Can margins be set in writing Tapcis mail?
 

Some of my correspondents use a Mac. Because of the narrower Mac screen, my mail msgs to them tend to have long and short lines.

Is there a secret setting in Tapcis that would permit me, while writing a mail msg, to set the margins at, say, 65 characters wide instead of Tap's default width?

I can add HRts manually at the end of each line, and do it that way (and tell Tap to keep the format when sending), but that's a hassle when I'm in a hurry. Another way I do it is to compose the msg in my text editor, which allows me to set margin widths, save it as a file, then do Shft-F10 to retrieve the file when I open Tap's msg screen (and again X Save Format when sending). Still extra hassle, but it works.

Any magic within Tapcis that would work? (As you can tell, I haven't dug into all of Tap's features.)

ed p.

I vaguely remember something about an expert setting that would alter margins, but I can't remember whether it was changing the way messages were displayed, or changing the way they were written.

Let me dig through some of my old stuff and see what I can find, if someone else hasn't come up with something in the meantime.

--Lindsey

Lindsey's better at expert settings than I am, but you can set up an external editor to be the Tapcis editor.

Oh, right! I had almost forgotten about that. That may well be the best thing to do, because I also sort of vaguely remember that the margin setting was problematic.

--Lindsey

Expert setting?

Duh....what's that?

I already in effect use ED.EXE as an external editor for Tapcis. I'll have to see about making it officially a Tap external editor. The HELP page on external editors already uses ED.EXE as the example for configuring. Now if I can only get a plain English translation of what the HELP writer said to do. <vbg>

ed p.

It's a configuration setting that is not included in a dialog; you have to edit one of the *.INI files directly.

This is my old boilerplate file on setting up an external editor (which appears to have been written for someone wanting to use WordStar):

You can tell TAPCIS to launch an external program in place of the internal editor. You'll need to specify the command lines to use to launch the program in three different situations:

• the Reply configuration: these are situations in which the internal editor gives you a split window, with the parent message (or the selected messages) in the top window, and the editor in the bottom window)
  
• the Write configuration: these are the situations in which the internal editor gives you only the editor window, with no upper window (as when you write a message to start a thread rather than to reply to an existing message)
  
• the Edit configuration: these are the situations in which the editor is being used to modify an existing file (like an INI file) rather than to write/edit a message.

For the Reply configuration, you will need to tell your external editor, via the command line, to load two files, both of them in your TAPCIS root directory: ROOT~.TMP, which is where TAPCIS will place the contents that the internal editor would have shown in the upper window; and EDITOR~.TMP, which is where your reply will go. If this is a new message, it will be an empty file. If it's an existing message that you are re-editing, EDITOR~.TMP will contain the reply as you have composed it so far. When you exit your external editor, be sure to save the contents of EDITOR~.TMP (as MS-DOS text), because that's where TAPCIS will look for it to place in the proper SND file.

For the Write configuration, you will only need to load EDITOR~.TMP.

For the Edit configuration, you will probably not want to load any file automatically, but open whatever file you want to work on after the editor is launched.

The command line specifications are entered into the Setup|Editors|Configure dialog (which you can only get to from the Main Menu). That puts the specifications in the [Editors] section of TAPCIS.INI.

As an example, here is the [Editors] section of my TAPCIS.INI which sets up Textpad32 as External Editor #2:

[Editors]
EditConfig2=c:\TextPad\txtpad32.exe
ReplyConfig2=c:\TextPad\txtpad32.exe -ah -cd -u "editor~.tmp" "root~.tmp"
WriteConfig2=c:\TextPad\txtpad32.exe -cd editor~.tmp

Notice that I've included some of Textpad's command line switches. "-ah" is for horizontal tiling; "-cd" says to open the file(s) as MS-DOS text; and I'm not sure just why I put the "-u" in there.

If you can't load more than one file from the command line for Wordstar, you'll just have to load it separately once the program is launched. Or do without (which would not be too convenient).

One caution: there is (or was) a bug in the external editor dialog that will truncate long lines when you re-edit the configuration, even though it gives you room in the field to enter the entire line. I'm not sure if that was fixed in the final 6.2c release or not. [post hoc: I think it was.]

Once you've got the command lines configured, you can switch to an external editor with Setup|Editors and choosing the editor you want from the dialog. (You can switch editors from within the message reader as well as from the Main Menu. It's only the Configuration dialog that has to be reached from the Main Menu.)

I hope that tells you what you need to know, but if you have further questions, ask away.

Meanwhile, I'm still checking on the other.

--Lindsey

The big thing I remember about the margin setting is that it didn't always work.

That's more or less my recollection, too.

I think the external editor is much the better solution, especially since TAPCIS lets you switch back and forth on the fly.

--Lindsey

It works for me, unless I'm importing lines >75, and then multiple ^F3's are usually needed to reformat.

TAPCIS.INI

[Interface]

EditorWidth=75

Or any other width you like. Too short and "Keep Format" will rear its ugly head.

- Jeff

Ah! Thank you!

--Lindsey