Help for HV - A HTML Viewer for the HP Palmtop Computers

HV is a program that lets you browse through HTML texts.

The help document you are currently reading is such a HTML text.

This help document explains what keys in HV do, what the menus offer, how to configure HV, how indexing in HV works and it explains some commonly used terms.

Press the space bar to see more!

Keys in HV

F1 brings you to this help document
Press SPACE, the '+' key or PgDn to move downward one screen
Press PgUp, Backspace or the '-' key to move upward one screen
Press Ctrl-down to move down one line and Ctrl-Up to move up one line.
Home brings you to the top of the current document and End to the last page
F6 brings you back to last document you have seen before the current one
ESC behaves the same as F6, except that it quits HV if there is no previous document.
If you went back using F6, you can press F7 to go forward to the document you left with F6
F2 brings you to your home page (the first page you see when you start HV)
Rectangles show you that there is a link (a connection to a different document). If you press ENTER, you will be taken to the place, the filled rectangle is linked to.
By pressing the arrow keys or the TAB or Shift-TAB keys, you can move around the filled rectangle and, thus, select a link.
If you press a letter and there is a link that starts with that letter, this will select the corresponding link.
If you want to see a specific document, press F9 and enter its filename or URL.
F8 will show you the name of the current document and the document that will be visited when you press ENTER (i.e. the current link). It also will display the amount of free memory HV has available.
F4 will let you search for a word in the current document
F3 will start Memo and let you edit the source of the current document.
F5 will show you the hot list. The hot list is a list of documents you often use. By using the down arrow key, you can choose between the documents you added to the hot list. You can add the current document to the hot list by pressing the "Add Current" button (move to it using the TAB key). You can also select a list item and press the "Delete" button. In this case, the selected item will be removed from the hot list. The hot list is kept as a file named HV.HOT in the HV main directory.
If you want to save the currently displayed document to a local file, press F10 and enter a file name.
If you want to exit HV, press Menu-Q

Most of the above functions can also be selected using the Menu. In addition to these commands, a few additional functions can be selected from the menus only. These commands are discussed in the following.

File menu

Reload Document reads (downloads) the current document again. This usually only makes sense for non-local documents.

Rebuild Index deletes the current index and creates it again.

Clear History deletes the history, i.e. the list of documents that you visited before the current one. This command may be useful to free some memory.

Shell to DOS opens a DOS shell and you can execute DOS commands while HV is still open. Enter "exit" to return to HV.

Edit menu

(no new items here)

View menu

Goto Page lets you enter a page number and jump directly to a certain page within the current document.

Options menu

Display GIF images toggles whether inline GIF images should be displayed.

Do Tables toggles whether <TABLE> and related tags should be processed or not. These tags are used to create a tabular display of data. Normally, it makes sense to have that feature enabled. However, more and more documents found on the WWW abuse the table tags to format the layout of the page. In these cases, it is often useful to disable the table feature because HV does not display tables in exactly the same way as the most popular browser and those documents are usually designed for that browser only.

Use ISO Latin 1 toggles between the ISO latin 1 character set and the PC character set (page 850). ISO latin 1 is the standard used on the WWW, but some pages created on PCs might use the other character set.

Show Links toggles between displaying the function key bar and the currently selected link.

Disconnect WWW/LX only appears when WWW/LX is running and connected to your ISP. By selecting this option, you can close the connection without leaving HV.

The configuration file

You can configure HV for your needs by modifying the file HV.CFG, which must reside in the same directory as HV.EXE. The configuration file is split into so called sections. Each section starts with a section name on a single line enclosed by '[' and ']'. Lines starting with ';' are comments.

The `[system]` section

The system section contains some general settings for HV:

Root=<path>
specifies where you have installed HV. You only need this if you installed the files belonging to HV in a different directory than HV.EXE.
Editor=<path to editor>
specifies which editor should be used for editing HTML files. If you do not specify an editor, HV will use MEMO.
Retain=Yes
If you include this line, HV will store the current position in the file C:\_DAT\HV.ENV so that you will be taken to the same document and the same position if you leave HV and start it again. If you don't include the line, HV will always start up with the same document.
HistorySize=<size>
If Retain is set to "Yes", HistorySize specifies how many items of the history (visited documents) will be saved across sessions. This value defaults to 1, i.e. only the last position is saved.
Latin=No
If this is set, the PC character set (code page 850) is used instead of ISO Latin 1. ISO Latin 1 is used for all the 8-bit documents in HTML format that you will find on the world wide web. Note that this setting only determines the start up state. You can always change it in the Options menu.
IndexDir=<directory>
This lets you specify a directory in which all index files should be placed. If it is not specified, all index files are placed in the same directory in which the viewed document resides.
CacheDir=<directory>
If HV accesses non-local documents using WWW/LX, it stores them in local, temporary files. By default, these files are kept in the directory C:\. If you want to have them in a different directory, set this entry to the name of that directory.
NumCache=<number>
By default, up to 10 non-local documents are kept in local files before these files are re-used. If 10 files are not enough, you can set this number to any value up to 25. If the 10 files need too much space, you can decrease the value.
Download=<directory>
When you choose "Save As", this directory is used as the default directory for the downloaded file.
GIF=Yes
If you specify this, inline GIF images are displayed Note that this only specifies the value at startup. You can always change it in the Options menu.
Tables=No
If you set this to No, <TABLE> tags are ignored. Note that this only specifies the value at startup. You can always change it in the Options menu.
Links=Yes
If you set this, the current link is displayed in place of the function key bar. Note that this only specifies the value at startup. You can always change it in the Options menu.

The `[Fonts]` section

This section lets you specify the fonts to be used by HV:

FontPath=<directory name>
If the PAL font files are not in the same directory as the other HV files, include this line.
Normal=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for normal text. <font name> may be the name of a PAL font file or one of the following words: Small, Medium or Large. These keywords specify the built-in fonts of the palmtop.
Bold=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for boldface and emphasized text.
Italic=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for italic text.
Fixed=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for monospaced text.
H1=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for level 1 headings.
H2=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for level 2 headings.
H3=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for level 3 headings.
H4=<font name>
specifies the font to be used for level 4, 5 and 6 headings.

The `[Docs]` section

This section lets you specify special documents:

Home=<document name>
This line lets you specify the path and file name of the document to by displayed when the F4 (Home) key is pressed.

The `[Viewers]` section

This section specifies what to do if a non-HTML file is encountered. The action depends on the file extension. Example:

   GIF=C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE %s

If a file with a GIF extension is encountered, the program C:\BIN\SHOWGIF.EXE is started with the file name (%s is replaced by the file name) as an argument. Note that the specified extension has to be upper case. You can specify as many extensions as you like. ATTENTION: while running an external viewer, HV stll remains in memory and needs about 130k. The external viewer can only be started if there is enough remaining memory.

Indexing

When loading a document for the first time, an index is generated. Using an index improves access speed significantly, especially for large documents. The index is placed into two files, so that it has to be computed only once, and if you access a document for a second time, the index is readily available. The index files have the same name as the HTML document but have an .PAG and a .LAB extension.

If, for any reason, one of these index files got corrupted, you can rebuild them any time by choosing Rebuild Index from the File menu.

Indexing takes place in the background. The only thing you will notice while indexing is the text Indexing in the title bar. While indexing, you can still do most operations. Thus, you don't have to wait until indexing is completed.

Glossary

Browser: A browser is a program that lets you browse through a special kind of data. In our case, the special kind of data is hypertext. The browser visualizes the data in a hypertext and lets you move around. HV is such a browser.
HTML: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) provides a simple but very powerful means for representing hypertexts. WWW mainly consists of HTML documents. HTML is basically plain text, with so called tags enclosed in angular brackets that specify special elements, i.e. <em> selects emphasised text.
Hypertext: A hypertext is an extension to a normal text. In addition to the textual data, a hypertext also contains so called links, references to other documents or other places within the same document. In order to read a hypertext, you usually need a special browser.
Inline Images: HTML supports two different ways of integrating an image into the WWW: either a link points to an image (the same way as a link that points to a different piece of the hypertext) or an image is integrated into the current page and floats within the text. The latter is called an inline image.
Internet: The Internet is a worldwide "virtual" computer network. "virtual" because it does not consist of any special kind of hardware (all kinds of hardware are actually used), but of a set of standards that define how data is sent from one place to the other. The most important among these standards are IP (Internet Protocol) and TCP (Transport Control Protocol). IP defines how a packet of data has to look like and how it is transported from the source machine to the destination machine. TCP makes sure that all packets arrive unchanged and puts the packets together in the correct order to one stream of data. Most other Internet standards are based on TCP and IP.
ISP, Internet Service Providers: In order to have access to the documents on theWWW, your palmtop must be connected to the Internet. ISPs offer that service, most of the times using a dial up phone line and a modem.
URL, Uniform Resource Locator: A URL identifies a single document on the WWW. A URL typically looks like: http://host.name.com/my_dir/my_document. The part before the ':' specifies how the document can be retrieved (here: using the HTTP protocol). The part after "//" specifies on what machine the document is located (here: host.name.com) and the rest (here: /my_dir/mydocument) specifies the path and file name of the document.
WWW, the World Wide Web: The WWW is a worldwide distributed hypertext that is built upon the Internet. Each document you see can come from a different machine somewhere on the world. Everybody can contribute new documents and they automatically become part of the WWW.

Limitations

HV does not support any tags apart from the following (and corresponding closing tags): <A> <ADDRESS> <B> <BLOCKQUOTE> <BODY> <BR> <CENTER> <CITE> <CODE> <DD> <DL> <DT> <EM> <FORM> <H1> <H2> <H3> <H4> <HEAD> <HR> <HTML> <I> <IMG> <INPUT> <ISINDEX> <LI> <OL> <OPTION> <P> <PRE> <SELECT> <STRONG> <TABLE> <TD> <TEXTAREA> <TH> <TITLE> <TR> <TT> <U> <UL>

HV does not support any alignment attributes in tags.

HV does not support more than one form per page.

HV does not support nested tables.

HV cannot display inline JPEG images.

Image maps (clickable images) are not supported.

URLs can be 512 characters long at most.

Therefore, FORMs with more data than 512 characters (including the URL and all labels and hidden data) cannot be handled.

TEXTAREAs only support one line of text.

HV supports HTTP, but not S-HTTP (secure HTTP).

A maximum of n inline images can be displayed within one non-local document, where n is the number of cached documents minus one.

Press ESC now, to leave help (and return to the previous document).

Andreas Garzotto, September 1996