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ETextViewer is
a FREE e-book reader, or a viewer for electronic text (whichever
description suits you) written in Visual Basic 6. I wrote it
primarily to be able to read long text files, like those provided by
the wonderful folk at Project Gutenberg, without having to use a
word processor or a Notepad replacement.
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This revision is to fix a bug pointed out by a few helpful users... Bit of a pesky one that caused the text of any opened file to show as weird ASCII characters! (Reload fixed it, but still - not very nice!) Either way, an easy one to sort out once I could play with the version of riched32.dll that was causing the problem - thanks Henny! :) 8 September 2001 - Version 2.1.1: Not a lot to shout about in terms of what the average user will notice! It turns out that there was a bug which only showed up on foreign-language versions of Windows. Thanks to a helpful user pointing it out and assisting with testing, the problem seems to have been isolated and removed now :) Quick word from the author: I must apologise for ETextViewer's page (and my home page) dropping off the face of the internet several months ago. Magenet have been having some major problems and are still not back up! It's taken a while to re-group and put everything onto another site so apologies for the delay as well. 8 September 2001 - Version 2.1.0: This version finally had an (optional) toolbar in it plus some other handy features like advanced scrolling options. The rest of the changes were more cosmetic relating to improved cursor tracking, reformatting, and text colouring, as well as some bug fixes. 10 February 2001 - Version 2.0.0:This release brought a fairly major overhaul and introduced the long-awaited book-marking option [5 per book], history to remember your last 20 books (and their bookmarks), auto-scrolling of text (you choose time and scroll size), ability to take a command-line arguments and additional bug-fixes for Windows 98 text colour selection.
2 December 2000 - Version 1.4.6: Finally got round to putting in the option for changing margin settings (bowing to popular demands ;) Also fixed a few more bugs in the text sizing and coloring routines and made things a bit slicker overall. Put in a "nice-to-have" option to reformat automatically on opening a new file. 5 August 2000 - Version 1.45: Very minor mod to block the Paste from Clipboard command if there is no usable text. 30 July 2000 - Version 1.44: Now force the Open command to look in the directory that the current file came from (a value-adding suggestion). Slicked up the interface a little more. Put in 'Copy to Clipboard' and 'Select All' menu item to supplement the Ctrl-A /-C keyboard functionality. Change the file open dialog so that "All Files" is also an option. (Any file can be opened, not necessarily read ;) Found a better install program, hence the smaller install file size :) 24 July 2000 - Version 1.43: Improved reformatting option. Put in Paste text from Clipboard so that chunks of text (e.g. mail) can be pasted in, re-formatted and then read with improved legibility. You can tell that I really like this feature! ;) 10 July 2000 - Version 1.41: This version fixes a couple of minor bugs with non-black text colours. Windows 98 still doesn't like the Increase/Decrease font size sequences if the wrong version of Riched32.dll is in the Systems directory. 1 July 2000: ETextViewer is on to version 1.4 at the moment and there are lots of plans for further improvements. I'm aware that there is a lot more that I can do with it but I thought I should release it first and move from there.
Background
ETextViewer was initially inspired by NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook™ software and also driven by the frustration of being forced to download their special encoded versions of every book that I wanted to read. After moving on to Project Gutenberg sites to find additional classics, the only option was to find (or create!) a decent book reader. Since the first option didn't really work out (and I also wanted to get some practice with Visual Basic), I wrote ETextViewer to read the Project Gutenberg files that I downloaded. In the spirit of Project Gutenberg, ETextViewer is 100% freeware although any friendly donations in the form of local t-shirts or bank notes are welcome.
Having Difficulties Running ETextViewer on Your PC? Incorrect version of an OCX file?Some people have found that they have incompatible versions of various .OCX files which prevents the software from running (or kicks them out when they try to edit the margins or scroll!!)To get around these problems, the OCX file which is causing the problem needs to be replaced. On Windows 95/98/ME systems, these files live in the Windows System directory (System32 for Windows NT4)and the newer versions (below) can be safely copied over the older versions. (Making a back-up of the old files first is always recommended!) On Windows 2000/XP machines, these files should be copied straight into ETextViewer's directory. The full set of self-installing OCX files are now available if you want to download them: OCXSetup.exe
Alternately - for more advanced users - if you'd like to download and install
the OCX files yourself the independent files can be obtained from the links
below (ZIPped to make them smaller and to avoid the tendency of some
browsers to try to display them!)
On the versions of Windows where you have to use the Windows\System directory (i.e. not Windows 2000/XP), just putting the .OCX file into the System directory doesn't do the trick - and I have personally seen this on Windows NT4.This might not always work but it's definitely worth a try especially for NT4... Download regocx32.zip (it's free), extract it into a temp directory (ignore the .bat file) and run it from a DOS window. In my case, I had to type: "regocx32.exe c:\winnt\system32\richtx32.ocx"and from that point on, it started to work. Yee-ha! :) (Note that WinNT keeps its OCX files in the System32 directory, all the others just use the Windows\System directory.)
Missing a .DLL File?
If you get an error saying that the program can't run because there is a .DLL file missing, chances are good that it is one of the Visual Basic run-time DLL's. Most people already have these files so they are not commonly included in the install package because they are quite large.
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Last updated 12 July 2003, 10h29 (GMT)
