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                   Expert Guide for Windows v2.15
                   ==============================

                          By Dave pearson
                         <davep@davep.org>

Introduction

Welcome to WEG version 2. WEG is a Norton Guide database reader for Windows. If you don't know what a Norton Guide database is you probably don't need WEG.

WEG is released, under the GPL, with full source code. Please take the time to read the file COPYING if you want to further enhance this software, in fact, why not take the time to read it anyway?

Licence

WEG is released under the terms of the GPL; see the file COPYING which should accompany this file. However, because WEG makes use of Delphi's VCL you should consider the VCL to be "system software" in regard to the "special exception" mentioned in section 3 of the GPL.

Please also note that WEG makes use of Toolbar2000 and does so under its GPL licence option. See <URL:http://www.jrsoftware.org/> for more details on Toolbar2000.

Latest Release

You'll always find the latest release of WEG at:

<URL:http://www.davep.org/norton-guides/#weg>

See the file CHANGES.txt for details of what has changed in this and previous releases.

Fonts

WEG, for obvious reasons, only lets you select fixed pitch fonts for displaying the content of a guide. By default WEG will attempt to make use of "Fixedsys" and the guide reading code will do OEM to ANSI translation. Personally, for the types of guides I read (US/UK English with lots of line drawing characters), I've found that "MS Linedraw" with OEM to ANSI translation turned off works best. I'd suggest that you try and track down a copy of "MS Linedraw" and use that. As best as I can tell it used to ship with some versions of Microsoft Office. A search on Google seems to turn up copies for download.

Please don't ask me to send you a copy of the font. I will ignore such requests.

Building WEG

To build WEG you'll need Delphi. I developed WEG and WEGLib with Delphi 5, I don't know if this code will build with later versions of Delphi (I'm pretty certain that it won't build with Kylix). You'll then need to build and install WEGLib. You will also need to get and install Toolbar2000. You can get it from <URL:http://www.jrsoftware.org/>.

DDE

You can talk to WEG via DDE. The details are:

Application: {path-to-weg}\weg Service....: WEG Topic......: Execute

WEG implements the following macros:

Syntax: open, Usage.: Opens a guide. can be the full path to the guide or just the name of the file. If you only provide the name of the file then, if that file isn't in WEG's current working directly, the file will be looked for in the default guide directory as defined in the guide preferences dialog.

Syntax: gsearch, Usage.: Opens the global finder, sets the search string to and starts a global search.

Syntax: gsearchset,, Usage.: Opens the global finder and sets depending on . Available settings and values are:

    Setting: guides
    Values.: current/all
    Usage..: Specify if you want to search to search the currently
             focused guide or all known guides.

    Setting: shorts
    Values.: on/off
    Usage..: Specify if you want to search short entries.

    Setting: longs
    Values.: on/off
    Usage..: Specify if you want to search long entries.

    Setting: regexp
    Values.: on/off
    Usage..: Specify if you want to do a regular expression search.

    Setting: matchcase
    Values.: on/off
    Usage..: Specify if you want the search to be case-sensitive or
             case-insensitive.

Note that you can send any combination of the above as a multi-line macro. For example, if you wanted to get WEG to perform a case-sensitive regular expression search on a guide called wibble.ng, looking only in short entries for "^\s+MY", you could send:

Please note that, for the moment, WEG is a little too forgiving of mistakes and any typos in the above will generally be silently ignored. If your macro isn't doing what you'd expect it to do you probably need to check your spelling. At some point in the future I'll make WEG moan like mad if you get something wrong.

Feedback

Please feel free to send me any feedback, ideas, enhancement requests, bug reports, bug fixes or anything else. I'd appreciate it if you sent email concerining WEG to weg@davep.org; if you just want a chat then use the email address at the start of this file.

Before you do drop me a line please make sure that you've had a read of TODO.txt and BUGS.txt. It might be that I'm already aware of a bug you're about to report or I might already plan to implement some feature you're about to ask me for.

On the off chance that you want to show your thanks in some tangible way feel free to help me reduce the size of my Amazon wish-list. If you fancy doing that just visit my web site and click on my picture.

Thanks

Thanks go to:

o Arnold Johnson for his invaluable input (and, who, sadly, is no longer with us to provide such invaluable input). o Viktor Trunov for his feedback and ideas and for testing WEG v1.x against Russian language guides. o The inmates of comp.lang.clipper for their feedback, ideas and support. o Jordon Russell for Toolbar2000. o Douglas Woodrow for his fix to saving window positions in a way that doesn't look odd on XP with animated Windows.

davep / weg

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