WSMOOTH

Richard Hale Shaw November 13, 1990 (Utilities)

Purpose: A text-browsing utility, designed specifically for use in Microsoft
Windows 3.0, that provides smooth, bi-directional scrolling at user-selectable
speeds to ease reading from the screen. Its forerunner, SMOOTH.COM, performs
the same function but was not intended for use in Windows unless run in the
full-screen.

Format: WSMOOTH [filename] [msecs] [pixel rows] [/W]

Remarks: WSMOOTH lets you use the mouse or the keyboard to display a
file and control the scrolling speed. If you invoke SMOOTH without specifying
a filename, a file selection dialog box will be displayed. Once a file is
selected, the program will immediately begin scrolling the file in its window.
Scrolling direction is set using the Up and Down Arrow keys or a single mouse
click on the arrows on the vertical scroll bar. PgUp and PgDn flip a screenful
at a time, and Home and End take you to the top or bottom of the file. The
spacebar or a single left mouse click mouse click will freeze scrolling, and a
subsequent keystroke or mouse click will resume. You exit WSMOOTH by pressing
Esc, selecting Exit from the File menu, or double-clicking the System icon.

The msecs parameter lets you set the frequency at which WSMOOTH
scrolls the screen. By default, msecs is set to 100 (milliseconds), so it will
scroll about 10 times a second; a value of 1000 will cause WSMOOTH to scroll
approximately every second.

The pixel rows parameter (set to 1 by default) lets you adjust the
number of rows of pixels scrolled, from 1 to 9. While scrolling you can also
control the number of pixel rows scrolled at a time in three ways: using the
plus and minus keys; double- and single-clicking the right mouse button; or
pressing one of the number keys. Zero brings WSMOOTH to a standstill; numbers
1-9 steadily increase the rate. Notice that WSMOOTH gets progressively less
smooth as you increase the pixel row setting toward 9.

The /W switch causes WSMOOTH to strip the high bit from each character
before displaying it. This feature proves useful when viewing WordStar files
or others that use the high bit to format the document. Try it if a document
you're viewing occasionally appears to contain graphics characters.