Jeanne's World    Apple Guide Place

Elko
An Apple Guide Parser and Indexer

Elko is a HyperTalk application I wrote a couple of years ago to help me make sense of the structure of large guides. You use Elko by importing your Guide source files into the stacks; after importing, you can display (and navigate to) the components of any sequence or panel, and view any context check, prompt, or format. Elko consists of seven stacks:

• Overview
  Central summary, report generation, and import.
• Sequences
  A card for each sequence, listing the components (panels, context checks, etc.) that sequence uses. Everything is clickable, so clicking a panel in a sequence's list shows that panel's card.
• Panels
  A card for each panel, listing the components that panel uses and the panel text.
• Coaches
• Context Checks
• Prompts
• Index
  Generates a GuideScript index file based on a list of index terms you provide.

You can print any card, mark certain cards (either with a HyperTalk command or by clicking the checkbox icon in the upper right corner) and print marked cards, or print the entire contents of a stack.

The stacks keep track of which components belong to which files, so if you re-import a file you've changed, Elko will offer to replace the old components with the ones from the new version of the file.

You can download Elko (89K). If you don't have HyperCard, you will also need to obtain the HyperCard Player (1.4M) from Apple's web site. Elko can be used with HyperCard or HyperCard Player version 2.2 or later.

Documentation

• Setting up and Using Elko
• Creating Elko Reports
• Making an Index With Elko

Deficiencies

Elko only imports plain text files, something of a pain if you work with Word or MacWrite II format (you need to Save As in text format).

The user interface is not great. If I ever work on this again, I'll implement it as a standalone application, use a sensible custom menu bar, get rid of some of those buttons, and probably lose the faux-grayscale. (What can I say - I fell hard for the NeXT interface in 1988 and I've never quite gotten over it.)

Nomenclature

Why is this called "Elko"? You may well ask. The reason is that the code names for Apple Guide-related projects all had something to do with Nevada, and I wasn't quite brave enough to use "Mustang Ranch".

Jeanne A. E. DeVoto jaed@jaedworks.com