Open Window Software News Spring 2003 A Free E-mail Newsletter From Open Window Software Featuring Tips On Using The WinFlash Suite, HandyCards And ProUpdater Contents: 1) Optimizing Graphics For Use In WinFlash 2) Ideas For More Decks For The Library? 3) Freeware Fonts Supporting The Greek Symbol Set 4) Increase Your Backup Security With Offsite Storage 5) All About Fonts In WinFlash 6) Free Updates For Deck Contributors 7) Study Tip --------------------------------------------------- 1) Optimizing Graphics For Use In WinFlash You can make your graphics-content decks look a bit more professional by taking a little extra time when preparing the graphics for use. When we create our demo decks we first assemble the graphics based on the needed content. Next we open all the graphics at once using a program such as Paint Shop Pro (our personal favorite for graphics manipulation and creation). This allows us to consider the overall 'feel' of the set of graphics - if something plainly doesn't fit we try to find a substitute that is more in line with the overall style of the deck. We may also make small changes such as changing the background color, removing distracting features, etc. As a last step, we make all of the graphics the same size (520 x 400) - usually by enlarging the canvas by adding additional 'white space' that matches the color of the original's background. This size fits the default graphic window of the Q and A dialogs nicely without wasting space within the window. Have a favorite tip for using one of WinFlash's capabilities? E-mail it to us and we'll try it out for use in an upcoming newsletter. If we use it we'll credit you with the suggestion and flag you in the database for a free upgrade to the next major release. --------------------------------------------------- 2) Ideas For More Decks For The Library? We're looking for fresh suggestions for our featured study decks that we release with our newsletter. Is there a topic you'd like to see that you think would have a significant user base? If you send us an idea that we use we'll credit you in the newsletter when it's released as well as flagging your name for a free upgrade to the next major release. Send us your suggestions - the deck we release with our next newsletter could be yours! --------------------------------------------------- 3) Freeware Fonts Supporting The Greek Symbol Set Instead of a flashcard deck or pair generator, this issue we're featuring two fonts that'll be useful for those of you using WinFlash for subjects which make use of Greek symbols (math, physics, etc.). See the feature on fonts in WinFlash below for a thorough discussion of the general topic. These two fonts support all of the normal keyboard characters AND provide all of the small and capital Greek characters in the 'upper' portion of the font, accessible using Charmap or the Alt-Keypad # method. The first one is a Times New Roman-style for the 'regular' characters and the second is Arial-style. Download these fonts from our WinFlash Users Group Library page at http://www.openwindow.com/pages/wfusers.htm or, if your mail client supports it, by clicking directly on the links below: Arial: http://www.openwindow.com/ftp/arialsym.ttf Times New Roman: http://www.openwindow.com/ftp/timessym.ttf --------------------------------------------------- 4) Increase Your Backup Security With Offsite Storage In the last issue of the newsletter we talked about how to set up an automatic backup system for your home network. That system guards against a large majority of the data loss scenarios that you might encounter. What about that tiny minority of cases, though, when your ENTIRE home computing environment is destroyed - either by natural disaster or through vandalism or theft? The only way to recover from this type of event is to have a copy of your data stored in a secure location off-site. While some web-based companies offer services of this type you'd need a very high-speed connection for backup of any serious amount of data. At Open Window we use a system where we rotate three sets of removable Zip disks between our bank, a fireproof storage box in our home and our office desk. We established this procedure before writeable CD's were available at such inexpensive prices. These days we'd probably use CDR's for our monthly backups, sticking with the three-generation approach and destroying the oldest set when the new one is created. Depending on the extent of your data and the capacity of your removable media, you may want to store less data than you do for your daily backups. For instance on our daily backups we copy our in-progress programs' .exe files, all the previous versions, .zip files we host on our site, etc., since these go to an 80Gb drive that has plenty of spare space. When we do our monthly offsite backups we use a different set of settings for ProUpdater, stored in a separate .opt file, that excludes all data that we can regenerate with simple compilations of our source code archives. We also periodically write a CDR of archival data that will never change and LEAVE this in the safe deposit box. This data is then excluded from the monthly backups. Whatever removable media you decide upon, the key is to set up a routine where you periodically back up your data and move the media to a safe, off-site location. If you don't have a bank safe deposit box, you can arrange to swap backups with a friend - providing the off-site safety net for each other. Since the likelihood of a system-wide disaster is, hopefully, a lot lower than the risk of a simple disk crash, unintentional format, or other every-day data wipeout, we've settled on once a month for these backups. You may be comfortable with a longer interval. Just ask yourself "How many weeks (months) of data would I be comfortable losing permanently?" Some of my friends who only use their computer for e-mail and web surfing are comfortable with starting over totally from scratch if they were to lose their data. Many others, though, have either financial data, digital photos of the family, collections of carefully assembled music files or other fruits of significant effort that they'd be loath to part with. If you're in this latter group, think about setting up that off-site backup routine! If you don't yet have a backup tool to assist with this chore, check out ProUpdater on our site at http://www.openwindow.com/pages/winupd8r.htm --------------------------------------------------- 5) All About Fonts In WinFlash The use of fonts in WinFlash probably causes more confusion than any other single topic. First a little background on fonts. Starting with Windows 3.1, the standard Windows display fonts have been TrueType fonts. These fonts contain 'only' 256 characters - not all of which are printable. The positions 33 - 126 comprise the commonly-accessible keyboard characters. These 'lower' positions are fairly standard across most TrueType fonts as they must correspond to standard keyboard assignments. Positions 127 - 255 are less standard across fonts and contain additional characters that can be entered using Charmap or the numeric keypad. Starting with Windows XP, Unicode fonts became part of the standard operating system. Unicode fonts contain many more characters and require two bytes of data (16 bits) to represent each character. Because of this requirement, documents which contain Unicode font characters above position 255 cannot be stored in standard ANSI text format (the format for WinFlash .fls files) - thus WinFlash does not universally support the characters above position 255 in Unicode fonts. WinFlash DOES support Unicode characters in the .rtf support files which can be created and edited with Educator (this includes the deck's Introduction). See the Tutorial topic "Add An Intro And .RTF Support File" for information on using these capabilities. If you are using WinFlash to learn facts that can be expressed with the characters available from the standard keyboard, you're in luck - select any font that you like for the Question and Answer - both of these fonts are independently selectable in Options|Colors & Fonts. The rub comes when you want to use 'special' characters in addition to the regular keyboard characters - for instance the British pound symbol "£" or perhaps Japanese or Korean characters. You must be certain when using such characters with CharMap that Charmap is set to the SAME font as the Questions (or Answers if an answer is being edited). In addition, in Windows XP, you need to be sure that you're selecting the character from the first 255 positions in the font. In short - all the characters universally recognized correctly by WinFlash can be entered by holding down the Alt key, typing a number between 33 and 255 on the numeric keypad and releasing the Alt key. There are a number of tactics you can use to get around this issue if you need to make use of 'special' character sets. If you simply need foreign language characters for non-Asian alphabets you can obtain TrueType fonts from many locations on the net. Do a search for TrueType fonts on Google and you'll quickly locate sources for your font. Install your font on your computer and then set the Answer font to this new font and you're set to go. See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ttfinst/ttfinst.htm for a nice step-by-step tutorial, including screenshots, on how to install a new font on your computer. If you need access to the extended capabilities of Unicode fonts - to create study decks for Japanese, for instance - consider using the .rtf support file capability in Educator. This will place the Unicode text in the right-hand side 'graphics' window. You'll need to 'phrase' your questions so that you don't need the 'regular' part of the WinFlash pair to contain these Unicode characters. For instance, you could enter Japanese vocabulary words in the Question's .rtf support file and then use the Auto Fill-In-The-Blank capability in Educator to study the words where the Japanese word is the question and the English word is the answer. To go in the other direction, though, you'd need to revert to 'standard' mode, since WinFlash cannot accept the Japanese characters as entries in the FIB box. The fairly complicated information above can be managed by understanding and applying a few simple facts about WinFlash: 1. All 'regular' text in WinFlash must be entered using the lower 255 characters of a font. 2. The Questions' regular text must all be in a single, user-selectable, font. The Answers' regular text must also all be in a single, user-selectable, font - a different one than the Questions' if desired. This setting is accessed through the Options|Colors & Fonts dialog. 3. ANY mix of fonts and characters can be used in the Introduction and in each pair's .rtf support files. (See the Tutorial topic "Add An Intro And .RTF Support File" for information on using these capabilities.) --------------------------------------------------- 6) Free Upgrades For Deck Contributors Have a deck that you think might be useful to others? We'll give you a free upgrade to the next release of your version of the program if you'll share! Plus you'll get credit on the library page for your contribution (unless you'd rather remain anonymous). To submit your deck, see the detailed instructions at http://www.openwindow.com/pages/contribute.htm We'll immediately acknowledge receipt of your submission and, after review, will send you another e-mail letting you know if we've accepted it for use in our library. If it's accepted, we'll flag your database entry for a free upgrade to v8.0 when it's released. --------------------------------------------------- 7) Study Tip An excellent way to reinforce your memory of the facts you're studying is to change the format in which they're presented. That way you integrate the basic facts themselves, regardless of the format that they're presented in. WinFlash Scholar and Educator both have Option settings that allow you to present "standard format" pairs as Fill-In-The-Blank or Multiple Choice pairs automatically. This is especially useful for fact pairs like vocabulary words. If you enter all of your vocabulary words as standard format pairs you can then study them in a variety of ways - standard, fill-in and multiple choice for starters. But then throw in Display Answer After x Seconds time limiting, A First Followed By Q - Always or Randomly and you have a large menu of ways to reinforce your memorization AND to keep from getting bored with the same old study routine! Note: All mentioned options can be found in Options|Q&A Modes|Settings Common To All Modes. --------------------------------------------------- Need Help? Have A problem? Check out our online listings of the latest releases and the problems that they've solved. For WinFlash programs see: http://www.openwindow.com/pages/wfprobs.htm For ProUpdater see: http://www.openwindow.com/pages/puprobs.htm If your issue isn't covered there, please send e-mail to support@openwindow.com and we'll do our best to resolve your problem. --------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIBE: Send e-mail to service@openwindow.com with SUBSCRIBE as the Subject. UNSUBSCRIBE: Simply send an email to service@openwindow.com with REMOVE as the Subject. 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