a sentence. One thing which should be noted is that the cursor must not be inside the marked block when the move or copy commands are used, as it is not possible to copy or move a block into itself. If you do attempt to do so, PROTEXT will display an error message on the status line. CTRL-Y is a command which, though not solely connected with the process of cut and paste editing, is frequently used with it. CTRL-Y is used to switch between two documents in memory. Full details of 'Two file editing' are provided in the manual, but just to give you an idea of the possibilities, mark this complete paragraph with the block markers, but this time, instead of using one of the copy, move or delete commands, press CTRL-Y, followed by CTRL-O (letter O, not zero). You should now find that you are in a new document containing only the marked block of text. Look at the status line and you will see the message 'No File', indicating that it is a new document. If you now press CTRL-Y again, PROTEXT will switch back to the original document, which will still contain the original block of text. CTRL-Y toggles between the two documents, whilst CTRL-O is the command to copy the contents of a block into the other document. The block of text is always copied over to the position of the cursor in the second document. The original block of text will still have the block markers round it, so it is easy to press CTRL-DELETE to remove the original text if required. The above operation, as you have seen, provides a most convenient way to transfer sections of one document to another and is much quicker than saving blocks of text and merging them into the other document. The second document is an entirely normal document and any of the command mode and editing commands can be used. You will also have noticed that when you switch between documents, the cursor position is remembered, together with all the settings of the various block and place markers, justification etc. The second part of this tutorial is concerned with a brief description of the FIND and REPLACE functions provided by PROTEXT. These are two of the few editing commands which are largely carried out from command mode. Because FIND and REPLACE are used from command mode, a tutorial file is not the ideal way to learn how to use them, so we recommend that you consult the chapter in the manual which gives full details of their operation. The following few paragraphs give a brief look at the options and how to use them. Both options work in a similar way, the difference being that FIND merely searches for a chosen 'string' of characters, whilst REPLACE will both find them and replace them with a substitute string. A string of characters is a collection of letters, numbers or punctuation marks that can be found in consecutive positions in the document. Included in the string may be printer control codes, tabs and returns. The easiest way to find out how to use the Find and Replace options is to try them. Before using ESC to go into command mode, move the text up the screen so that the following paragraph is at the top of the screen and will be visible even in command mode. Set a place marker in the text so that you can easily return here afterwards. Press ESC now to leave edit mode and then continue reading the next paragraph. From command mode type FIND and press RETURN. You will then be prompted with 'FIND string' and should now enter the word or characters that you want to find. In this example we shall look for the word 'string', so type that in and press RETURN. Next you will be asked to select 'Options (A,B,C,G,W,n)'. This time we will not select any options, so just press RETURN when you have read the remainder of this paragraph. PROTEXT will return to edit mode and start searching. When it finds the first occurrence of the word 'string', it will position the cursor on the first character of the word, in this case 's'. At this point you can resume editing if you want, or if you press CTRL and the ) key on the keypad at the right of the keyboard, PROTEXT will continue the search. If you had chosen to do some editing, you could still have continued the search whenever you wanted, by pressing the CTRL-keypad ) key. When all occurrences have been found, return to here by using the marker you set earlier. Instead of pressing CTRL-keypad ) to continue the search, the keypad ( key could have been used and would have caused the search to be resumed in the reverse direction from before. This allows you to back track if needs be. By default, with no options selected, PROTEXT will carry out a search of the document from the cursor position, forwards, ignoring the case of all letters and finding all occurrences, even when they are part of a longer word. PROTEXT is very flexible in the variety of different ways that you can search for a string. It is possible to specify a number of options which will decide what form the search will take. Full details are given in the manual of what the various options do, but briefly, they permit you to do a global search of the whole document (G), search backwards (B), search for whole words only (W), search only for words with all characters in the same case as the search string (C), search for the nth occurrence of a string (any number between 1 and 255) and finally there is an automatic option (A), which can be used to return the total number of occurrences of the string. REPLACE is very similar to FIND, the only difference being that you are also requested to give a string to replace the original with. As before, PROTEXT will position the cursor on the first occurrence of the string, but this time a message will appear at the top of the screen, on the status line, asking you to confirm 'Replace Y/N?'. If you select the N option the search will continue, leaving the original string unchanged. Selecting Y will replace the string with the new one and continue the search. Alternatively, if you press ESC when the 'Replace Y/N?' is displayed, the search is abandoned and you can continue with further editing. If you later decide to continue the search, then pressing CTRL-Keypad) or CTRL-Keypad( will resume the search from the cursor position. Try using REPLACE to replace all occurrences of the word 'string' with 'STRING', asking for confirmation each time. The '(A)utomatic' option will change all occurrences without requesting confirmation and will give a count of the total number of replacements made. If you wish to continue with the tutorial files, you should now return to command mode and enter:- That concludes part 3 of the Protext Tutorial, now on with the fourth and final part .......... TUTOR 4. RULERS, TABS, MARGINS AND FORMATTING. PROTEXT is supplied with a number of tutorial files for the purpose of providing a quick and easy method of learning the most commonly used commands. Each file covers a particular aspect of word processing. Formatting is the process which determines the layout and final appearance of a document and takes two distinct forms. Automatic formatting occurs naturally during the course of the creation of a document and is determined by the settings of a number of parameters, whilst manual re-formatting is the process of rearranging the text into another layout, correcting mis-alignment of text caused by insertion or deletion of areas of text, or by altering rulers after text has been entered. Automatic formatting is controlled by a number of things, the first of which are 'Rulers'. You have already seen a number of rulers in the tutorials. There is one immediately after the 'PRESS ESC KEY' message above. A ruler is a special line that marks out the margins and tabs. Margins are the left and right hand limits of the text, whilst tabs are markers used to position text in set columns on the screen and are particularly useful for lining up columns of words or numbers. Tabs work in a very similar fashion to those of a typewriter, but in a much more flexible fashion. You will notice that at the top of screen, just under the Status lines, there is another ruler. This is the 'active ruler' and at all times is the one applicable to the line of text that the cursor is on. You can have any number of ruler lines in the text and each ruler applies to the text from the line beneath the ruler to the next ruler line (or the end of the text if there are no more ruler lines). When the cursor is moved down past a ruler line, the new ruler will immediately replace the previous ruler at the top of the screen. PROTEXT considers the first ruler that will be used when printing takes place, to be the 'default document ruler'. In the event that the document does not contain a ruler PROTEXT provides a default ruler, which is the one you will see at the top of the screen when you first load PROTEXT. When you load PROTEXT initially, you will see the default ruler displayed at the top of the screen, beneath the status lines. Each '!' on the ruler marks a tab position and the 'L' and 'R' indicate the left and right margins. You can create new ruler lines to suit the layout you require by typing the new ruler line as you would a line of text. The line must have a 'greater than' symbol (>) in the first column. You do not need to type in the hyphens (-) along the line and unless you wish to inset the left margin, which is described later, you should not enter the 'L'. By default PROTEXT assumes the first column to be the left margin. Simply type in the '!' wherever you want a tab and the point '.' wherever you want a decimal tab. Try creating a new ruler line just above the last ruler and then type in a few lines of text. You will find that the text will wrap round automatically when it reaches the new right margin that you have set. >---L---!--------------------------------------------------------- -------- -R There are two further commands connected with rulers. The first, CTRL-D, copies the 'default document ruler' (the first active ruler in a document) to the current cursor position and CTRL-R copies the previous ruler but one to the current cursor position. CTRL-R is particularly useful when you are working with areas of the text which are in different formats. as it allows you to quickly 'restore' the ruler in use prior to the last change of format. The ruler immediately below this paragraph was copied using CTRL-R. If you wished to create another inset paragraph a few lines further down, the CTRL-R command would copy the above ruler down, to repeat the process. >---!---------!------------------------------------------------------R Often, when creating a new ruler, it is convenient to use one or the other of the commands to copy a ruler down and then to edit it as required by adding or removing tabs, etc. Rulers may also be copied from anywhere in the text by using the normal block copy command, CTRL-INSERT, after marking the ruler with the block markers. PROTEXT has two types of tabs, the normal 'tab' and the 'decimal tab' and these are inserted into a ruler line by just typing in an exclamation mark (!) where you want a normal tab marker, or a point (.) where you want a decimal tab marker. You may have as many of either tab as you want on each ruler line. Every '!' on the ruler line marks a normal tab position. When editing text, pressing the TAB key will move the cursor to the next of these positions. Make sure you are in insert mode and position the cursor at the start of one of the lines in the middle of a paragraph. Press the TAB key and you will find that the cursor jumps across to the first TAB marker, pushing the text in front of it. Pressing the TAB key again will make the cursor jump to the next tab marker. If you now press BACKSPACE the cursor and text will be pulled back to the previous tab marker. If you want to tab across the line without moving the text across, then press SHIFT-TAB and this time the cursor will just pass over the text to the tab position. Now go into overwrite mode using CTRL-TAB and repeat the process. This time you will find that TAB passes over the text, whilst SHIFT- TAB has the effect of pushing the text across. Don't forget to return to insert mode afterwards. The main use of tabs is for aligning text or numbers in columns, and PROTEXT allows you to set tabs at any positions in the line (and as many as you like). The normal tab is also used to inset the start of a paragraph and when used in conjunction with RETURN can provide a very quick means of splitting one paragraph into two. Try it now, positioning the cursor on the 'T' of 'Try' at the start of this sentence, press RETURN, then TAB to inset the paragraph and finally CTRL-F to reformat the paragraph. Note: do not use TAB when creating or editing a ruler line since this will cause the tabs to be set wrongly. PROTEXT also has a special form of tab called a 'decimal tab' which can be used in a number of ways. It permits you to align numbers so that the decimal points line up automatically. Any numbers that you enter after pressing TAB to take you to a decimal tab will be automatically shunted to the left of the tab position until you enter the decimal point(.), after which any further numbers will be placed to the right. If you do not enter a decimal point (as for a whole number) and then press TAB again, the number will be right justified in such a way that units, tens, hundreds etc. all line up. This tab can also be used with words, in which case they will all be lined up so that the end of the words are all in line. This can be very useful for entry of words like 'Total' and 'Subtotal' in conjunction with columns of figures. The right margin (denoted by 'R' on the ruler line) also acts as a decimal tab. If TAB is pressed when the cursor is to the right of all tab markers, it will be moved to the column to the right of the right margin. Any text typed now is pushed to the left and is right- justified at the margin. This can be very useful for putting the date on the right hand side of a letter, amongst many other things. Position the cursor on a blank line and TAB across until the cursor is at the right margin, then enter the date and press RETURN. Note that there must be sufficient room between the previous tab and the margin for the text that is to be entered. Try copying a ruler down now, with CTRL-R and tabbing across until the cursor is at the right hand margin and then entering the date. You should not use a full stop in the date, or PROTEXT will think this is a decimal point and therefore an instruction to continue entering text normally. The ruler line is also used to define margins. These are indicated by 'L' for left margin, and 'R' for right margin. These define the part of the screen within which text will be formatted. If the left margin is in the first column the 'L' should be omitted as PROTEXT, by default, assumes the left margin to be in the first column. The main use of left margins is to indent a section of text. When RETURN (or SHIFT-RETURN or CTRL-RETURN) is pressed or the end of a line is reached, the cursor moves to the left margin, rather than the left hand column, so by insetting the left margin text can be automatically indented. A left margin should NOT be used to indent the whole of a document. If you want to leave part of the paper to the left of the text completely blank, this is accomplished by using the 'side margin' stored command (>SM) which is described in the manual. When the text is formatted with the 'FORMAT' command, any text that is within the left margin, i.e. to the left of the left margin setting, is unaffected. This means that the left margin can be used to include marginal comments with the text. To type a comment in the margin use CTRL- to force the cursor to column 1. Tabs are allowed within the margin and the following ruler line may be found useful for numbering indented paragraphs: >---!---L--------------------------------------------------R 1. First paragraph. You will notice that the text wraps round onto the next line, but starting at the left margin, not column 1. 2. Second paragraph. >---!---------!------------------------------------------------------R Try entering a 'Third paragraph'. First position the cursor at the end of the 'Second paragraph.' line and press RETURN as you would normally when you are entering text. The cursor will move to the left margin of the next line. Press CTRL- to get into the margin, then TAB, before entering the number. Finally press TAB again, which will take you back to the left margin to enter the text. Ruler lines allow you to re-format the text in any way you choose by altering the ruler line and using CTRL-F to reformat the paragraph. If you have tabulated text by inserting tab characters, altering the position of the tab markers on the ruler line will result in the tabulated columns being re-formatted to their new positions immediately, making it is easy to move columns about or experiment with different layouts to decide which is best. Try moving the decimal tabs around on the following piece of tabulated text. >---!--------------------.--------------------.-------R Item 1 100.00 10.2 Item 2 25.43 12.5 Item 3 240.50 .75 >---!---------!------------------------------------------------------R One command which is useful is the CTRL-V T command, which has the effect of making all tabs and Carriage Returns visible. CTRL-V T is a toggled command and using it again will remove them from sight. Tabs appear as a right pointing triangle, whilst carriage returns are a 'cranked arrow' pointing to the left. Another feature which has a direct effect on the appearance of a PROTEXT document is 'Right Justification'. This is the process whereby the right hand edge of the text has a straight edge, like a book and is achieved by PROTEXT spacing out the words on a line. By default right justification is on, but this can be changed by the use of the CTRL-J command. This also is a toggled command and right justification can be turned on and off at any time. Press CTRL-J now and enter a bit of text in the line beneath this paragraph and this time it will have a 'ragged' right edge, similar to that produced by a typewriter. If you now switch right justification on again and reformat the paragraph using CTRL-F, the text will be reformatted with a straight right edge. We have already seen that text can be reformatted at any time by the use of CTRL-F, which is very convenient for the odd paragraph. Text is reformatted from the cursor position to the end of the paragraph. As well as CTRL-F, SHIFT-CTRL-F may be used to reformat a complete paragraph, leaving the cursor at its original place in the text. If a considerable amount of the text has been disrupted by editing and moving blocks of text about, this could prove to be a bit long winded, so PROTEXT has a 'global' format command. This is used from command mode, so it is necessary to press ESC to enter command mode then type 'FORMAT'. When RETURN is pressed the entire document will be reformatted according to the current setting of right justification and any rulers in the text. There is also a command FORMATB which will only reformat the text within a block marked with the Block Markers. Try 'messing up' a few paragraphs by inserting and deleting text and just for good measure alter some of the rulers to different widths, or insert some new rulers with left margins. Now go into command mode and use the global FORMAT command. When complete, go back into edit mode and see what the effect has been. There are several other items which, though not strictly 'formatting' commands, have a very direct effect on the appearance of a document. Sometimes when right justification is in operation PROTEXT might insert spaces between words where it is important that there is only one space and PROTEXT has a special character to replace the space. When justification takes place, PROTEXT then knows not to insert any spaces where a 'Non-break space' has been used. To insert a non-break space, press CTRL-N, followed by a space and you will find the space represented as a small box, like this ' '. One example which might illustrate the use of it is where you have a space after the 'A.' in Mr A. Smith. This would look wrong if separated by more than one space, as above, but when a non break space is used, 'Mr A. Smith' will always appear with only the one space between, when printed. Another similar character is the 'non-break hyphen'. Normally, when PROTEXT finds a hyphen at the end of a line, it will split the word at that point, but on occasions it may be important not to split the word. An example of this is where we have used a hyphen in CTRL- TAB which has the effect of splitting the command. Pressing CTRL-N and then the hyphen key will insert a non break hyphen, ensuring that the two halves are permanently joined together. Try replacing the normal hyphen with a non-break hyphen in 'CTRL-TAB' above and then reformatting the paragraph. The opposite of the non-break hyphen is the 'soft-hyphen'. This may be used in the middle of a long word which might look better if split with a hyphen, rather than causing the text on the previous line to be 'stretched' unnaturally. It is inserted into the word by pressing CTRL-- (CTRL-hyphen key) and will appear as a hyphen in inverse video ' '. The hyphen will always appear in the text on the screen, but the word will not be split unless the soft hyphen falls naturally towards the end of a line. When printing takes place the hyphen will only be printed if it is at the end of a line, otherwise it will just be ignored and the word will appear as one word. PROTEXT also has a command to make these codes 'invisible', so that the text can be viewed as it will appear. To see this in action, press CTRL-V V to view the text without any printer control codes, hard spaces or soft hyphens. Any place markers and block markers will also be made invisible. Pressing it again will restore them to the screen. Yet another command which is not strictly a formatting command, but which can prove most useful is CTRL-V S, which exposes all hard spaces. Hard spaces are those which are typed in by you, rather than the 'soft' spaces which are inserted by PROTEXT in the course of formatting. Soft spaces can be inserted and removed at any time by PROTEXT, whereas hard spaces are a permanent part of the document. To see this in use, press CTRL-V S and the hard spaces are shown as shaded spaces, with the soft spaces remaining blank. That brings us to the end of the supplied tutorial files which have given you a brief demonstration of most of the commonly used editing commands. Please note that there are many other commands and functions available in PROTEXT that have not been demonstrated and these are all fully described in the manual. In particular, no mention has been made of how to insert 'printer control codes' into the text, nor of how to use 'stored commands' or the many commands available in Command mode and these sections of the manual should be read fully. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, that concludes the extensive Protext Tutorial files. Thanks to Paul B. for supplying the original (fucked up) docs, which were merged in to a single file and edited extensively by Sewer Rat.