Introduction
Knowing how good Bars & Pipes is, it was frustrating to hear people complaining about the program's complexity and seeming lack of usability. It is easy to convey the concept of Bars & Pipes to another person and convince them of the benefits, but without a manual, using the actual program is at best daunting and at worst an impossibility.
So after completing the ToolGuide, I decided that I should at least try to create some form of tutorial to help users new or old who have no access to the original manual. I starting scanning sections of the manual and then realised (fool that I am) that rather than re-write the thing, I might as well just re-create it in HTML form.
It was no easy job
The conversion to strict HTML took hours and hours. It involved scanning the pages, OCR'ing and proof-reading the scans, fixing errors, formatting to the same layout as the original, re-creating the photographs as actual windows in Bars & Pipes and screengrabbing them, editing the screengrabs, creating a standard frame design, writing the HTML code around the text while following through the paper manual, converting all non-HTML characters to HTML codes (for example all occurances of & had to be changed to &, and you can imagine how many of those there are), embedding anchors in each page for the chapter contents, creating the contents frame, and ensuring that it appears as correctly as possible on all browsers. That's a lot of work for a working professional (and that's why this manual has taken so long to come to fruition)!
After a few chapters, Gary Goldberg offered to start scanning and OCR'ing his copy of the manual. So while I worked forwards, he worked backwards from chapter 31. Scans were coming in thick and fast, and I had trouble keeping up. I only got up to Chapter 8 with my scanning, and Gary was far ahead, kindly providing me with a plain text copy of each chapter. Chapter 8 was, in fact, the last chapter I scanned as Gary had pretty much scanned every other chapter. A big round of applause for Mr. Goldberg there.
I was constantly searching for some form of HTML editor to try to save some of the ridiculous amount of work that it took to HTML the text. I tried pretty much every editor out there, and they were all either simple text editors, or produced horrible bloated error-ridden code.
Then I found StarOffice.
StarOffice is a free office suite given away by Sun Microsystems. It goes down on my list of amazing things (along with B&P, Photoshop, and the Kurzweil K2000 series), I recommend that everybody get it and have a look at it (it's a bit weird at first, but eventually you'll see that it makes perfect sense - just like B&P and the K2000), but who'd have thought it would turn out to be the best HTML editor I could find. One of the great things about the program is it's integration. The Word Processor, for example, is also the text editor, the HTML editor, and the web browser. I discovered that by being careful about the order I applied styles to certain parts (in the same manner that you would apply styles in any word processor), it could produce very clean HTML and would automatically convert non-HTML characters to HTML form. The amount of time it saved was amazing. No longer did I have to hand-code every tiny detail. I even wrote a macro (in StarOffice's excellent basic-like language) to re-format the text and convert paragraphs into a single line with no new-line characters which saved even more time. Of course, it was still a shocking amount of work, but nowhere near what I had to do before.
With Gary's scanning and StarOffice's usefulness the task became manageable. And yet, after literally years of work, it's still not finished. The chapter contents and the creation and grabbing of images for the later chapters is still to be finished. Once that is done, this manual shall be offered for download in one big fat archive. Until then, it shall remain here as an online document which hopefully you will find useful.
MikeC (mike@fromwithin.com)