Survex Help

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 10:49:44AM +0000, Andy Waddington on Survey stuff wrote:
> Paul> could not open any of the files with extension *.svx
> 
> Olly> right-click and choose "Process"
> 
> I suspect that when Paul says "open" he wants to look at a .svx file, rather
> than process it through Survex. Right-click and choose "Open with..." which
> should pop up a list of possible programs. Choose your favourite plain
> vanilla text editor

Sorry, but Andy's advice here is rather unhelpful.  I suspect he's not used
a recent version of Survex on MS Windows.

Under Microsoft Windows, the right button menu on a .svx file in explorer
includes two filetype specific options.  These are: "Open" and "Process".

The default option (what happens if you just double-click on a .svx file) is
"Open".  As set up by the installer, this loads the file into Notepad.

Using "Open with..." is long-winded.  If you prefer something over Notepad,
it's far better to edit the file association than to have to choose the editor
from a list every time.  Rather counter intuitively, the easiest way to edit
the file associations is from explorer via View->Folder Options... and click on
the "File Types" tab.

> (preferably one which copes with Unix-style newlines,
> ie. not Notepad, although I bet the example dataset is built with <cr-lf> to
> avoid the problem.

The zip version is (intended for MS Windows/MS DOS) has end of line markers
suitable for those platform.

The tar.gz version (intended for Unix) has end of line markers suitable for
that platform.

(RISC OS users currently get the MS DOS end of lines, but neither of them have
complained yet...)

> > Some people create a "template" .svx file
> 
> There used to be some examples of such template files in the Austria dataset
> (which is what I assume you are still using as the example dataset ?). I
> think they will be in a directory with a name like "Templates" or similar.

The script which builds the sample data set archives from the CUCC repositry
carefully strips out unused files (there's a lot of cruft in there which we
ought to clean out really) so you don't get the templates.  The CUCC ones
are in dire need of updating anyway, so this is probably a good thing.

Cheers,
Olly