MAGSCAN The BEEBUG Bibliography Disc WARNING At no time should you alter or compact the MAGSCAN disc, since it is specially prepared for both 40 and 80 track users and an alteration could corrupt it completely. (c) BEEBUGSOFT 1985 P.0. Box 50, St. Albans, Herts. All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced in whole or part by any means without written permission of the publisher. Unauthorised hiring, renting, loaning, public performance or broadcasting of this product or its constituent parts is prohibited. While every care is taken, the publisher cannot be held responsible for any errors in this product. page1 MAGSCAN The BEEBUG Bibliography Disc I. INTRODUCTION Beebug has passed its third anniversary, and the thirty or so issues of the magazine produced to date comprise a formidable reference work of articles, hints, tips, reviews, programs and ideas on almost every imaginable aspect of the BBC micro; but as this source becomes richer, so it becomes more difficult to locate specific items in the ever increasing collection of issues. MAGSCAN is our answer to the problem. It allows you instantly to locate all references to any chosen subject that have occurred anywhere in the first 30 issues of BEEBUG; and it is easily extendible to cover volume 4. MAGSCAN is supplied on a dual format 40/80 track disc and contains almost 1000 entries each giving the title, a brief description of the article, and the volume, issue and page numbers. Flexible search routines allow you to interrogate the database by volume number and article type and to specify up to two strings. MAGSCAN then searches its database of titles and brief descriptions for a match. 2. GETTING STARTED Insert the disc into your disc drive (drive 0 if you have dual drives). Hold down the Shift key and press Break, then release the Break key and finally the Shift key. This will auto-boot the disc (regardless of whether you have a 40 or 80 track drive), and MAGSCAN is now ready for use. page 2 3. USING THE BIBLIOGRAPHY On booting up MAGSCAN you are presented with a panel of options from which to enter the criteria for your search. At any point during this process, pressing Escape will take you back to the previous entry. Or if a search or printout is in progress, Escape will return you to the front panel. The search criteria are selected as follows: VOLUME NUMBER First of all, enter the volume number that you want to search through or enter " * " to search through all three volumes. The default on boot-up is " * " , which can be entered by pressing Return. ARTICLE TYPE Next select the letter from the list displayed for the type of article you want to find, or enter " * " to search through all types. The default on boot-up is " * " , which can be entered by pressing Return. THE SEARCH STRINGS MAGSCAN allows you to enter up to two search strings, and to select the logic linking the two strings. Each string can be up to 12 characters in length and is terminated by pressing Return. Strings may contain upper or lower case text but searches are not case specific. Thus if you enter "ACORN", MAGSCAN will search for "Acorn", "ACORN", "acorn" etc. page 3 When the first string has been entered you are prompted for a second. This is optional, and pressing Return at this point will enter a null for the second string: though if this is not the first search after boot-up, you may need to press the space bar to delete any previously searched word from the slot before pressing Return. After entering the search strings you may specify search logic. When performing a search for a single string the search logic plays no part, and we will deal with this later. Moreover, when searching for a single string, you may enter the search string in the first or second string slot. AN EXAMPLE As an example of a single string search, suppose that you wished to locate all reviews in vols 1, 2 and 3 covering Epson printers. To do this set up the search as follows: Vol no * Article type C String 1 EPSON String 2 Logic Hard copy If you try this you will see that MAGSCAN finds six reviews on this search. They appear on screen in blocks of three, with an instruction to press the space bar between blocks. A beep announces that the search has been completed, and a final press of the space bar takes you back to the front panel. If you begin a second search you will notice that MAGSCAN retains the previous search parameters as defaults for the next search, and pressing Return on any field will re-enter them. page 4 Thus for example if you wish to repeat the search carried out above, but for Acorn rather than Epson, just press Return on the first two fields, then enter ACORN where EPSON appeared in field three. To find all references in a particular article type, select your first two fields, then enter a null in fields 3 and 4. This is done by pressing the space bar followed by Return to overwrite an earlier default string. Again the logic is not important for this form of search. WILD CARDS The word searches covered so far have made no use of MAGSCAN'S wildcard facility, and the words searched for will only be found if they appear alone rather than as part of a longer string, so that a search for "ROM" would miss the word "EPROM" for example. MAGSCAN allows wild cards to be selected by placing a full stop at the beginning or end of a string. For example "ACORN" will find the exact word "Acorn" or "ACORN" but will reject occurrences of the string within a longer string, and "Acorns" for example will not be found. But "ACORN." will find "Acorn", "ACORN", "Acorns", "Acornsoft" etc, and ".ROM." will find "Rom", "Prom", "Eprom", "Roms", "Proms" etc. page 5 THE SEARCH LOGIC So far we have glossed over the selection of the search logic in MAGSCAN. Quite simply the user may specify the logic linking the two search strings as either OR or AND. To do this, enter either "O" or "A" on field 5 as prompted. The default on boot-up is "OR" and this can be entered by pressing Return. If you select "OR" a find will be made if either of the strings is found in an entry. If you select "AND" a find will only be made if both strings are found in an entry. As you will appreciate, both options have their uses, and the choice allows the user considerable flexibility. For example if you are looking for an FX call to redefine the Escape key, and you think that it was covered in a Beebug Hint, a good option to go for would be: String 1 .FX. String 2 ESCAPE Logic AND This will pick out all occurrences where "FX" and "ESCAPE" appear in either the title or description of an entry. Alternatively if you were searching for all references to Micronet or Prestel, you might search for the following: String 1 MICRONET String 2 PRESTEL Logic OR HARDCOPY To produce a printout of the results of a search you should enter a "Y" in field 6. The default on boot-up for this field is "N", and as usual the default is entered by pressing Return. Printout can be halted by pressing Escape. page 6 4. CREATING YOUR OWN BIBLIOGRAPHY It is possible to create your own bibliography providing you have a simple knowledge of Basic programming and a text editor (such as View or Wordwise). The following notes should allow you to extend MAGSCAN for volume four of Beebug. DATA FILES The data for each entry is stored in three text files called VOL 1, VOL2 and VOL3. Each file is for a particular volume of Beebug and should not exceed &5700 bytes long. Note: In actual fact the files VOL 1 and VOL2 have been split into two, to fit onto the MAGSCAN disc which is supplied in a special dual format. When you produce a file for volume four it should be a single file similar to VOL3 but called VOL4. FILE FORMAT Each entry in the file comprises five lines: Line 1 - The character " ^ " followed by a letter "A" to "J" followed by a Carriage Return. Where " ^ " is the symbol marking the beginning of the entry - it should not be used anywhere else. The letter following this indicates the type of article : page7 A - General Article B - Programming Article C - Review D - News E - Hint F - Points Arising G - Application Program H - Utility Program I - Games Program J - Miscellaneous Program Line 2 - Title of article. This should have a maximum of 39 characters and each word should be separated by a space. The line should end with a Carriage Return. Lines 3 & 4 - Two optional lines that give a brief description of the article. Each word should be separated by a space and the line should end with a Carriage Return. Again, each line should contain a maximum of 39 characters. Line 5 - The character " " followed by the issue number and the page number. The two numbers should be separated by a space and the line should end with a Carriage Return. Each entry should follow on straight after the previous one and the character " [ " should be placed at the very end to mark the end of a file The final entry in a file should Iook something like this: ^ B A New Graphics System Software Review - Computer Aided Design Published by Software Ltd \3 23 [ page 8 As the searching is carried out on lines 2 and 3 of the entry, these two lines should contain all additional key words that relate to the subject of the article. ALTERING THE BASIC PROGRAM It is necessary to alter the value of the variable N% in line 110 of the program "INDEX" to 4, which is the last volume number. DUAL FORMAT DISCS The disc supplied is a dual format disc and contains no free space for extra files. To add VOL4 to MAGSCAN you should copy all the files except # -******1 # -******2 to a blank disc and use that instead. You must copy each file individually with the command COPY. A 40 track disc should give you an extra 35k of storage, which will be more than enough for volume 4, while an eighty track disc should contain enough space to take Beebug into the nineteen nineties! At no time should you alter or compact the MAGSCAN disc, since it is specially prepared for both 40 and 80 track users and an alteration could corrupt it completely. MAGSCAN UPDATE DISC VOLUME 4 NUMBERS 1 TO 10 1. The Magscan Update Disc cointains the file VOL4 which is the Magscan entries for volume 4, numbers 1 to 10. 2. Both this disc and the original magscan disc are dual formatted and should not be altered in any way. 3. The following notes explain how to produce a new master disc containing the original three volumes plus the new volume 4. i. Copy all files from the original Magscan disc to a newly formatted disc using: *COPY 0 1 $.* This new disc will be the new Magscan master. ii. Copy the file VOL4 from the Magscan Update Disc to the new Magscan master using: *COPY 0 1 VOL4 the new Magscan master now contains all the necessary files. iii. Load the program "INDEX" from the new master, and change the value of the variable N% in line 110, from 3 to 4. Now resave "INDEX". iv. Finally, with the new master in drive 0, type: *OPT 4,3 This is to set the disc for auto boot. NOTE: If you only have a single disc drive then the COPY commands in (a) and (b) above should read: *COPY 0 0 and not *COPY 0 1 4.Data far further issues of Beebug can be found on the monthly Beebug magazine cassette and disc. Each new issue for volume 4 should be added to the end of the file VOL using Wordwise or View. Remember to reposition the end of file marker as explained in section 4 of the Magscan manual.