Text Viewer

The TableCurve text window appears throughout the program for displaying, modifying, and printing text information.

Window Type

Text can be displayed either as RTF (Rich Text Format) windows or in a fast standard display.

If Rich Text Format Windows is checked in the Preferences, RTF-type windows are used to display reports. RTF windows offer the means to select and copy portions of the overall text, but are considerably slower than TableCurve 2D's standard text windows. For windows whose contents vary based upon the size of a data set, RTF windows are available only for data sets having 128 or fewer points. Data tables larger than 128 points will be displayed using standard text windows regardless of this setting.

The standard text windows can display up to 65536 lines of information. You may use either the cursor keys or the scroll bars to move about the text. If the contents of the window have been generated by TableCurve 2D, the text will contain columnar formatting to properly align all fonts, there will be a predefined color formatting, and there will be support for displaying and printing subscripts, superscripts, and symbols.

Editing the Content of TableCurve 2D Reports

TableCurve 2D directly supports only non-formatted ASCII editing of report information. To edit the formatted report as it appears in TableCurve 2D, you must save the contents to an RTF file for import into a word processor, copy the contents to the clipboard and then paste them into an RTF-capable editor, or you can stream the content directly to MS Word.

File Menu

The viewer's File menu contains options to save the information in the window as an ASCII text file, as a WK1 or WK3 worksheet, as a fully formatted Rich Text Format (RTF) file, or the contents can be directly streamed to MS Word. Although any text can be converted into a WK1 or WK3 spreadsheet, the primary use will be with numeric columns of data.

The RTF format preserves the appearance of the text when imported into word processing and desktop publishing products. The RTF option thus preserves columnar formatting, font colors, bolding, superscripts, and subscripts. In order to save, copy, or stream black and white RTF text, you will need to uncheck the Color option in the Style menu.

The Printer Setup item is used to select and optionally configure a printer for use by TableCurve 2D. Note that the orientation option in the printer driver's own configuration dialog will be overridden by the orientation set in the Text Print dialog.

The Print item opens the Text Print dialog, allowing a header to be specified, the date and page number to be included, the orientation to be chosen, and the margins to be set. You may also elect to center the longest line and to print either all information or only that portion currently visible in the window.

Edit Menu

The Copy option copies the text in the window to the Windows clipboard as unformatted ASCII text, as formatted Rich Text Format (RTF) text, and in the Lotus WK1 format. The unformatted text format is space delimited and is used when you to paste the information into a text-based program.

Again, since the RTF format preserves columnar formatting, font colors, bolding, superscripts, and subscripts. In order to save a black and white RTF text file, you will need to uncheck the Color option in the Style menu prior to the Copy.

For some products where RTF is the default clipboard format, such as Microsoft Word, you will need to use a Paste As, Paste Special, or similar option in order to specifically select the unformatted text. The most practical use of the WK1 spreadsheet format will be with text containing columns of numeric information. This Copy option is limited only by available memory.

The ASCII Editor option copies the contents of the viewer into the TableCurve ASCII editor. On 16-bit Windows subsystems (Windows 95 and Windows 98), the contents of must be less than 64K in size in order for the ASCII Editor to be available.

Style Menu

The text windows each use their own specific font. If you select a different font using the Font Select item, it will be used only for the current type of text window. Since TableCurve 2D's internal windows are preformatted, you may freely select variable pitch fonts, although you may wish to use a fixed width font for the ASCII List and ASCII Editor options, especially when working with files containing numeric columns of data.

The Color item simply toggles the text between its predefined color format and the default black text on white. The font and color setting are saved across sessions for each type of window.