1wxPoem 1.0 2---------- 3 4by Julian Smart 5--------------- 6 7Fancy a little intellectual stimulation after long hours spent staring 8at spreadsheets or reports? Does your brain long for something a little 9more fulfilling than Tetris or fiddling with the WIN.INI file? Then you 10could go out and buy a poetry book... or alternatively, if you just 11can't drag yourself away from the screen, click on the wxPoem icon. 12 13wxPoem is a simple Windows application which picks poems from a file at 14random, or finds poems according to a string criterion, and formats them 15nicely in a window. A displayed poem can be copied to the Windows clipboard 16ready for inclusion in that more imaginative report... 17 18It's small, it's free and it's totally harmless, so far as I know. 19No responsibility accepted, though, for any problems it might cause with 20your setup. 21 22wxPoem was converted to use the wxWindows toolkit, from the original 23WinPoem which received a favourable review from Windows Shareware 500. 24 25Since it now uses wxWindows, wxPoem may be compiled on a variety 26of platforms such as X (XView or Motif), Windows and NT. 27 28Files 29----- 30 31The main data file is winpoem.dat, and an index file winpoem.idx is 32supplied or can be (re)built by deleting winpoem.idx and rerunning 33wxPoem. Source code is also provided in source.zip, but wxWindows is 34required to build it. The original WinPoem is much leaner (40K 35instead of 400K!) and can be compiled under Windows without wxWindows. 36 37Installation 38------------ 39 40 Windows 41 ======= 42 43 Copy ctl3dv2.dll to windows\system, and delete the original 44 ctl3dv2.dll or wxPoem will not run. 45 46 wxPoem can be put in the Startup folder in the Program Manager, so that 47 a random poem will pop up every time Windows is run. 48 49 UNIX 50 ==== 51 52 wxPoem comes in Open Look and Motif versions for the Sun, and a 53 Linux Open Look version. For other platforms, you will need to 54 recompile the source. 55 56 57Use 58--- 59 60Simply run the program, and a random poem will be displayed. 61You can optionally give a filename on the command line, without a suffix 62(e.g. winpoem). 63 64The simplest way of operating wxPoem is to keep pressing the space bar 65for new poems (or pages for multi-page poems). 66 67Clicking the right mouse button (or selecting the wxPoem Options menu 68item from the system menu) gives a choice of the following facilities: 69Next poem/page (Page down) Display next poem (or next page) 70Previous page (Page up) Display previous page (multi-line poems only) 71Search (S) Allows user to enter a search string 72Next match (N) Gives next search match 73Copy to clipboard Allows poems to be pasted into other applications 74Bigger text Increases text size 75Smaller text Decreases text size 76About wxPoem About wxPoem 77Exit (Esc) Quit wxPoem 78 79When wxPoem is closed, the font, text height and window position are 80remembered (stored in WIN.INI) for next time. Under X, the values 81are not written (since they are stored in .Xdefaults), so you may 82want to edit the following resources by hand: 83 84wxPoem.X ; X position 85wxPoem.Y ; Y position 86wxPoem.FontSize ; Font size in points (default 12) 87 88The data file 89------------- 90 91The winpoem.dat file contains poems separated by a #, with optional 92@ codes denoting title (@T) author (@A) and page break (@P). Any 93unrecognized codes will cause the rest of the line to be ignored, so 94the user can add lines (e.g. @S for subject) which will be searched on but 95not displayed. 96 97The data file contains a mixture of 20th century and earlier poetry, 98subject to copyright constraints. Apologies if any copyrights have 99inadvertently been infringed, though I have tried to avoid it. 100 101Implementation 102-------------- 103 104The original WinPoem program was my `Windows learning application', i.e. 105a vehicle for getting stuck into Windows programming, whilst (possibly) 106affording others a modicum of amusement. Therefore the code is pretty 107ugly. So don't look if you're squeamish! 108 109License 110------- 111 112Copyright Julian Smart, released into the public domain, October 1994. 113 114Julian Smart 115Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute 116University of Edinburgh 11780 South Bridge 118Einburgh 119EH1 1HN 120 121J.Smart@ed.ac.uk 122