Rich Text Format (RTF)Guide's linking interface is visual, which means you create and link objects using your mouse. Alternatively, links can be established through an object's attributes dialog, or through a LOGiiX script.
Guide offers the following object types:
Expansion Buttons
let you hide detailed information behind a word, phrase, or graphic. Clicking on an Expansion Button has the effect of zooming in to display the detailed information behind the Button. For example, a section of a report could be hidden behind the section heading. Similarly, an illustration of a computer could be zoomed to show engineering drawings of its component parts.
Reference Buttons
connect related topics in a document and between documents. A Reference Button can be linked to another document or a specific object within a document. Clicking on a Reference Button instantly displays the linked information.
Command Buttons
link text or graphics in a Guide document with a script. A Command Button script can, in turn, call Interpreters (similar to DLLs), which perform specific tasks. Some examples of the tasks handled by Interpreters include: displaying large graphics, launching other applications such as a spreadsheet program, or controlling devices connected to the serial port.
In most cases, Guide authors will use the point-and-click visual authoring interface. However, this is augmented by an embedded Pascal-like programming language called LOGiiX. In addition to the usual programming functions, LOGiiX provides functions for manipulating the Guide hypermedia engine. LOGiiX scripts can be attached to Command Buttons or documents.
Note: :
Buttons can be attached to any document text or graphic, and display a temporary pop-up window which itself can contain text or graphics.
The Guide application window, Guide documents, and objects all have attributes which can be set by the author. These attributes determine their appearance and behavior, and, in the case of objects, their relationship to other objects.
Documents are formatted by selecting font, size, typeface, and color options. A ruler lets authors determine the position of margins, indentation, and tabs. Wordwrap is also controlled from the ruler.
The background color of a document window can be set. Similarly, the color of text, text background, document caption, cursor patterns, and the size and position of document windows can all be set by the author.
Guide supports direct placement of a variety of industry-standard text and graphic file formats, including:
Rich Text Format (RTF)
PC Paintbrush (.PCX, .PCC)
Tagged Image File Format (TIFF, stored in .TIF files)
Device Independent Bitmap (DIB)
Other formats are supported via the Windows Clipboard. Guide also exports ASCII and RTF text files.
Graphics can be physically placed in a document, or a file link can be placed in the document which causes the graphic to be read from disk at display-time. Graphic file sizes are limited by the availability of memory required to display them.
An embedded programming language called LOGiiX lets the author program objects and links to create smart documents. In addition to data entry, arithmetic, logic operations, string manipulation, looping, and data logging functions, LOGiiX can be used to create macros which greatly simplify the user interface and hide complex actions from the user.
LOGiiX programs can be automatically executed on opening, closing, or moving a document. So, for example, a waveform audio file can be triggered by opening a document.
It is easy to maintain a large collection of documents using Guide's document and text editing tools. For example, Guide's text search algorithm lets you find (and change) text strings globally by following hypertext links to related documents, or by specifying a collection of documents. Automatic object indexing, link tracing, and keyboard editing of links are also supported.
Guide supports object interfaces to its own Interpreters and, via LOGiiX, to Windows dynamic-link libraries.
Sound, animation, and MIDI are supported from LOGiiX via Windows multimedia extensions. Animation is also supported through the “place filter” which lets the author seamlessly embed animations in document text.
Browsing is supported by Guide's hypermedia links and a built-in backtracking capability. Searching is handled by a linear search algorithm which will accept complex queries (AND, OR) and can search multiple documents.