WordRider Text Editor for Ti-89 - Page 1

Hello,
I would like to introduce you open source text editor 'WordRider' which helps with creating TxtRider's text format in calculator TI-89.

WordRider is similar to applications such as RidEdit, MadCoder's Text Editor or Okin's Word. WordRider brings full support of TxtRider view-tags and more user convenience with working TI-89text format. WordRider editor is "almost" WYSIWYG.
Features

* you can easily change font sizes, alignments, margins, word wrap, math expressions and insert line separators or breakpoints
* really easy work with breakpoints and inserting special characters
* 89i pictures support
* drag and drop support
* math expressions are distinguished by color
* multilanguage environment
* free software
* open source code under GNU GPL license
* support for Java Look&Feels and themes
* OS platform independent
* and much more...



I also look for someone, who would be able to translate WordRider editor into French.
More info can be found here: http://wordrider.net

Vity

I think it's the first time that the 89i pictures are supported !
It seems to be a great software ! Congratulations

Awesome

Honestly, I played around with it a little, and it looks like everything is well polished (what you see really is what you get and the generated code isn't "dirty") Really, it's rare to see such good quality software (and your website isn't bad either ^^)

A few comments:
- copy/paste has glitches, among them the fact that indentation ("&,") and equation ("&E") tags disappear, and that pasting inserts as many undo steps as there are lines (though it should be easy to fix, I guess)
- anti-aliasing does not seem to work on the very line you are editing
- perhaps you could bundle a bmp/gif/jpg->89i converter
- I guess character widths are different from actual 89/92+ widths, so isn't it a bit misleading regarding the "emulation"? (if you can't get the actual TI fonts to work, then it might be possible to just take real-calculator widths into account instead of computer-screen widths -- just an idea though, it may or may not be worth the trouble)
- the "Windows" look&feel has *huge* toolbar separators, do you have the same problem or is it because of the version of Java I have installed?

Thanks Pollux for your comments. :-) I am glad you like it. :-)

> copy/paste has glitches, among them the fact that indentation ("&,") and equation ("&E") tags disappear, and that pasting inserts as many undo steps as there are lines (though it should be easy to fix, I guess)
- can you describe this strange behaviour with more details please?

> anti-aliasing does not seem to work on the very line you are editing
- i will check it

> perhaps you could bundle a bmp/gif/jpg->89i converter
- maybe in future version - nowadays many applications can do that

> I guess character widths are different from actual 89/92+ widths, so isn't it a bit misleading regarding the "emulation"? (if you can't get the actual TI fonts to work, then it might be possible to just take real-calculator widths into account instead of computer-screen widths -- just an idea though, it may or may not be worth the trouble)

- the width for 89/92 emulation is counted by width of characters -for example - TI92PlusPC font width of 'w' * 25characters(=count of characters viewed by TxtRider in normal font for Ti89) = width of 89emulation

> the "Windows" look&feel has *huge* toolbar separators, do you have the same problem or is it because of the version of Java I have installed?
Yeah, I know about this problem(and I am not alone - http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=57&threadID=122894. Unfortunately I don't know how to fix that. Try to download another Look and Feel from WordRider's pages.

Thanks again

Vity

This just shows that Swing sucks. D*mn non-native interfaces. For UI programs in Java, SWT is the way to go!

Actually, if he feels better with swing, just let him use swing
You don't like this program ? don't use it... But I'm almost certain that many people will appreciate it (and, moreover, it's supposed to work both on windows and linux )

If no one used non-native interfaces, we'd be looking at LEDs on our keyboards for display from programs

Vity
: - can you describe this strange behaviour with more details please?

Just take an indented list, cut it, paste it, and the indenting goes away.

And you'll notice that if you try to undo the "paste" command, you will have to press Ctrl-Z as many times as you have lines in the clipboard...

- the width for 89/92 emulation is counted by width of characters -for example - TI92PlusPC font width of 'w' * 25characters(=count of characters viewed by TxtRider in normal font for Ti89) = width of 89emulation

OK, but I was just saying that small and large fonts aren't emulated exactly (especially the small font).


Hmm I was thinking about another feature you could add : perhaps have the text written in terms of Unicode characters, rather than the weird charset used by TI ?

I'm willing to do the translation, if you're still looking for someone

squale92 :
Actually, if he feels better with swing, just let him use swing
You don't like this program ? don't use it... But I'm almost certain that many people will appreciate it (and, moreover, it's supposed to work both on windows and linux )

I used SWING because SWING application can be faster than SWT application(it's my experience). Btw. libraries for SWT > 1MB . WordRider's size is now about 450kB.
I also tried to use SwingWT(combination of both), but it was impossible to make conversion - WordRider is too dependent on SWING core(due to special drawing on textarea)

Vity
: I used SWING because SWING application can be faster than SWT application(it's my experience).

Huh? In my experience, Swing applications are invariably slower, more memory-hungry and buggier (due to Swing eating all system resources) than SWT applications. (That's on Windows Me, and my experience is somewhat limited, I try to avoid Java stuff because it's so slow.)

Pollux
:

Vity
: - can you describe this strange behaviour with more details please?

Just take an indented list, cut it, paste it, and the indenting goes away.

And you'll notice that if you try to undo the "paste" command, you will have to press Ctrl-Z as many times as you have lines in the clipboard...

- the width for 89/92 emulation is counted by width of characters -for example - TI92PlusPC font width of 'w' * 25characters(=count of characters viewed by TxtRider in normal font for Ti89) = width of 89emulation

OK, but I was just saying that small and large fonts aren't emulated exactly (especially the small font).


Hmm I was thinking about another feature you could add : perhaps have the text written in terms of Unicode characters, rather than the weird charset used by TI ?

I will check this copy&paste problem.

I agree with you - small fonts aren't emulated exactly, i can't change it without special True Type Font which would be equal to bitmap TI89fake font.
It's really really hard to create such font(i guess that it's more difficult than to create WordRider itself ;-)).
"in terms of Unicode characters" - what do you mean with that?

Anyway i fixed a problem with antialiasing. It will be included in the next version(beta 3).

Thank you for your comments people!

Vity

Kevin Kofler
:

Vity
: I used SWING because SWING application can be faster than SWT application(it's my experience).

Huh? In my experience, Swing applications are invariably slower, more memory-hungry and buggier (due to Swing eating all system resources) than SWT applications. (That's on Windows Me, and my experience is somewhat limited, I try to avoid Java stuff because it's so slow.)

<noflame>
We could talk about it for a long time :-).
I know eg. JBuilder is very very slow - that's because it's bad written software.
Eg. IDEA IntelliJ is very fast software - complete based on SWING - and I guess it's much better and faster than Eclipse...
</noflame>

Vity :
I agree with you - small fonts aren't emulated exactly, i can't change it without special True Type Font which would be equal to bitmap TI89fake font. It's really really hard to create such font(i guess that it's more difficult than to create WordRider itself ;-)).

But like I said, perhaps you could deal with it by just detecting where to wrap according to an internal table containing the width of each character, rather than doing it according to a fixed wrap width (unless you use Swing's integrated control to wrap, which may force you to have the same wrap width for all lines ?)

"in terms of Unicode characters" - what do you mean with that?

I mean, when you have the greek Alpha letter (α), it corresponds to TI Charset #128, but to Unicode #x3B1 ; so if you take this line from my message and copy-paste it into WordRider, you won't get an α character because TI's alpha is not encoded that way... (by the way, you don't check for non-0..255 characters, so you won't get the same result after you save and reload the .89t file )
And vice-versa for copy-pasting from a TI file, of course.

It looks great indeed. It's a pity I do not use my calc to store texts or images.

And about the use of Java/swing (well it was my main point when I began writing this post):
Though I generally do not like Java for many (good, needless to say ) reasons, this program is an example of the kind of software I think Java should be used for:
- it does not do intensive computations
- platform independence is an issue
- it is light enough so that the overhead introduced by the use of Java will not be a problem
- it is not mission-critical

Well, that does not mean I would have chosen Java. That means I understand and approve your choice. (Those last remarks are mainly for some other people who know what I think of Java )

Pollux :
I mean, when you have the greek Alpha letter (α), it corresponds to TI Charset #128, but to Unicode #x3B1 ; so if you take this line from my message and copy-paste it into WordRider, you won't get an α character because TI's alpha is not encoded that way... (by the way, you don't check for non-0..255 characters, so you won't get the same result after you save and reload the .89t file )
And vice-versa for copy-pasting from a TI file, of course.

I understand your request and I agree with it.
Unfortunately alpha character(α) is not viewed by WordRider because Ti92PlusPC font(it's the beginning and the end of many problems...) has no such character with this code(alpha is placed at &x20ac). I could make special filter for import the text written in unicode(at least for greek and math characters) into editor(create another converse table...). I will think about it. Don't you have better idea?

I use a converse table - every character 0..255 has assigned character in the font(if exists... - otherwise "empty bar" is displayed)

Well, if Ti92PlusPC bothers you so much, you might be interested by http://fonttools.sourceforge.net, which allows you to do various manipulations on TrueType fonts... (it can convert TrueType fonts to and from XML files, which you should be able to modify easily)

Ti92PlusPC is a buggy font. Its character positions don't even match the ones on the calculator, and there are a few characters which are completely missing! Don't use it.

That's why I'm pointing him to this tool, so that he can fix it if he wants to Saying "Ti92PlusPC sucks" is not gonna improve anything, unless of course you have an interesting suggestion to make (which does not seem to be the case...)

It's illegal to modify Ti92PlusPC. It is actually illegal to even distribute it with your program, by the way. It is a copyrighted font by Agfa Monotype used under license by TI. (Look at the font properties or at the TI Graph Link splashscreen, it's stated black on white there.)

Well, is it very hard to create another font ?

Kevin> Ouch, I didn't realize that... Actually, a font like Courier New already has many of TI's symbols [greek letters, symbols like infinity, etc...], wouldn't it be a good idea to use it instead ? (in addition, it looks much better, especially when you have anti-aliasing enabled)

Moumou> well, you can try, if you feel like it but there are more than a hundred different characters to draw, so it's quite a bit of work...

the TI charset is exactly 256 characteres which can be printed no more, no less

Hmm, that's not exactly true, because at least \0 and \r can't appear in a text file... And as for weird symbols ("SH", "SX"...), maybe it's not that much of a problem if they're not displayed properly.

Is anybody experienced with creating true type font(from bitmaps)?
We need to know how to do that. Then we could share this work ;-). 255 characters divide 3-4 people? :-)

Hello friends :-).
WordRider 0.54 is out!
The latest version improves user comfort with new features (recent files, easy check for new version, support of French,...) and fixes many bugs from previous versions(bad checksum in generated text file).
This new version is now available at http://wordrider.net.

If you have some problems with downloading(corrupted files), please let me know.

Vity

Yes, I have pbs to download files : There is no compiled version for linux...

Not Found

The requested URL /download/wordrider-0.54.tar.gz was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Apache Server at wordrider.net Port 80

Thanks for your attention. It's fixed now...

Vity

Hello TI fans!
The next version of WordRider - v0.7 is now available for download!
Main new features:
+ improved compatibility to Hibview
+ options dialog with many settings
+ image import
+ new look&feels support
+ and much more...

[IMG]http://wordrider.net/screenshots/simply-rocks.jpg[/IMG]

More info: [URL=http://wordrider.net]WordRider homepage[/URL]

great job
I will look at it.
In the FAQ, you're saying

I can say : Yes. Unfortunately, there are several differences between TxtRider and Hibview (such as a different way of processing &/# tags) so the resulting text styles might be different. WordRider was only tested with TxtRider. Support for Hibview is planned for future versions.

What are the differences in styles ? I tried to take the exact syntax and styling of Txtrider tags, then I added some new tag. Some text written for Txtrider won't be drawn in the same way in HibView ?