EDNA'S COOK BOOK (ECB) Edna's Cook Book (ECB) is a program for recording, filing, listing, and printing recipes. Essentially, it is the equivalent of the cookbook in which you now keep all your recipes, except that it is electronic. The program may also be used in the preparation of cook books for publication, since it facilitates organization and printing. If you can type, you no longer have to deal with disorganized slips of paper and clippings thrown together in a drawer or box, only to be frustrated when you can't find that particular recipe that you remember you had, except you can't remember where it is, or what the precise name of it is. ECB will take care of the tedious part, so you can get on with the real work--good cooking. QUICK START INSTRUCTIONS MAKING A WORK COPY 1. Format a disk, using the DOS FORMAT command. 2. If you are using a dual floppy system, format a second disk to use as a data disk. 3. Copy the Program Disk files onto a work copy using the COPY *.* procedure and put the original in a safe place. In case something happens to your work copy, you will then have a backup. Do NOT put a write protect tab on the program disk. Any permanent changes that you make (print parameters, boot drive/directory, password) will have to be written back to this disk. ECB will run from a hard disk with no difficulty. Just copy the files on the program disk onto the hard disk. It is recommended that you create a separate subdirectory for the program. PRINTING THE USER'S MANUAL To print the User's Manual, place your work disk in Drive A: and type: PRINTDOC You can view the manual on your screen by typing: TYPE MANUAL.DOC STARTING THE PROGRAM To start ECB, put the work copy in drive A. At the A> prompt type: ECB . If you have a color card and a monochrome monitor, you may have difficulty seeing some of ECB. To run ECB in black and white (or green and green or whatever two colors you may have on your monitor), type: ECB BW . UPDATE INFO v. 1.16 : It is now possible to delete the last record in a file without crashing and having your cursor swallowed whole. v. 1.17 : fixes a problem editing multi-page directions (thanks to T. Walker, a problem with list (thanks to C. Sloan), a search problem, and a printing problem that appeared only under certain conditions. v. 1.18 : fixes a problem listing to ASCII files (thanks to B. Scott). v. 1.19 : fixes a serious problem in indexing larger recipe files and makes slight modifications to the indexes (thanks to F. Schmidt and L. Payton) and cleans up some other little things. Lists to disk files and printers have been made more legible. IMPORTANT: IF YOU HAVE RECIPE FILES CREATED WITH VERSIONS PRIOR TO 1.19, YOU MAY HAVE UNSTABLE INDEXES WHICH CAN LEAD TO CONSTANT CRASHES AND OTHER DIFFICULTIES WHICH ARE EVEN MORE UNPLEASANT. TO CORRECT THIS, RUN AN INDEX REBUILD (SELECT UTILITY/REBUILD INDEXES) IMMEDIATELY AFTER BOOTING ECB V. 1.19. THE REBUILD WILL CORRECT POTENTIAL PROBLEMS IN THE INDEX STRUCTURE. v. 1.20 : corrects a problem that occurred in printing recipes with multiple pages of ingredients AND recipes (thanks to B. Matone) and double listing some (multipage) recipes when listed by name (thanks to F. Schmidt). Also adds a feature: if a category or subcategory is deleted, the categories/subcategories of all subsequent recipes are automatically corrected and the records updated. v. 1.21 : corrects a problem associated with adding the 20th category or subcategory (Thanks to M. Watts). v. 1.22 : corrects a problem associated with printing multiple recipes (e.g. a whole category that contained multiple multiple-page recipes - the print function used to quit before the end of the category (Thanks to J. Curtis). v. 1.23 : fixes a data integrity bug that surfaces only under certain infrequent conditions and adds code to the program that detects that condition (Thanks to A. Wiles). Also adds RECONST.COM to the ECB program disk. This utility literally reconstructs the data file as well as the index files to correct the condition mentioned above. A bonus of this utility is that if deletes unused records. If you have a number of unused records in the file (from deleting a number of recipes), running this program will remove the unused records from the file. For those who decided in the middle of entering recipes to keep separate files, this could decrease the size of those files considerably. Operating instructions for this utility are in the ASCII file RECONST.DOC. NOTE: in some cases, when creating a new recipe file or opening a recipe file that that has NEVER had data in it, ECB will erroneously detect the error condition mentioned above and advise you to run RECONST to salvage the files. Just press at the error message and you can proceed. This is the ONLY circumstance under which the advice to run RECONST should be disregarded. v. 1.24 corrects the problem with false reporting of error condition mentioned above. Also corrects an occasional misreporting of print parameter "print categories/subcats" (Thanks to W. Benda). Paper advance option added to end of "list to printer." Cleanup of screen messages when pausing between pages. UPGRADE utility and documentation added to disk. This utility is for upgrading from one version to another without disturbing passwords or parameters that you have already customized. RECONST 2.00 is issued with this update. The new reconstruct has a feature that insures that all recipes are properly indexed, according to the category/subcat listed on the recipe page (see RECONST.DOC for further details.) v. 1.25 fixes a problem when printing more than 2 pages of ingredients in double columns. (thanks to C. Pettengill)