John.Sanfilippo@f608.n107.z1.fidonet.org (John Sanfilippo) (02/06/91)
Index Number: 13556
[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]
Hi Ann,
You asked about text readers where you could read a bit, stop
and come back later and read some more, picking up where you
left off.
HTYPE was one excellent suggestion which I rather liked using
for awhile. I just remembered the screen number where I last was
and then called it up again later.
But once having that, I wanted more: I wanted to be able to
brouse through a disk directory and pick files for reading,
deleting, moving and so on. I also wanted to be able to search
for specific text. The answer to these desires was Vernon
Buerg's LIST.COM. If you want to pick up from where you left
off with this program, it gives you line numbers, you'd have to
either remember the line number or search for specific text that
you remember seeing there.
Another suggestion is QEdit. It too gives you line numbers.
Ah, but this is an editor. That means you can read a portion of
text, stop somewhere, write your own special mark into the text
and then save the file with your marker in it. (OOPS, I'm
forgetting, you DID say LONG files.) I've seen QEdit load files
as long as up to about 300k, but this depends on how much memory
your machine has.
This is one advantage that LIST has over QEdit: List works with
small portions of the file, it can read the entire file, but it
does not load the whole thing into memory as QEdit tries to do.
With the REGISTERED QEdit package there is a CHUNKER program
included which breaks the original file down to smaller files of
about 100k each. It takes me a few hours to read 100k! So I
appreciate taking a break!
Hmmm, I don't think I've come up with a simple solution for you,
but these are things which I do and am satisfied with.
You are right: it might be nice to know about a text reader
which can handle any file size and provide for some kind of book
marker.
Hope this was helpful.
jjcs
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