Text Editor

The TableCurve 3D ASCII Editor is a NotePad-like editor available in many of the program's menus. The ASCII Editor option in the Edit menu within the program's main menu is used primarily for editing the X,Y,Z data table since it offers an update of the X,Y,Z data table with the numeric contents when closing the editor. Most of TableCurve 3D's principal text windows offer an ASCII Editor option which will place the contents of the window into the editor. If you wish to edit a non data table text file from the main menu, you may select the ASCII List option in the main File menu, select the file desired, and then select the ASCII Editor option from the list window's Edit menu.

Considerations

There should be no size limitations if you are running Windows XP, Windows 2000, or Windows NT v4.

On Windows 95, 98, and ME, edit controls remain limited to 64K. In this case, when reading files larger than 32K, the ASCII Editor automatically strips all whitespace except that necessary to delimit the information. When editing a large equation list, the information will be truncated to fit within the editor, allowing an edit of the first 700-800 equations.

The ASCII Editor is available for the X,Y,Z Data Table, the ASCII List option, the Evaluation Procedure in the View Function(X,Y) and Surface-Fit Review, the Numeric Summary the Data Summary, and the Precision Summary in the Review, and also for the Equation List, the Surface-Fit Parameter Output, and the Surface-Fit Generated Code Output. Columnar formatting, if present, can be preserved in the editor using a fixed width font, such as Courier. Special characters such as subscripts, superscripts, and symbols will not be preserved.

File Menu

The standard items to create a New file, to Open an existing file, to Save the current file, to Save As a different file, and to Exit are here. The contents of the editor may be saved as an ASCII text file, a Lotus WK1 file, or a Lotus WK3 file. Although a WK1 or WK3 can be created regardless of the editor contents, such files generally make sense only for columns of numeric information.

The Printer Setup item is used to select and optionally configure a printer for use by TableCurve 3D. 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. When printing from the editor, it is not possible to center the longest line nor to print only the visible portion of the editor.

Edit Menu

The standard items to Cut to, Copy to, and Paste from the clipboard are here as well as a single step Undo, the Delete of selected text, and a Select All for selecting all text. The Copy option will copy the selected or highlighted text to the clipboard in a text format, and if at least a full line is selected, also in a WK1 spreadsheet format suitable for a very rapid paste by Excel, Lotus Windows, Quattro Pro Windows, or SigmaPlot Windows.

Search Menu

The standard items consist of a Find, a Find and Replace, and a Next item which will continue an existing Find or Find and Replace operation.

Style Menu

The editor always loads with a standard Courier font. The Font Select option will allow any other font to be used. For editing the content of TableCurve 3D text windows, a fixed width font is recommended.

There are three formatting items in the Style menu. The Comma to Decimal item is for converting European format numeric entries to the decimal type required by TableCurve 3D. This option simply converts all comma characters within the file to the period character, as in [123,45] being converted to [123.45]. You may enter data with commas as decimal separators and then use the Comma To Decimal option to convert to it to the format required by TableCurve 3D.

The Space Delimited option will strip all whitespace from the program except for a single space delimiter between the entries. The Comma Delimited option accomplishes the same task, except that the single delimiter will be the comma character. In the Tab Delimited option, the tab character serves as the delimiter.