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Comment: Moved "Limitations and conventions" to "Menu, Topic, Help" sub-page.

Each application can have a set of 'topics' associated with it. These topics appear in the topic window on the left hand edge of the screen, below the application name. Normally all the topics are in grey but when the menu key is pressed a topic name is highlighted and a menu display is brought up. The menu consists of up to three columns of commands, which may be selected with a highlight bar or by using a special keyboard sequence also shown on the menu. Each topic and each command may have a page of help text associated with it and in addition the application itself may have a page of help text, perhaps for a general description of its function. An extra information topic, not displayed in the topic window, may be added to provide access to a series of help pages which are not directly associated with keyboard commands. This is useful to explain general features of the application or tips of command usage. 

Limitations and conventions

There are some limitations and conventions regarding menu topics and help; the limitations are:

  1. Diamond sequences should consist of no more than 5 characters, although these may be special characters like arrow keys and Delete.
  2. The first possible match will be selected, so if a diamond sequence 'AB' exists, there is no point having 'ABC' as it cannot be selected.
  3. No command code should be zero, as two zeroes from 'OS_In' are used to represent NUL. Note also that the <SPACE>, <TAB>, <ENTER> and the arrow keys all return command codes and you must make sure you do not clash with these. See "Input and the Keyboard Decoder" for details of these codes.
  4. There should be no more than 7 topics per application and no more than 24 commands per topic. Each command name should consist of no more than 25 characters.
  5. If any commands in a topic have help, then it is strongly recommended that all the topics have help, even if this is just a blank page (set the help pointer to point to a NUL) and the topic itself must have help. 

The conventions, we recommend you subscribe to, are:

    1. Make the first letter of a diamond sequence the first letter of the topic name (eg. PipeDream has BNEW in the Blocks topic).
    2. If topic names coincide with the internal ones, then the order should be the same, eg. 'CURSOR' before 'FILES'.
    3. Commands associated with the arrow keys should be in the order: Right, Left, Up and Down. 

 

The 'pointer to topics' is of the form of a 2 byte offset in a bank, followed by a bank number. The pointer should point to a series of topic definitions arranged like this:

...