So you made it to step 2 of the process.

Good!

This is where most of my work has been put in and I believe that you will find
it a lot easier to colour your articles now bro.

You should have already made your articles in notepad, the p1.txt , p2.txt etc.
The formatter needs something called "i files" to work.

You will have already generated them by clicking on :

convert_pages.bat

after this you will see 20 files that look like;

i1.txt
i2.txt

etc..

These are basically your pages which have been converted into a format that the
new chart engine can understand.

Remember the old codes?

<RED> <GREEN> <H1> <H2> Etc...

Well they don't exist any more. All text formatting is done by mouse from now on.
The formatter creates several layers that contain a map of each page.
One contains dividers, one contains colours, one contains font types and one contains
the actual text.

So you have the converted files, just double click on:

format_pages.bat

And be patient, this code to some extent is actually self-generating so you need to
wait while it builds and compiles its-self. Yeah I know it's a head fuck, this is one
reason why it has taken me so long, it was really difficult code. Maybe the most complex
thing I have ever written.

When it has built it's self you will see a nice mouse controlled menu.

Everything is controlled by mouse and is fairly self-explanitory. I will explain the
menu anyway as it has some really cool things!

-------------------------
**     THE TOP PART    **
-------------------------

Left click to select things.

QUIT + SAVE!  - Does what it says.

On the left is a box showing you some status information like;

The current Colour
The current Page divider
The current Font
The current Mode
The current Page.

This is for quick info so you can see what you have selected atm.

On the right of this you will see;

-LTTR-  -  Letter mode (Allows individual formatting of characters).
-WORD-  -  Word mode (Allows continuous words to be formatted at once).
-LINE-  -  Line mode (Allows whole lines to be formatted at once).
-LEFT-  -  Left mode (Everything to the left of the mouse is formatted at once.
-RIGT-  -  Right mode (As above but to the right of the mouse).

FONT 1  -  Select font 1
FONT 2  -  Select Font 2

------  - Page dividers (8 of them)

Colour bands, click on the colour to choose it.

<- PREV PAGE  - Go back a page.
NEXT PAGE ->  - Go forward a page.


Pretty simple eh?

One thing to note, if you change pages it will mean that you accept the word layout
this applies if you used the justify function. You wont be able to undo when you
go back so only change pages when you are happy with the layout.

----------------------------
**     THE BOTTOM PART    **
----------------------------


BK>
BK>
...

Left Click on any of these to insert the current page divider at that point.
Right click to remove the divider.

<JY
<JY
...

Left click to auto justify
Right click to revert back to how the page looked when you entered it.

When you move the mouse into the text area the border will light up.
Also you'll see a flashing hollow box, the size of the box depends on the
text mode, by left clicking, all characters in the box are formatted
with the current selections.

If you right click anywhere in the text window, those attributes are grabbed
to allow fast selection of colours / page dividers.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Saving your changes.
--------------------

When you leave the formatter, your changes will be saved so you dont have to
do the whole mag in one go.

If you convert the files again though, be careful because everything will be overwritten.
If you want to preserve formatted pages for future issues, after you have coloured them
you should copy them and store them somewhere safe.

you can just replace the i file with the preserved one just before you compile the
final version of the mag.

In all this is a lot more complicated than the last one but I feel it's easier to use
and will make a huge difference to the presentation of the mag.