The Sinclair QL Forum

XorA wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 9:55 am Just to point out if people are discussing html viewers the QL already has one in the lynx port!

file://mdv1_document_htm should be valid I think!

Oh no, it aint that simple! I just gave Lynx another go. Takes me down 30+ years to Unix Hell. No thank you!

Looking back at Martin's original requirements:

"I often find myself wanted to write-up documentation to read on a QL, user guides and the like, that could include some basic formatting, possibly tables or columns as well as linking to QL screen displays or sprites. And hyperlinks to other pages/bookmarks..."

I saw this as the end "document" would be only for the QL. I did not see any requirement that the "document" be portable. That is why I suggested Dilwyn's Viewer. It's been a while since I tinkered with it, but I think it meets most of the requirements.

If a requirement was to be portable "document", when Viewer would not work. I don't think any QL-based format would be considered portable. Now, I do start all of my writings (including ZXzine and SMSQzine) using Quill, but I convert it to RTF to then finish editing in LibreOffice. For the zines, I do the final work in Scribus and output to PDF.

I do keep copies of QL documentation as PDF on my laptop for easy viewing when using QL emulators. I also keep PDF versions of programming books (K&R C, Perl, etc) for the same reason. I'm not sure I'd use a QL viewer to read documents, but I do like the idea and the spirit behind it.

Tim

swensont wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 5:52 pm Looking back at Martin's original requirements:

"I often find myself wanted to write-up documentation to read on a QL, user guides and the like, that could include some basic formatting, possibly tables or columns as well as linking to QL screen displays or sprites. And hyperlinks to other pages/bookmarks..."

I saw this as the end "document" would be only for the QL. I did not see any requirement that the "document" be portable. That is why I suggested Dilwyn's Viewer. It's been a while since I tinkered with it, but I think it meets most of the requirements.

If it were only that, I think Quill _doc would serve just fine: Everybody has a viewer for that and the format is well established. It does lack a hyperlink feature, but given the advantages, I think I could live with it.

swensont wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 5:52 pm
If a requirement was to be portable "document", when Viewer would not work. I don't think any QL-based format would be considered portable. Now, I do start all of my writings (including ZXzine and SMSQzine) using Quill, but I convert it to RTF to then finish editing in LibreOffice. For the zines, I do the final work in Scribus and output to PDF.

But if it comes to

swensont wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 5:52 pm
I do keep copies of QL documentation as PDF on my laptop

one can easily see why it makes sense to have something that can be viewed instantly on a PC with standard software -
I regularily find myself checking downloaded zip packages for documentation on the PC - And find myself struggling with Quill _doc files. Most often it's just the "quick glance" I'd need, and it is really inconvenient to search for a specific viewer in those cases. RTF, Markup, or HTML is easily viewed with one mouse click, but Quill files aren't.

tofro wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 6:32 pmRTF, Markup, or HTML is easily viewed with one mouse click, but Quill files aren't.

QStripper? Let you also export as PDF, HTML....

https://github.com/NormanDunbar/QStripp ... lease_1.16

I use Quill-View. It has an icon on my desktop. I can just drop any Quill doc file onto that icon and up pops the file in my browser, complete with bold or underline as in the original Quill document. The HTML file can be found in the Quill-View home folder from where it can be retrieved, renamed, tweaked a bit and stored as an HTML for future reference.

The resulting HTML files are compact, compared to PDF. One can easily add one's preferred colour, header, etc scheme by inserting a reference to a predefined CSS template. Files can quickly be appended to an HTML index and linked to other files - in other words creating a web.

pjw wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 7:29 pm I use Quill-View. It has an icon on my desktop. I can just drop any Quill doc file onto that icon and up pops the file in my browser, complete with bold or underline as in the original Quill document. The HTML file can be found in the Quill-View home folder from where it can be retrieved, renamed, tweaked a bit and stored as an HTML for future reference.

The resulting HTML files are compact, compared to PDF. One can easily add one's preferred colour, header, etc scheme by inserting a reference to a predefined CSS template. Files can quickly be appended to an HTML index and linked to other files - in other words creating a web.

Is there a Quill-View for Windows? The doc mentions it, but it's missing from the archive.

Hi,

But I thought the initial quextion related to a QL files system.

So PDFs are not supported.

HTML can be viewed with Lynx.

Christopher Cave's MVIEW is great for viewing Quill files and Text files.

QPAC2 FILES can view text files. But not process HTML.

I've taken a look at my Q-Browse browser's code. It's not quite suitable for this purpose as it stands, but the rendering part should be usable at the core of something. It would need a different simplified 'front end' and greater emphasis on loading local html files and remove the excess code which tries to fetch files from the web to try to make it more compact for this purpose. But I think perfectly do-able with the right will and time.

I appreciate there have been plenty of suggestions for better ways of doing this, so what I'll do is work on this in parallel with any better ideas floating around. If the ideas floated so far come to something, that's fine. Mine will be the "backup plan" in the absence of better ideas coming to fruition.

I'd like to ask if those who might use it for help-style systems would prefer a pointered or non-pointer front end, depending on how and where you see it being used.

Andrew wrote: Tue Feb 11, 2025 7:45 pm <>
Is there a Quill-View for Windows? The doc mentions it, but it's missing from the archive.

The latest version (beta 0.7) is here: https://github.com/MikaelStrom/quill-view However, the Windows executable appears to be missing although there are binaries for many other systems. If anyone is able to compile a Windows executable, could they give a shout out?

In the mean time, I use beta 0.5, which works ok. You can find it here http://www.jadiam.org/QL/Download.php.

Will that do?