Digital Reader version 0.1 – the software part of the solution

 

Time passed, and finally I completed another of my developments. Another direction. It's software and literature. And a bit of drawing. And color selection. This is Digital Reader. It's software that allows you to read short texts. It's designed as an MS-DOS viewer in Norton Commander. There are two stories for this version. One is fantasy. The other is science fiction. And you can read them in Digital Reader.

This is a comprehensive solution for reading short stories. This is the Reader program. That's what it's called. You read stories in it. Small in size, in theory. Written in the QB64 Phoenix Edition programming language. This is another variant of Qb64. My first attempt. But it's very similar to QB64, so you could say they're the same thing.

In this first post, I should talk about the software. This is the Reader program. A simple program for reading short texts. Stories. I created it primarily for this purpose. So that readers can read my stories using this program, I wrote the reader myself.

 

It looks like Norton Commander or Volkov Commander. Retro styling. Everything is listed at the bottom. Menu. Up and down arrows move forward and backward through pages. For convenience, there's a function to jump from the first page to the last. And vice versa. You can also hide this menu. And there's an information menu. It contains all the information used in the program: color palettes, text titles, page count. Everything is controlled by the numbers 1, 2, and 3. And 0 exits the program. Simple. Like on MS-DOS.

I thought long and hard about it, but overall, the program is ready. And it's ready to use. I named the program "Reader." That's one thing. Digital Reader is a comprehensive solution. Software + stories. And styling. The program is simple and ready to use. I was thinking about writing version 1.0, but I named it version 0.1. It's like a starting point. Together, it's like the comprehensive Digital Reader solution. Version 0.1 is just the beginning. So, Reader 0.1 works perfectly. Version 1.0 could have been written. All the intended functions are implemented.

There's also a Launcher included. From there, you launch what you need, just like from a .bat file. There are two stories now. That's where you choose. So, you need to launch the Launcher. It's just a text menu, like MS DOS. You select which story you want to read by pressing 1 or 2. The Reader program launches, which already has the text for the desired story loaded.

That's basically it for the software. But another topic related to the software is styling. A set of color schemes. Each story comes with its own design theme. Four options here: Story text color. Story background color. Text color for control buttons. Background color for control buttons. Four colors in the RGB palette from 0-255 for each component.

 

Thus, the Reader program takes data from the story folder. And each story has its own folder. There's a file with the color scheme there. An image file. A text file. Each story for the Reader program is a folder containing three files: a color scheme, an image, and the story text.

This Launcher passes the path to the story folder as a parameter to the Reader program. It then grabs it all and applies it. It loads the color scheme, the text itself, and the image with the illustration. So, the Reader program has a launch parameter. This is the path to the story folder. In the format described. It should contain the color scheme, the text with the story, and the image.

In fact, the Reader works just like that, if you launch it. That's the secret. By default, it looks for the Data folder, which is where all of this should be. The format is the same: the Data folder should contain the color scheme, the text with the story, and the image.

This is the software side of the issue. And the styling. Each story is planned as a separate folder, containing a file with the color scheme, an illustration, and the text itself. The text is in text form. The line length is 128 characters. The Reader has 45 lines per page. 45 lines is one page. That's how pages are counted. Plus, page number one is always the image and the title of the story. It's like a title page. So, the first page of the text file containing the text itself is page number two.

The Reader program loads from the Launcher, and you see the story's color scheme, the illustration, and the text itself. That's the idea. That's why I wrote my own software. I dream of writing my own software. Office-grade software. For simple tasks. Simple solutions.

So, welcome to the Launcher and the Reader!

Digital Reader version 0.1 – most first version. In this version there are 2 stories! Adventurers, Explosion of a star. And also program Reader and program for launch.

Digital Reader: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/apps/digitalreader/index_eng.html

Website: http://www.dimalink.tv-games.ru/home_eng.html