r_harvey

Frequently Asked Questions

What do I do with these ZIP files?

ZIP files are compressed archives that contain one or more other files. Use an un-zip program on your computer to extract the original files from the archive. Here are the steps.

• Find the page that describes the file you want to download.
• Click the mouse on the link that describes your file.
• After a short delay, your browser will ask you what you want to do with the file. Select the option to save the file to your hard disk. Pick a disk directory (file folder) that is easy to find.
• Your Web browser will display a message that tells you how the download is progressing. Wait while the file download continues. There may be a "Status line" somewhere on the screen that tells you how the process is working.
• The Web browser will probably not do anything to tell you that the file has been successfully downloaded. The message box will disappear or the status line will change.
• Use an un-zip program to extract the original files. Use a separate directory, preferably an empty directory or one that contains just a few files.
• Look for a text file (with the .TXT file extension) in the archive. This file will explain additional installation instructions.

If your Web browser doesn't offer to save the ZIP file, but instead tries to display the contents of the file, there is a solution. Try holding down a SHIFT key on the keyboard while you click the mouse button on the link.

Some popular un-zip programs include PKZip, PROZip, and WinZip.

Why do files I download look incomplete?

Most of the files offered here are complete, working copies. A few, such as HTMLCAT.ZIP, are evaluation versions. This means that some features are disabled or missing. If you like the products, we ask you to purchase complete copies; the missing bits are reminders. Look at these books and tools, and imagine how much time and money and knowledge they must take to create. Without payment, there is little incentive to create or maintain these things. Just because prices are low doesn't mean payment is optional--where would Bazooka Joe and Hershey be today if that were true?

We offer versions just for you to look at. If you like them and find them useful, please pay for them. If you don't feel they are worth paying for, don't use them, and remove all copies from your computer. It's only fair.

How do I register and Get The Good Stuff?

Register by sending you name, address, your E-mail address, plus any required payment, here:

R. E. Harvey
P.O. Box 10086
Glendale AZ 85318-0086 USA

You have the option of receiving the complete product on floppy disk (at some extra cost), or immediate access to the registered version on the Internet. Internet access is the most practical and economical delivery method.

Payment should be in US funds, in the form of a personal check, money order, or cash. If you must send cash for a small purchase, and many from outside the US do, make sure you cannot tell that the envelope contains currency. Do not send anything that looks like a birthday card. See the text file included in each ZIP file for payment and licensing information.

After you register, we will send you instructions for locating and downloading the software, and a password for reading the files. FTP download is not available. File names, locations, and passwords change periodically.

How do I register online?

Everything we offer is priced as low as possible. To keep it that way, we use simple tools and we have simple relationships. You can to purchase HTMLcat online, for online-delivery from the secure Web site:

• HTMLcat Order Form

Payment for our least-expensive products are not currently available online, because the online transactions would be as expensive as the products themselves.

Can I change the password?

When you register a product, a unique password is assigned to you. You may find your name in the password, something like this:

 HTMLcat5:BR549Pat_Crenshaw0S1a2m3p4l5e6P
 7a8s9s0w1o2r3d4S5a6m7p8l9e0P1a2s3s4w5o6r

This is a reminder of the product name, and that it is registered personally to you. If you change the name, the password will no longer work. The name may be a shorthand way of spelling your name, in order to make it unique in our database; it may be incorrectly spelled, but that does not affect how it appears in our records.

My evaluation period ended... what to do?

Your evaluation begins the first time you use the product, and ends at the end of the specified evaluation period. If you try it once and then forget about it for a few weeks, your time will be gone... and for naught. If you feel you need more evaluation time, or the check is in the mail, e-mail a note to , and we will see that you get some more time.

Why can't I use some fonts?

Many Windows applications look better with fixed-pitch screen fonts, but when you try to use them, they aren't available in the font list. This is normal! Screen fonts are missing from the list for many applications, because they use standard dialog boxes that eliminate them.

In most cases, you can manually type the font name, and it will work. In Word for Windows, for example, I sometimes use "MS Sans Serif", which is never listed (I don't recommend that font--I use it just for exporting to help files).

Why should I buy fonts--they are free?

First, of course, they are copyrighted, not freeware, and if you use them, you must pay for the complete, licensed versions. Even if you do buy one copy, this does not pass the license to you--you cannot give copies to friends or sell them. You cannot sell or give away copies you have made of Microsoft Office, these fonts are no different.

There is one more problem with using standard Windows fonts with programs you write for distribution, and that has nothing to do with whether or not you buy fonts here: Windows may not continue to include the font you want. See Q117742 for Microsoft's explanation about using fixed-pitch fonts.

Do you do custom designs

Yes. You may have used our custom fonts and other designs without even knowing it; we have several million users (yes, million). We quietly provide clear, simple, and easy to use designs for many companies and software products.

With more than 18 years experience, we can do it easier, faster, and less expensively than you would expect. See Screen Fonts for more information.

What happened to Alice In Wonderland

We had a gorgeously PDF document containing both books, but illustrations were not up to the quality of rest of the piece. When we found a version with better illustrations, it was clearly time to link to it, instead. You can find it, along with some more online books, from here.

Can I give-away ASCIIcat with my product?

No. However, you can link to the ASCIIcat download page here:

• http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/r_harvey/asciicat.htm

You cannot give it away as your own free add-on. I would consider allowing redistribution if you provided significant additional data for ASCIIcat. We offer licensing and bundling arrangements, as well as custom help files tailored to your needs; write for details.

And no, you cannot give-away or sell copies of anything else you find here.

Is it HTMLcat™ or Html-CAT

Html-CAT, a product created by Robin Hilliard of Dublin, Ireland, is an end-to-end localization environment for both small and large HTML projects. Visit Translation Craft for information.

Our HTMLcat is an all-in-one guide and tutorial about writing documents for the Internet. HTMLcat^(TM) has been in production since 1997. HTMLcat and Html-CAT are not related.

What happened to Windows 3.1 support in HTMLcat?

HTMLcat began as a 16-bit application using a custom DLL (Dynamic Link Library) written in Assembly language. With release 4.0, it supported most Windows versions by including both 16- and 32-bit DLLs. We no longer include a 16-bit DLL because fewer than one percent use it.

Unfortunately, Windows NT and Windows 2000 do not support 16-bit DLLs with help files. The DLL adds hundreds of features that often must be written and tested twice: once for each DLL; this is an expensive and error-prone process, especially for a product that does not return any profit. For the cost of writing one product twice, we could instead add more features. The ultimate question is: Do we continue support for Windows 3.1, but block support for future operating systems, or do we abandon Windows 3.1 so that we can add support for the future? In new releases, we will concentrate on 32-bit operating systems.

Why don't you use !DOCTYPE if you're so standards-compliant

Well, we do, a bit, anyway. The problem is that Mozilla 1.x doesn't seem to like this URL; it's probably something to do with the underscore in the name. If we specify strict compliance, neither scripts nor style sheets load, thought they do with Internet Explorer. So, for the time being, no !DOCTYPE, and we render in "quirks" mode.

What is Tinkit?

Tinkit™ (nominally) means "Think." An advertising campaign in the 1930s for shirts used a quotation from an Aborigine named Mulga Fred: "Mine Tinkit They Fit" ("I think they fit," or more likely, "In my way of thinking about it, they fit").

We're in a transition state now, from r_harvey to tinkit.com. Tinkit is memorable, so you can call us that; we'll also likely be r_harvey for years to come. Just for clarity, let me repeat: Tinkit is a trademark of R. E. Harvey, and this is tinkit.com.

I Tinkit™, therefore I am.

What is that logo-thing?

That's a three-dimensional representation of an Esquilax. See The legend of the Esquilax.

Can I use the rabbit pictures

In short: NO. All forms of the rabbit are trademarks. Would Disney let you use their characters as your own? See Copyright notice.

What Development Tools Do You Use?

All development is done with PC-compatible computers. See the Links page for information about some of these products.

• Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK). This venerable package includes utilities that have long since vanished.
• We write Windows Help files using Microsoft Word for Windows 7.0 (Word 95), which is the final version that is compatible with all Windows help compilers, and it doesn't know anything about connecting to the Internet. We use Microsoft Word 2000 for documents that do not have to be backward-compatible.
• Some help files use Microsoft Help Workshop 4.03. Custom programs clean-up the documents to remove unnecessary information and incompatibilities before we compile the help files.
• Microsoft HTML Help 1.x compiler for testing.
• We develop, use, and highly recommend small custom utility programs. We use lots of custom utilities, macros, and include files. If you do a critical, repetitive, nuisance task often, a little utility program to automate the task will make you more than just productive -- it'll improve the quality of your life. The higher-level you can make it, the higher-level you can maintain it. Utilities and programming libraries are written with:
  • Microsoft Macro Assembler (MASM).
  • Some older large utilities use custom Assembly language libraries along with Visual Basic for MS-DOS. For compatibility, we no longer use Basic for utilities.
  • ANSI C. Tools up to about 2000 lines are written to compile on any platform that supports the C language. We plan on reusing these utilities forever, regardless of how operating systems change.
  • C/C++ with platform-specific libraries.
• Big projects use appropriate high-level tools:
  • Usually C/C++. We use several C/C++ compilers, depending on the project. The GCC C++ compiler, Intel, Microsoft and Watcom C/C++ compilers create excellent code. Borland's C++ Builder compiler has the advantage of being both modern and compliant with industry standards -- something that cannot be said of some other compilers.
  • Borland Delphi.
  • For ultimate control, I may write it in Assembly language anyway.
• Most development for Microsoft Windows is done with a combination of C/C++ and Assembly language. We usually work without MFC (the Microsoft Foundation Class), and avoid the standard runtime library. If you need a template library, consider the Standard C++ Library, (also called Standard Template Library or STL) which is compatible with most operating environments.
• We use versatile office productivity tools that are easy to use, inexpensive, reliable, follow published document specifications, and have the possibility of being ported to additional operating systems. These tools include:
  • Lotus SmartSuite
  • Microsoft Word
  • Sun StarOffice
• We use several design applications:
  • Adobe Acrobat
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe LiveMotion
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Corel Draw
  • Corel Photo-Paint
  • Micrografx Designer
  • Micrografx Picture Publisher
  • POV-Ray Tracer
  • The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) bitmap editor
  • A custom bitmap resolution-setting and information program
  • Plain-old Paintbrush for quick-fixes
• Page layout is handled with Adobe InDesign, Corel Draw, Lotus WordPro and Microsoft Word.

Just enough tools to do the job.

Why didn't you answer my E-mail?

We try to respond to every e-mail message.

• Use your real e-mail address.
• Use your real name.
• Use a descriptive title. Make sure the message title is not "Message from Internet" or "No title." Especially avoid "How to build a cable converter box."
• Use standard English.
• Send plain text, not HTML attachments.
• Some e-mail services are case-sensitive. If nobody seems to respond to you, it may be because you have capitalized part of a word in an address.
• Do not send binary attachments. For system integrity, we do not decode unsolicited attachments.

We offer custom development and consulting. We can and would like to do your research, for a fee.

How Do You Make Help Files?

Read Windows Help Files for some tips. See Bibliography for additional tool information.

How Do You Make Fonts?

First, set aside a hundred extra hours for learning and experimenting.

Creating bitmap fonts requires the Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK). Documentation is nearly nonexistent, with no information about placing multiple fonts in one file or creating multiple versions from one set of source files (such as our evaluation/release versions). A FON file containing multiple bitmaps is actually a 16-bit DLL, even when used with 32-bit operating systems; this is historically because of bugs with some early 32-bit video drivers, but we still avoid 32-bit bitmap fonts. There is no code in FON files, just resources, so there is no effective difference between 16- and 32-bit files.

While a commercial vector font editor may be able to create bitmap font files, these fonts are designed to be used along with matching TrueType fonts, and they may not have the proportions you want.

I haven't found a Windows-based TrueType font editor that is truly up to the task. I use three of them, but none are good enough to recommend. Font editors are literally about ten years behind in features and reliability, when compared to other drawing programs. Regardless of which font editor you select, make constant back-ups, and stay on the lookout for corrupted files.

Why do your HTML files change when I copy them

That's because they can tell when they have been borrowed. They are copyrighted, and cannot, and must not, be copied to your web site, your CD-ROM, your book, or to your homework. See Copyright notice.

HP 95 Utilities

The HP-95 Productivity Pack, Utility Pack and the Windows help file (based on the book Explorer's Guide To The HP 95 were originally available for $100 from EduCALC. We later offered them here for just $17 for all three. This package was offered on the honor system, and thousands of users have copies, though only two users paid. The package has been withdrawn.

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