yBook is designed to emulate the look and feel of a book on your computer screen.

yBook is copyright Spacejock Software. You may distribute yBook to whoever you like providing you don't modify the program or associated documentation. You can charge a small fee to cover the cost of distribution, but you may not sell the program itself.

I'm going to assume you've installed the program. If you downloaded the EXE file instead of the full install, you will need to get hold of the Visual Basic 6 runtime if you don't already have it on your computer. The quickest way to find out is to run yBook. Did it work? Good, you don't need the runtime.

Now, look along the bottom of the screen. You will see a strip across the bottom containing several buttons, knobs and other assorted controls. From left to right:

The < and > buttons, and 'Search Term'. Click on the Search Term box, type a word (or sentence) into the resulting text box and press Enter. Now click < to find the first match on previous pages and > to find the first match on subsequent pages.

Next are the Font Size controls. You can click - until you can't read the text any more, or click + until it's very, very big. (7 to 24 point is the range) Because the book has to be re-indexed every time you alter the size, it's quicker to click on the number between the -/+ and enter the size directly (unless you're just playing around to see whether you can crash the program. All the same, users are.)

Load is what you click to read a file into yBook. There are four kinds of files you can read: TXT files (like those on the Gutenberg archive) HTML files, BFL files and BRN files. The latter two are produced by BookMaker, a text compiler which produces encyrpted books with formatting (like bold, italics, etc) and optionally includes password protection and per-user details (like name and address of the person who bought the book). Note that yBook WILL NOT read PDF, DOC, EXE, ZIP, LIT or anything else for that matter. There are already other readers for those formats, and some of them will save as Ascii text, which is a TXT file, which is what you can read with yBook. HTML files are better, because yBook preserves the Bold, Italics and Underlining. Of course, being a paperback emulator you don't get to see any pictures ;-) yBook also reads BRN/BFL files, but we did that bit already.

Once you've loaded a file, of course, you want to turn the pages. You can left-click a page to turn it, or you can use the Space bar to go forwards and shift-space to go back.

The last button is 'Exit' Apart from closing the program with no warning (I HATE programs that stupidly ask me whether I'm sure I want to quit. If I didn't want to quit I wouldn't have clicked the &*^&* exit button, would I?), it also stores your current font, typeface and most recently used book path. All of these settings will be restored when you re-load yBook. It also remembers the current page for the book you have loaded (if any) so that re-loading the book returns to the last-used page (even if the font size or typeface is different and the book has twice as many pages!)

So where are the other settings?

'Justify' will attempt to spread the sentences out so that they fit all the way across the page, like a real book. You can click it on and off, marvelling as the little letters shuffle left and right at your whim. Well I think it's amusing, anyway. Due to limitations with scaling, I can't get the right edge ruler-straight with all fonts.

GOTO does exactly that. If you want to go to the end of the book just enter some huge number. The first page in the book is 1.

PRINT will open up a printer dialog box. You can print the book page by page, choosing a normal sequential print or a two-up print. If you print two-up in combination with odd/even pages you can print an entire novel out in one go, with one copy on the left and another on the right. Guillotine the finished job and you'll have two copies, side by side, ready for binding and cropping. Is that useful for home-made books or what?
Please note: you'll have to experiment a bit. On my screen (800x600) I have to make yBook the full height of the screen, even going as far as pushing the task bar out the way. Then I make it about 3/4 screen width and change the font to 7 or 8 point Times Roman. This will result in a printed page which is pretty similar to a standard paperback novel, although you may like to increase the font size a little if you prefer larger print.

The help option brings up a list of keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can use the spacebar to turn to the next page and shift-space to go back to the previous one. All the shortcuts are listed (along with ANOTHER plug for BookMaker. Gee, what a pain.)

Oh, one last thing - if you open a book and it asks for a password, once you enter that password you won't need to enter it again on the same computer.

That's it. Simple. Now all you have to do is tell people about this program so they too can enjoy reading from the screen.

Until next time,

Simon Haynes

http://www.spacejock.com

ybook@spacejock.com

Text files can be formatted in a number of ways. So-called 'MSDOS' text files may have carriage-return & linefeed (CRLF) pairs at the ends of lines. Unix text files have just a single carriage return. Some text files have a carriage return at the end of every line and two after a paragraph (for example, Gutenberg texts) while others have a great long line of text and a CRLF at the end.

Because you can't please all the people all the time, yBook is designed to do the following:

It will replace all occurrences of CRLFCRLF (double) with a special paragraph marker. It will then delete all remaining CRLF (single), assuming they represent end of lines.

The reason I explain this is because you may be expecting to see a neat table of contents and you get a joined-up mess. Correct. See the following example:

chapter 1

chapter 2

chapter 3

Now, that looks fine, but in order to make it look like that I had to insert an extra carriage return between each line, because if I didn't yBook would reformat them like this:

chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3

Now, if you want to read a file which has a lot of text positioning, grids and tables drawn with ascii or poetry then yBook is not the program for you. Notepad will do just as well. I mention this here to avoid emails stating 'Your program doesn't show my text properly.'

No, yBook is designed as an eBook reader. Open any gutenberg text with Wordpad, set 'wrap to screen width' ON and narrow the page down until it's about 50 character wide (2/3 sentence width).

Oh look, it doesn't show the text properly.

Now load the same file into yBook, get past the Gutenberg info to chapter 1. (The info at the start of their books has a lot of positioning...which yBook will reformat.) See the difference? The sentences are wrapped to the page size, no matter how large the font. THAT'S what yBook is for.

So, if you're writing a text file and you would like yBook to display it properly, what should you do?

1) Put an extra blank line between items in a list (as per the example above)

2) Put a blank line between paragraphs

3) ... that's it. If you would like to add centered text, bold, italic and underlining (and page breaks) then I have a program to sell you. If you're happy with plain text - go for it.

Michael McCollum has converted his short stories to yBook format, and is offering them as a free download.

Publisher of quality ebooks. Available as HTML, which can be read into ybook. Check out Chuck McKenzie's 'Worlds Apart', a funny SF novel.

http://www.wn.com.au/clubclad/erebus/

The Official Home Page of The Erebus Equilibrium, a fantasy trilogy by Neil Charles Cladingboel. You can download samples of Neil's first two books in yBook format, plus there's a short story to enjoy as well.

Project Gutenberg

Literally thousands of out-of-copyright text files.

... More sites to follow. Stay tuned!