The Yahoo group backup site and GrandView

Posted by Derek Cornish
Dec 14, 2007 at 05:40 PM

> The one problem I’ve found is that I can’t get it to run in a window…

I can confirm that it does work in a window. You need to make sure that you are not still using a left-over WIN98 pif file instead of an XP one (that was a problem I initially had, as I recall). I can send you my pif, if you like. It should work with some mods to the path details.

I have tried using TameDOS [http://www.tamedos.com/] to improve GV’s running, but found that it was better not bothering. This could well be that I haven’t had sufficient patience to tinker with Tame’s myriad options, however.

Some time ago I also downloaded some extra DOS fonts that improved usage a lot. I can now run GV in a DOS box that is almost full-screen - much better than the native full-screen view that takes over the whole display and has awful fonts (at least on my Thinkpad).

As you mentioned, document view is reached by F5. Documents are made simply by pressing

when in the outline view, and typing. They can then be hidden or revealed via F5. I’ve sent Pierre some screenshots of the menu-system, so I’ll send him a couple of the document feature.

Curiously - or stupidly :-) - I have never made much use of the document feature in all my years of using Grandview. In part this was because it is so easy to delete huge “documents” by accident - e.g., by joining ajdacent heads or sub-heads. (I recall that this is a problem with NoteMap’s “comments” feature.) What ever else that says about my usage, it is a tribute to the power and flexibility built into GV that there is actually no need to use the document feature for many purposes. GV’s heads and sub-heads can contain as much text as one wants without having to spill over into the document feature; and the powerful expand, collapse and hoist features of GV enable one to produce as sparse or detailed a view of the outline as one wants.

I agree so much with your conclusions about GV. It’s as a complete writing environment as I have ever found, and its features - and not some pared-down version of them - could provide a basis for a moder writing environment to rival that of Scrivener. think of a Zoot+Grandview hybrid. Maybe SQLNotes can achieve this!

Derek