ST ALMANAC Version 2.1 November 1, 1991 ST ALMANAC is designed to be an easy to use all purpose calendar and planner to keep track of holidays, special events, birthdays, appointments and anything else you want to keep an up to-date record of. It includes thousands of holidays and historical events in the files included with it. This file contains ALMANC21.PRG, ALMAVIEW.PRG, DATES.CAL, ALMANAC.ALM and several files with the extension .YRL and *.CAL. Another file is available called ALFILES1.LZH which contains several alternative almanac files - HOLIDAYS.ALM showing various holidays from around the world on each date and BIRTHDAY.ALM shows a list of famous people born on each date of the year. The program is shareware and if you find it useful a contribution of $10-$20 would be greatly appreciated. Naturally I'll be glad to mail you back an updated version of the program. Any comments or suggestions can also be sent to: Manfred Sierke 84 Barrette Street Vanier, Ontario Canada K1L 8A3 REQUIREMENTS Almanac must be run in medium or high resolution but otherwise should run on any Atari ST. The program was really designed to work on a colour monitor but should work in hi-rez. The program requires about 300k of free memory (or less depending on the size of the *.ALM file loaded) but unless you have a lot of accessories installed this should be no problem even on a 520ST. SETUP Included are numerous files which contain the data the program will require. I suggest that you put all the files with the extension *.YRL in a folder called "YEARDATA" and all the files with the extension *.CAL and *.ALM in another folder called "ALMANAC". These are the defaults the program looks for the first time it is run but can be easily changed to suit your own preference. If on running the program things just don't work right or if that's not the way you want the files organized then use the 'Change Path' option from the menu bar to tell the program where the *.CAL files are and the 'Set Year Path' option to locate the *.YRL files. Also load in the file ALMANAC.ALM and DATES.CAL using these options on the menu bar. Then use 'Save Config' to save the new file paths to ALMANAC.PRG and the next time the program is run it will read the correct paths from itself. The file ALMAVIEW.PRG should be placed in the auto folder of your boot disk. (Read the seperate txt file for almaview.) OVERVIEW ST ALMANAC maintains three distinct categories of data. These are for holidays(or special events) and two different modes for daily planning - the appointments mode and the almanac mode. Holidays and special events can be stored to be displayed on the same date (or day/week of month) for every year - with a limit of one per date (and day of week). These are saved on disk in the file DATES.CAL. The two daily planning modes - the appointment mode and the almanac mode allow up to ten different entries for each date. The appoint- ments mode is specific for a date/year and the files are stored in the selected directory as "Axxxxxxx.CAL". The almanac mode saves information for a date and ignores the year. These are saved to disk as "ALMANAC.ALM" (or "*.ALM"). Any changes of data will be automatically saved to the correct files when you change months or exit the program. The default mode is the appointments mode and you'll notice that on the calendar screen the APPTS button is in inverse. To switch modes click on the ALMANAC button (or press'a'). There are two main screens - the calendar screen which appears when the program is run, and the editor screen which shows the appointments for a specific date. Clicking the mouse on the desired date switches to the editor screen. THE MENU BAR 'Change Path' and 'Set Year Path' have already been mentioned and allow the user to instruct the program where to find the required data files. 'Save Changes' does an immediate save of all data that has been altered. If you wish to maintain several sets of data files this should be used before 'Change Path'. 'Save Almanac' allows you to save the data in the almanac mode to a different file name. 'Load Almanac' allows you to load in an alternate almanac file (extension *.ALM). If you wish to create a new almanac file enter in the name of the almanac file with an extension of ".ALM" and a file of that name will be created. The above also applies to the options 'Save Dates' and 'Load Dates'. 'Print Calendar' sends a copy of the calendar to the printer. 'Print Planner' does the same but in a daily planner format. 'Save Config' saves the current data paths,the mode, and whether the editor should be in overwrite or insert(the default) mode to itself. 'Save Config As...' does the same but to the file ALMANAC.CFG (a different name can be selected but use the extension .CFG). This file can be read used the 'Load Config...' option allowing you to change in one step to different set of data paths. Note that 'Load Config...' can also read the configuration from ALMANAC.PRG as well as ALMANAC.CFG. (It'll know the difference) When ALMANAC.PRG is run it'll attempt to read a part of itself for the correct configuration. However, I'm not sure that this will work correctly with all the replacement desktops and menu programs available. Therefore should it fail to be able to read the configuration then the program will look for ALMANAC.CFG and try again. So if you have problems with 'Save Config' then used the 'Save Config As...' option instead. 'Quit' saves any changes which have been made and returns you to the desktop. THE CALENDAR SCREEN Most of the screen is used by the dates of the current month. In blue print you'll see any special events or holidays that fall on those dates. A red check mark in the square indicates that there are appointments for that date (in the current mode). How to alter this display will be explained in the section on the editor screen. Of the buttons along the bottom the one marked 'appts' will be in inverse to indicate what mode is set. Clicking on 'appts' or 'almanac' will switch to that mode. Note that the text and check marks in the date boxes depend on which mode is in effect. The six buttons on the right allow for the changing of the month being displayed. The year and month buttons allow you to go forward of backward a year or a month at a time. The 'reset' button reads the ST's internal clock and returns you to the correct month and year (assuming you set the clock when you booted the computer). The 'Select' button provides a selector box to chose the month and year you wish to go to. The month is changed by clicking on the desired month. Using the right mouse button also returns you to the calendar screen. The year can be changed with the mouse by clicking on the '+' or '-' box, (speed different for left/right mouse buttons) or by using the up/down curser buttons on the keyboard or by typing in the year. When done either press return or click on the 'OK' button. The 'Print' button prints a copy of the current month if a printer is connected. The 'Clear' button clears all appointments for the month in the current mode (appts/almanac). The 'Quit' button saves all changes to disk and returns you to the desktop. The 'Month Scan' button shows you all appointments set for the current month in the selected mode. The 'Year View' button shows a variety of events that occurred in the year. More on this later on under Year View. If this is not working use the 'Set Year Path' option in the menu bar to locate the files which end in the extension *.YRL. The 'Disk' button provides the disk control panel which allows for some file manipulation from within St Almanac. Error checking is done but I suggest that if you copy/move files that you check Free Mem to ensure that the disk has sufficient space for the operation. Formatting is done to 80 tracks/10 sectors. All of the buttons can be called from the keyboard by pressing the first letter of the button (eg: 'q' to quit). The dates can be changed by using the left/right curser keys to switch months and the up/down curser keys to switch years. Also in the screens which contain the buttons 'Prev Next Exit' these options can also be selected with the first letter or a curser key (or return to exit). THE EDITOR SCREEN This screen allows you to edit the events for a particular date. The mode or the date can be changed by the buttons along the bottom. The 'clear' button clears all entries for this date not including 'by date:' or 'by day:'. 'Cancel' restores the entries to what they where before any changes where made. 'Print' prints a copy of the appointments for the date. The 'Insert' (or 'Overwrite') button toggles the editor between insert and overwrite. 'Center' centers the text for each line of the appointments (including by date/by day). At the top of the screen you'll find two special entries. 'BY DATE:' and 'BY DAY:' are for special events and holidays and are not dependent on the current mode but will always be displayed. Data entered here will also be shown for that date on the main calendar screen. 'BY DATE:' is for events which fall on a specific date of the year (eg:Christmas). 'BY DAY:' is for events which fall on a certain day of the week. An example would be Mother's Day which falls on the second Sunday of May. An entry here would be displayed on the appropriate day. One could also make an entry for the last day of a month (eg:Memorial Day falls on the last Monday of May) by saving it on the 5th week. If the 5th occurrence of that day does not occur in a month the event will be displayed in the 4th week. To edit this entry though, skip to a year that has the 5th occurrence and edit it there. These entries and the first appointment line if it includes an asterisk are the entries displayed for the dates on the main calendar screen. Example: " this is *** Easter Sunday *** today". If this is the first item in the appointments list "Easter Sunday" is the part that would be displayed on the calendar screen. Since as many as four possible special entries could fall on the same date and only one can be shown on the calendar screen the order of precedence to determine which is shown is: 1. by day - last of month 2. by day 3. by date 4. 1st line of appointments after asterisk The cursor can be moved to the desired location by clicking on the mouse or by using the keyboard arrow keys. There are also a few combination keys to make editing easier: Return - move to beginning of next line Shifted left arrow - move to beginning of line Shifted right arrow - move to end of line Clr Home - move to the start of the first appointment line Control c (center) - centers the text on that line Escape - if line is empty moves cursor to the start of line, if it contains text erases the line and saves it to the 'Undo' buffer. Undo - restores the last line erased through escape if pressed while the cursor is on an empty line. Only appointment lines can be restored to an appointment line and by day/by date lines can only be restored to those headings. the following codes work only on the 10 appointment lines and not on the by day/by date headings: Control i or Control Insert - inserts an empty line. Any text on the 10th appointment line will be lost. Control d or Control Delete - deletes the current line. If the line contained text this will be saved in the undelete buffer. Control u (undelete) - when pressed while the cursor is on an empty line will restore the last line erased with control delete. YEAR VIEW The 'Year View' screen shows a variety of special events that happened during the course of the year. You can change the year without returning to the calendar screen with the buttons provided. It is necessary to keep the file CONFIGUR.YRL in the same folder as the rest of the *.YRL files as this is read for the 'Year View' headings The files used by year view are in an easy to edit format. I won't go into details but if you examine the *.YRL files you should have no problems figuring it out. So if you're one of those weird people who didn't really care who won the Sugar Bowl in 1952 then go ahead and create your own year files. You can edit them with any text editor or word processor in ascii mode. FILES The monthly appts mode files are save to disk any time the months are changed in files with names comprised of "A", the year and the first 3 letters of the month and .CAL. The special dates from the 'by date/by day' headings are saved when the program is exited in a file called "DATES.CAL" ( this can be changed with 'Load Dates'). The almanac mode files are saved with the name of the almanac ("ALMANAC" by default) and the extension ".ALM" when the program is exited. Files that are to be erased or written over are changed to an extension of ".BAK" so it'll be useful to check these every now and then remove all the ".BAK" files which are there in case of an accidental erasure but are not required by the program. The yearly events calendar requires the files with the extension ".YRL". CREDITS ST ALMANAC was written using the assembler DEVPAC I and GFA Basic 3.5. THAT'S IT I hope you find that this program works as promised and is useful. If you don't feel like sending in a shareware contribution feel free to use it anyways and perhaps one day you'll reconsider (hopefully!).