[comp.sys.ibm.pc.programmer] Tesseract

minar@reed.bitnet (Nelson Minar,(???)) (02/27/90)

Given the number of TSR questions that have been asked lately..


Has anyone out there written any utilities with the program called Tesseract?
Its a collection of libraries for Pascal, C, and assembly (and maybe one
more language?) whose purpose it is to make writing TSRs simple, easy, and
standard.

Its a great idea.. I've never had the need to write a TSR, so I haven't used
the package. Are there Tesseract TSRs out there that people have written?

(please don't send requests for the package - I don't have any way to send
programs. Its available lots of places)

adler@tybalt.caltech.edu (B.Thomas Adler) (02/28/90)

In article <14284@reed.UUCP> minar@reed.bitnet (Nelson Minar) writes:
>Given the number of TSR questions that have been asked lately..
>Has anyone out there written any utilities with the program called Tesseract?

  I've written TSRs with the Tesseract package.  In particular, I was working
on a project which needed TSRs to be used while word-processing.  I read all
the standard references, most of which did not help.

  The most useful book I found was "Inside Turbo Pascal" or some such.  It's
put out by Osbourne, and is a huge book, containing *lots* of useful info
for the ibm programmer.  It's section on TSR was easy to understand, and
included a functioning example of one.

  Even with all the research I did on TSRs, my program still caused
fluctuations in the performance of Word Perfect, and so I resorted to
the Tesseract package.  I was quite surprised with what I found, and very
pleased when my program finally worked with no bugs.  (I suspect that I
was not being careful enough in using DOS functions, in my original attempts.)
The documentation to Tess. is fairly informative, but a little cryptic.  I
ended up taking the example programs they provided, and hacked in my own
code, rather than take the time to figure out what the docs said.

  Overall, I'd recommend Tesseract, but be prepared for some serious delving
into its operation to figure out how to use it, unless you hack on an example,
like I did.

Happy Hacking!

  -Bo   <adler@csvax.caltech.edu>
--
/----------------------------------------------------------------------\
|  B. Thomas Adler                 |   "No fucking shit, lady!         |
|  <adler@csvax.caltech.edu>       |    Do I sound like I'm            |
|  <adler@citjulie.bitnet>         |    ordering a pizza?!?"           |

johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch) (02/28/90)

In article <14284@reed.UUCP> minar@reed.bitnet (Nelson Minar) writes:
>Has anyone out there written any utilities with the program called Tesseract?

I've written several throw away programs using Tesseract when we needed a
quickie TSR to capture a screen or perform some other activity.  It is an
excellent, very robust package.  The only complaint I could possibly voice is
that the example program tries to do too much, it would have been better for
them to produce several simpler programs to demonstrate aspects of the
library.

If you are looking to produce solid TSR's with all the features of commercial
TSR's then you would be well placed to learn how to use their library.  The
price is also very reasonable.

John Munsch