(C) Copyright IBM Corp. 1994 BookManager READ for Windows 2.0 - README.TXT --------------------------------------------- Welcome to BookManager* READ for Windows(TM) 2.0. This README.TXT file contains information you need for installing BookManager READ for Windows 2.0, as well as information that was not available for our printed publications. This README.TXT file is divided into the following categories: - Before You Install READ for Windows - Getting Help - Installing READ for Windows - Late-Breaking News - Windows hints and tips - BookManager Library Reader for Windows hints and tips - Trademarks Before You Install READ for Windows ----------------------------------- 1) On the Installation - Directories window, if you plan on pressing the Disk Space button to determine if you have enough space to install on a particular driver, please note the following caution: CAUTION: If you are connected to a LAN that has a drive for removable media such as CD-ROM or optical disk, MAKE SURE THERE IS A DISK IN THAT DRIVE BEFORE CHOOSING THE DISK SPACE BUTTON. Otherwise unpredictable results will occur. (P1075) Getting Help ------------ Technical support for READ for Windows is available to licensed users under certain conditions by calling: 1-800-237-5511 in the United States and Puerto Rico 1-800-992-4777 in Canada 8am-5pm (your local time) Monday through Friday (except U.S. National holidays) Installing READ for Windows --------------------------- To install the product: 1) Start Microsoft Windows. 2) Insert Disk 1 of 3 in Drive A. 3) From the File Menu (of Program Manager), choose Run. 4) Type A:\INSTALL and press ENTER. - If you are using WIN-OS/2 and you experience a SYS3171 error at the end of installation, you will see this message: "A program caused exception C0000005 at xxxx. Due to insufficient stack space, the exception was not dispatched. The process is terminated." This means that all of the files are installed successfully, but because the installation did not finish, Software Installer (SI) does not know that it is installed. Therefore you will not be able to delete the product or apply maintenance. ACTION: - If you encounter this at the end of the installation, you should try to do the install again. If you get the message again, you are unable to use SI for maintenance or deleting. - Contact OS/2 support and get the fix for APAR #PJ10867. - If your PATH statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT is "PATH" (instead of PATH= or SET PATH=) and you have more than one blank space before the word PATH, and you requested that the installation program update your AUTOEXEC.BAT then you will need to remove the SET PATH= that the installation program added to the bottom of your AUTOEXEC.BAT. Also, append the path where the program files were install to your existing PATH statement. Late-Breaking News ------------------ WORKING WITH BOOKSHELVES - If you are looking at a large bookshelf, the list of books in that bookshelf may be truncated due to limitations of the listbox control. If you get a message that the list was truncated, choose Include from the View menu to see the books that were not originally displayed. (P0604) - In cases where books and bookshelves are stored in separate directories, make sure that the directories for both the books AND the bookshelves are in the startup path. This will aid load time performance by retrieving book information from the bookshelves. (P1043) WORKING WITH NOTES - Public notes can be shared by many users. In order to have public notes, you must change the note file attribute to read only, using Windows file manager or the equivalent. A private note should be placed on a local disk in the your workstation to prevent unauthorized write access. It can also be placed on a LAN drive with protected access. This product does not have the mechanisms for multiple write access to the note file. (P1172) WORKING WITH SEARCH - If you are performing a cross-book search on books listed in the bookshelf search index, and the search request has a word with more than 3 special characters in it, no matches will be found. To see the matches, limit words in the search request to no more than 3 special characters. (P1124) - If you experience unexpected results when going to the next or previous search match, you should scroll forward or backward within the topic. (P1207, P1159) - You can enter only 50 phrases (separated by commas) in a search request. It was documented that 64 phrases was the maximum. (P960) WORKING WITH PRINT - When viewing graphics using Print Preview, the following command buttons at the top of the window may not be visible: Two Pages, Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Close. However, the shortcut keys for these buttons (T, I, O, and C respectively) are still active and can be used in place of the buttons. (P1243) NAVIGATING IN BOOKSHELVES - Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down function as Page Up and Page Down in the following areas: List of Bookshelves, Bookshelf, and all list boxes. In the Book window they scroll to the beginning or end of the topic respectively. (P1246) SYSTEM SITUATIONS - If you experience a SYS3171 error when exiting the product or at the end of the installation, contact OS/2 support and get the fix for APAR #PJ10867. (P2001) - Due to a known bug in Windows 3.1, 3.11, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and WIN-OS/2, doing extensive zooming on some kinds of pictures may result in a blank window. If this occurs, simply revert to the previous zoom level. (P0909) - If you are using WIN-OS/2 and you experience a General Protection Fault (GPF) in the display driver, contact OS/2 support to get the latest version of the display device driver. (P1146) Windows hints and tips ---------------------- Beyond these performance enhancements lie the true upgrades -- faster processors, faster video graphic adapters, faster disk and CDROM drives. For adequate performance, production office workers should use a PC with 25MHz or better 386DX with 8MB of RAM. Using lots of files? #1 Make sure files and buffers are set high enough. BookManager uses many files: bookshelf, book, note, profile, unicode table, bookshelf index and temporary files. Opening many books can exhaust the file and buffer setting in CONFIG.SYS. Sometimes that out-of-memory error message means something completely different. Many systems come preconfigured with a minimal 30 files and 10 buffers. It is recommended that you set your FILES=120 and BUFFERS=80 in the CONFIG.SYS. If you use a SmartDrive utility, reduce your BUFFERS=80 to BUFFERS=20. Remove expanded memory #2 If you don't use any applications under Windows that require expanded memory (EMS) you can disable EMS driver in Windows to improve performance. Edit the SYSTEM.INI 386ENH section, add the line NOEMMDRIVER=ON, and restart Windows. If your not sure whether your applications use EMS don't alter this setting. Use SmartDrive #3 Use SmartDrive, which is supplied with Windows, to reduce retrieval time from your hard disk. This is both a read and a write cache that shortens your wait for the disk drive in most circumstances. SmartDrive should always be used; using the /C parameter is encouraged only if you write notes or update bookshelves. Still double buffering? #4 If double buffering is not needed, turn it off. Check your CONFIG.SYS file for this statement: DEVICE=SMARTDRV.EXE /DOUBLE_BUFFER. To determine whether your system needs the double buffer feature, type SMARTDRIVE /S at the DOS prompt. A SmartDrive status report is displayed. If the last column in the report reads "no", you can remove the double buffer line from your CONFIG.SYS file. Set up a permanent swap file #5 To set up a permanent swap file go into the Windows control panel's 386 Enhanced option and press the Virtual Memory button. You will be able to open more books and other applications by augmenting RAM with virtual memory. If Windows runs out of real memory, it will use the virtual memory set up by the permanent swap file. Unfortunately, a permanent swap file improves performance only if Windows has no RAM to allocate to applications. If your hard disk's "in use" light goes on when you switch applications, adding 1MB to 2MB of RAM will make a bigger difference in the speed of BookManager than any swap file will. Fast Disk #6 To boost I/O performance go to the Windows control panel's Enhanced option, select Virtual Memory, change and turn on "Use 32-bit file access." This is activated for disk drives that support the WD1003 standard used in most Western Digital disk controllers. If used, this device driver never needs to switch into real mode in order to read from or write to a disk. This speeds disk access significantly. Defragment your hard disk #7 The final performance improvement you should consider is to use a disk-optimizing program on your hard drive. Such programs rearrange the data on your disks so that when you start BookManager or open a book, the entire file can be read with the minimum number of physical movements of the disk's read-write heads. BookManager Library Reader for Windows hints and tips ----------------------------------------------------- Use code page 850 to display special characters #8 Check the code page setting to ensure that you are getting the best possible character display translation. Check the code page setting in your CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT. If you are not using code page 850, refer to the user's guide for your operating system for information on using the CHCP command to change it. Table of contents in a book #9 To improve performance opening a book, make a table of contents (TOC) and include all topic levels when you build the book. If a TOC is not built into the book, the entire book must be read in order to dynamically build the TOC and then collapse it to the highest topic level. Bookshelf size #10 Although bookshelves can contain an unlimited number of books, as a rule of thumb, bookshelves should not exceed more than 50 books. For performance reasons, it is recommended to group related books together on a bookshelf of no more than 50 books. Searching, adding, and removing books in a large bookshelf can adversely affect performance. Searching bookshelves #11 To improve searching many books in a bookshelf it is strongly recommended to use a bookshelf index file. The bookshelf index file is created using the an index utility currently available only from the VM and MVS BookManager family of products. Performance is improved because every book does not have to be opened and searched. When the search term is only one word, then only the bookshelf index file is searched. However, if a phrase or a Boolean search is entered, the index file is searched first, then the books with search matches are verified by opening each book and searching it. List books function #12 To list books quickly, bookshelves are read to locate book information such as the book title and date. This prevents each book from having to be opened to retrieve this data. If the number of books is greater than 60, the bookshelves found in your startup path will be used to list the books. To improve performance, when displaying a list of more than 60 books, avoid using a startup path that has many bookshelves and very large bookshelves (shelves containing thousands of books). Book searching #13 To improve search performance and to get more than 400 topic hits go to the Extended search dialog and select list topics in sequence. This will bypass topic ranking algorithms. Picture this #14 To improve performance while reading a book, and to use fewer resources in Windows, view pictures in a separate window. You can set this in the Workspace dialog box by choosing Workspace from the Options menu. You can then display only the picture you want to see by tabbing to the picture link and pressing Enter or double-clicking the picture link. View book text only #15 If you want a larger text viewing area, turn off the tool bar and status bar. You can set this temporarily in the View menu, or permanently by choosing Workspace from the Option menu. You can also move the split bar, which separates the topic from the table of contents, all the way to the right, removing the table of contents from view. You can then use a topic list on demand from the Navigate menu. Cross-book linking #16 You can link to other books from an author-defined link only if the book is located in the same bookshelf the original book was opened from. This will also work in the list of books as long as the other book you are linking to is in the same path used when the list of books window was built. Remember, the level number of the document number is not used. So, the first book found with a matching document number (minus the level) is opened. Close a few windows #17 Applications can generate many windows, which can steal time away from your main task because you cannot control the percentage of time that each running window claims. Even when other Windows applications are in the background, supposedly idle, they can slow down BookManager. Close some of these windows to return some precious resources and reduce CPU cycles in Windows. Maximize the size of your window #18 When several window frames are visible on your screen, Windows must expend a few CPU cycles to keep track of which one the mouse pointer is over, changing the mouse cursor, issuing messages and so on. Maximizing your screen to full size reduces this overhead. SHARE your files #19 To prevent the corruption of your note files if duplicate books or other applications are using the same note file, DOS SHARE.EXE or equivalent must be installed. Notes for an existing note file will be unavailable until SHARE is installed. SHARE also protects your note file in a LAN environment. To install SHARE, add the statement INSTALL=C:\DOS\SHARE.EXE to your CONFIG.SYS file. Change C:\DOS to your DOS path location. Public and private note files #20 Unfortunately, note files cannot be shared for updating. A public note file can, however, be shared on a LAN and read by many users. To share a public note, the note file attribute must be set to read-only. The public note file should be located in the same path used by the book. To set a file to read-only, go to Windows File Manager, select the file you want to make read-only, then from the File menu choose Properties. In the Properties dialog box, check the Read Only attribute. To attach a public note file to the user's book, the startup note path should be blank so the note file will be found using the book's path. As an alternative, the Startup Defaults for notes, available through the Option menu, can specify the same path where the public note file is located. A separate directory can be setup, on the LAN, to contain only public notes. Crash support #21 Add DRWATSON to your LOAD= line in the WIN.INI file, so that the Dr. Watson utility will capture information if you crash. Once it finds a crash, it will prompt you to enter a description of what you were doing at the time and will create a text file (DRWATSON.LOG) with all of the relevant system information, which you can share with a BookManager technical support person. In addition, to keep track of your windows startup, load Windows with the WIN/B command, which creates a text file BOOTLOG.TXT. Trademarks ---------- (TM) Windows is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation * BookManager is a trademark of IBM Corporation