quots

(last updated for version 1.15)

Contents

• Purpose
• Quotation File Format
• Options
• Download

Special abilities: This program ist fast. No matter how big your quotation file may be, it will hardly take a second to select a quotation and display it! It's easy to use, no index files, no data or configuration files! Quotation files may be edited with any ASCII editor! Multiple file support! And more ...

2.) Disclaimer

Mind that I take no responsibility whatsoever for any trouble you may be having with or because of the use of this program, in the judicial sense, that is. Of course any ideas on improving the program are very welcome.

The program is freeware. That means you are allowed to make as many copies as you want, but you must never change or charge anything, and always make a complete copy including this file. There's no warranty at all.

3.) Quotation Files

• Each file must start with a series of five percent characters. (Looks like this: %%%%%) :-)

• Each quotation must be terminated by two percent characters. (Yup, almost the same thing as above, but shorter: %%)

• Quotation length must range from 16 bytes to 1 kilobyte. If you don't pay attention to this, you might never see the ones that are too short, and only see part of those that are too large.
  Just in case you want to include very short quotations (< 16 bytes) at any rate, you may fill up the free space with blanks. Upon output, noone will notice, and the quotation is long enough.
  Example:

      "  Whoa.        %%"

  When counting quotation lengths, don't ignore line feeds, spaces, and percent characters. (Nobody ever does that anyway. Counting, I mean.)

• The left margin of the displayed quotation is applied as given in the quotation file. Same thing with line feeds.

• At the end of each quotation, a line feed is automatically added, so be sure to place the terminators (tee-hee) directly after the quotation, unless you want it to be followed by a blank line.

• Attention UNIX users! Line feed character is always CRLF.

• You are allowed to include your remarks with the file. Every line starting with a percent character (meaning '%' is the first character, really the first) is considered a comment and thus ignored. Comments virtually increase the length of the surrounding quotation. Single percent characters may be used in the quotation, as long as they don't stand at the beginning of a line.

• There shouldn't be too many blank lines at the end of quotation files. Might cause empty quotations to be displayed.

• A quotation file must not be larger than 1 megabyte.

• Larger quotations have a slightly better chance to be displayed. In large files (> 20 KB), this usally doesn't matter at all, but if you're using real tiny quotation files (< 5 KB), you might want to increase chances for the 'small guys' by putting them in repeatedly or otherwise increasing their size. Depends on how much you care about things like that.

Multiple files: Some people are real crazy about collecting quotations, so they might have more than 1 MB of quotations (That's more than will fit in a single file, remember?). So I included multiple file support. Just specify more than one file on the command line, and QUOTS will use them all. There are a few things you might want to know about how QUOTS picks quotations from multiple files:

• Of all given files, only the chosen one will be checked. Other files may not be valid quotation files. This way displaying the quotation is not slowed down by hardly necessary file checks. Ergo that task is up to you, unless you just want to wait for QUOTS to complain one day. The only thing actually checked is whether the file exists at all.

• If none of the given files bears today's date, QUOTS will randomly pick a new quotation. In situations like this, QUOTS rolls the dice to determine which file will be used. Larger files get a better chance according to their size.

• If only one file bears today's date, QUOTS will display the quotation that was last displayed using this file.

• If more than one file bears the current date, it will use the first file that has a valid quotation number. If there is no such file, the one with the highest number will be used.

• The Probability Problem (abbrev.: Thprpbl!)
  As mentioned above, larger files have a better chance of having one of their quotations displayed. Hence files that are a lot larger have a significantly better chance. However, you might not want to see quotations from nearly the same file all the time, since they are usually of the same type, too.
  Well, the solution is to tell QUOTS what file size to use for a specific file. Simply put the imaginary file size right behind the corresponding file name.

  1. Example: "QUOTS a_file 2000 b_file 2000 c_file 2000"
  

  will eventually pick a quotation from any of the given files that now have (and that's the new part) exactly the same chance of being selected, no matter how big they really are.

  2. Example: Imagine there's a quotation you like so much that you

  want to see it 50% of the time. You would just have to put it in a file of its own and call QUOTS like this:

      "QUOTS a_file 1000 b_file 1000 COOLfile 2000"

  Now the chance for the quotation in COOLfile is just as big as the total chance of all the other files together.

  Of course you don't need to put numbers after all of the given files, it's just as fine if they're just used once or twice, or not at all. Problem: You cannot put a filename that's merely a number after another filename. Okay, okay, then put it somewhere else ...

• Title String ( /T:"<title string>" )
  Changes the title string (surprise!). Mind the colon.
  <title string> may include spaces. Whereever you put a '$D' in the title string, it is replaced by the current date DD.MM.YY. '$E' works just like '$D' except that the date is displayed the "English" way: MM/DD/YY. The title string may only include one date. A specification like /T:"" will prevent the title from being displayed.
  By default, "This is today's ($E) quotation:" will be used as title.

• Color Set ( /C:<colorset> )
  You may choose from three different color sets:

  1 = monochrome color set

  2 = color (title lightred, frame yellow, text lightgreen on black)

  3 = your own creation!
  

  '3' must be immediately followed by 6 hexadecimal digits specifying your new color set. Every two digits combine for a text color attribute in the following order:

  -> Title Frame NormalText <-

  The first digit indicates the background, the second one the foreground color, e.g. '0F' would be white text on black.
  Color codes are as follows:

       Black     0           DarkGray      8
       Blue      1           LightBlue     9
       Green     2           LightGreen    A
       Cyan      3           LightCyan     B
       Red       4           LightRed      C
       Magenta   5           LightMagenta  D
       Brown     6           Yellow        E
       LightGray 7           White         F
  

  You may not use colors of the right column as background colors, unless you want the whole thing to be blinking.
  Example: -c:30C0E0A equals -c:2

  I know this could have been designed more user friendly, but after all, you've only got to do it once, so cheer up! By default, the 'color' color set is activated (option 2).

• Framing Lines ( /L:- ) [not a smiley]
  If you feel disturbed by the frame lines, you may turn them off by using the -l option. Any other character but the minus sign following the colon will cause the frame to be displayed.
  That is also the default.

• The option you should never use: /a
  Normally, QUOTS will pick a quotation for every day and display the same one all the time on one day. If you can't wait to see another great quotation from your database, you might want to use this option to make QUOTS display a new quotation every time it is called. However, the displayed quotation would no longer be some kind of 'motto of the day', and that's bad.
  QUOTS will still store the information about the last displayed quotation in the corresponding qfile. So when you're calling QUOTS again with the same parameters except /a, it will display the last quotation for the rest of the day. Now if you don't want that, you may specify /an, which makes QUOTS forget about the quotation it has just displayed. The last saved information will remain untouched, so unless the date has changed, the next call without the /a parameter will bring up the old quotation again.

• Counting Quotations
  Having acquired the first 100 KB of quotation files, I wondered how many quotations they might contain. So I decided to give QUOTS the ability to count them. What it does is count all the quotation seperators ('%%') in the file. So remember to put one behind the last quotation in your file, too, because if you don't QUOTS won't count it.
  In order to count quotations, the very first command line parameter must be '/count', followed by a list of quotation files. This time, there is no limit to the number of files except DOS's PSP.
  When counting quotations, no quotation will be displayed. QUOTS will not check whether the given files are valid quotation files. If you specify junk files, the result will probably be zero, or maybe something very weird.
  Example: QUOTS /count a_file b_file c_file

(a) QUOTS quots.qts -c:3090E07 -t:"" nice.qts 5000 bgsaying.qts 10000 english.qts

This is how QUOTS is called in my autoexec.bat file. The quotation is chosen from one of the four given files. "english.qts" is the biggest one (500 quots, 70,000 bytes), whereas the other three are relatively small. "nice" contains nice quotations that are a little too long, so I don't want to have them displayed too often (probability like a 5000 bytes file).
QUOTS displays the chosen quotation using light gray text and a yellow frame on black background. There is no title.

(b) QUOTS myquots.qts

Displays a quotation from "myquots.qts" with all the default settings, i.e. title, color set, frame, ...

(c) QUOTS

Tries to open "quots.qts". If successful, see (b). If not, QUOTS will display a short help screen with brief instructions on usage etc.
The latter can also be achieved by typing in "QUOTS -?". This comes in handy when there is a file "quots.qts", but you still want to see the help screen.

(d) QUOTS lotsofqu.ots -l:- -a

Displays a quotation from "lotsofqu.ots" just like (b), except that the frame is ommitted, and a new quotation is chosen whenever the program is called, regardless of date.

5.) Contacting the Author

   Documentation is like sex: When it is good, it is very, very good;
   and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
                                                  -- Dick Brandon

• Download quots self-extracting archive (~59 KB)

HAVE FUN !

   "... A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you
   have turned into a pile of dust."