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Fancy a little intellectual stimulation after long hours spent staring
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at spreadsheets or reports? Does your brain long for something a little
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more fulfilling than Tetris or fiddling with the WIN.INI file? Then you
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could go out and buy a poetry book... or alternatively, if you just
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can't drag yourself away from the screen, click on the wxPoem icon.
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wxPoem is a simple Windows application which picks poems from a file at
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random, or finds poems according to a string criterion, and formats them
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nicely in a window. A displayed poem can be copied to the Windows clipboard
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ready for inclusion in that more imaginative report...
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It's small, it's free and it's totally harmless, so far as I know.
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No responsibility accepted, though, for any problems it might cause with
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wxPoem was converted to use the wxWindows toolkit, from the original
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WinPoem which received a favourable review from Windows Shareware 500.
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Since it now uses wxWindows, wxPoem may be compiled on a variety
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of platforms such as X (XView or Motif), Windows and NT.
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The main data file is winpoem.dat, and an index file winpoem.idx is
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supplied or can be (re)built by deleting winpoem.idx and rerunning
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wxPoem. Source code is also provided in source.zip, but wxWindows is
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required to build it. The original WinPoem is much leaner (40K
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instead of 400K!) and can be compiled under Windows without wxWindows.
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Copy ctl3dv2.dll to windows\system, and delete the original
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ctl3dv2.dll or wxPoem will not run.
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wxPoem can be put in the Startup folder in the Program Manager, so that
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a random poem will pop up every time Windows is run.
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wxPoem comes in Open Look and Motif versions for the Sun, and a
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Linux Open Look version. For other platforms, you will need to
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Simply run the program, and a random poem will be displayed.
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You can optionally give a filename on the command line, without a suffix
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The simplest way of operating wxPoem is to keep pressing the space bar
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for new poems (or pages for multi-page poems).
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Clicking the right mouse button (or selecting the wxPoem Options menu
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item from the system menu) gives a choice of the following facilities:
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Next poem/page (Page down) Display next poem (or next page)
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Previous page (Page up) Display previous page (multi-line poems only)
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Search (S) Allows user to enter a search string
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Next match (N) Gives next search match
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Copy to clipboard Allows poems to be pasted into other applications
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Bigger text Increases text size
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Smaller text Decreases text size
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About wxPoem About wxPoem
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Exit (Esc) Quit wxPoem
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When wxPoem is closed, the font, text height and window position are
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remembered (stored in WIN.INI) for next time. Under X, the values
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are not written (since they are stored in .Xdefaults), so you may
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want to edit the following resources by hand:
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wxPoem.FontSize ; Font size in points (default 12)
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The winpoem.dat file contains poems separated by a #, with optional
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@ codes denoting title (@T) author (@A) and page break (@P). Any
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unrecognized codes will cause the rest of the line to be ignored, so
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the user can add lines (e.g. @S for subject) which will be searched on but
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The data file contains a mixture of 20th century and earlier poetry,
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subject to copyright constraints. Apologies if any copyrights have
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inadvertently been infringed, though I have tried to avoid it.
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The original WinPoem program was my `Windows learning application', i.e.
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a vehicle for getting stuck into Windows programming, whilst (possibly)
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affording others a modicum of amusement. Therefore the code is pretty
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ugly. So don't look if you're squeamish!
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Copyright Julian Smart, released into the public domain, October 1994.
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Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
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University of Edinburgh