Author

Larry Robertson

Current Version

SP Wizard version 1.4.32

History

SP Wizard was born in 1994 as a Visual Basic wrapper around SGMLS, and at that time was called SGMLS Manager. Developed by Larry Robertson to allow authors using a non-SGML aware editor to parse their documents without any knowledge of MSDOS and associated batch files. When James Clark introduced SP to the public SP Wizard grew out of SGMLS Manager. Now its most valuable as a DTD and test data development tool for students who can't afford expensive development tools.

SP Wizard had been tested under Windows 3.1, 95, NT 3.51, and NT 4.0. It has also been tested under a NT 4.0 network environment over a T1 line and modem. Supports long filenames and UNC. Testing under Windows NT 4.0 has shown a speed increase of over 200% over running Windows 95 as far as the DOS wrapper OLE Automation, for this reason I recommend running this application under Windows NT 4.0 for best performance.

What does SP Wizard do for SP?

SP Wizard is a Visual Basic application that calls on the services of NSGMLS and SPAM to parse or normalize SGML instances.
Allows you to interactively change settings
        of all command line parameters and
        environment variables.

Allows multiple files to be parsed at the
        press of a button.

Displays clickable error messages which
        puts the cursor in front of the offset
        within the line that was in error.

Allows you to correct errors as you find
        them.

Search and Replace.

Undo up to 32000 characters at multiple levels.

Prints reports of error messages and files
        that parsed with no errors.

OLE Automation for NSGMLS, SPAM
        and execution of DOS programs which
        can be used from Visual Basic and
        Visual C++.

Features not supported

SP Wizard does not support the following SP functionality:
-alinktype
-bbctf
-B
-csysid
-C
-Ddirectory
SP Wizard might not support unicode versions of SP, and has not been tested on European versions of Windows 95 and NT. If anyone finds a way to make it work let me know.

SP File Names

All 32 SP files were taken from the SP 1.2.0 distribution, and 16 bit SP files were taken from SP 1.1.1. In order to support both installation of 16 and 32 bit versions in Windows 3.x, 95 and NT all binaries (exe files) were renamed as follows:
Original Name  New 16 BIT Name  New 32 BIT Name  Location 
NSGMLS.EXE  NSGMLS16.EXE  NSGMLS32.EXE  Windows Directory 
SPAM.EXE  SPAM16.EXE  SPAM32.EXE  Windows Directory 
SGMLNORM.EXE SGMLN16.EXE SGMLN32.EXE Windows Directory
SPENT.EXE  N/A  SPENT32.EXE  Windows Directory 
 

IMPORTANT INSTALLATION NOTE

If you have install a previous version of SP Wizard you MUST delete the old INI file located in the installation directory. The 32 bit version has an uninstall program but it will not delete the INI file for you. It must be done manually. The 16 bit version has no uninstall program, please remove previous versions before you install a new version. To install make a temp directory, copy the zip file into the temp directory, unzip the file, and run setup.exe

LIMITATION OF 16 BIT VERSION

If you using the 16 bit version under DOS 6.22 or lower you can expect command line and environment variables to be truncated at 127 bytes. To avoid this problem you should:
  1. Install SP Wizard in a directory directly off the root of any hard drive and name the directory with as few characters as possible (i.e. C:\SPW).
  2. Keep your sgm files in a shallow directory structure (i.e. C:\DATA). Do not keep your dtd, entity, and sgm files in a directory that has a long path (i.e. C:\SGML\PARSERS\SPWIZ16\PROJ1\DATA) because this will eat up all of the 127 characters very quickly.
  3. Create a file called CATALOG in the same directory as the data to be parsed. This will eliminate the need to add more directory paths to the catalog path under setup directories menu.
  4. Look under the help menu for entries that should be made in your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files.

Features added to Version 1.4.32

  1. New: Added SP1.2.0 to the distribution of the 32 bit version.
  2. New: Added common dialog to all dialog boxes to allow UNC (Universal Naming Convention) and Network Neighborhood access.
  3. New: Added an extra message area that displays only the error or warning and color coded messages, red=error, blue=warning, and black=information.
  4. New: Added additional debug information that shows the version information for all DLLs and OCXs used by SP Wizard.

Known Bugs

  1. Line number and byte number fields do not update after a search/find or search/replace. (Submitted by Larry Robertson)
  2. If you make a correction to the document that either deletes a line or adds a line then the error line number will be off by the number of lines you added or deleted. This problem has no easy solution. The best thing to do in this case is to re-parse after such a correction so that the error line numbers will reflect reality. (Submitted by Larry Robertson)

Bug Reports

If you find any bugs, please send mail to Larry Robertson.

This version has debug routines activated. If you receive an error while running this program a message will be displayed and recorded. Information about your operating system, version of Windows, language of Windows, and about the error itself will be displayed if you choose "Windows Info for Bug Reports" off of the Help menu.

Please copy this information to the clipboard and paste it into an e-mail message, alternately attach the file DEBUG.TXT located in the same directory as SPWiz32.exe to the e-mail message. Send the e-mail message to me along with an explanation as to how to recreate the error(s). Whenever possible also include a simplified DTD and document instance if you feel they relate to the problem.

I really want to here from you about any bugs you find in this application. I will fix them as soon as possible, but if I don't know about them I can't fix them. Please take the time to send me an e-mail. I have made it very easy to gather the information I need to know about you system and the error(s) by making the program do the work. I may call upon you to help test any bug fixes that cannot be recreated on my machines.

Thank you.

Future Enhancements

  1. Catalog Wizard to allow easy editing of 9401 catalog files.
  2. Implement -alinktype?
  3. Implement -B Batch processing as built into NSGMLS?
  4. Implement -b BCTF?
  5. Implement Hytime link validation.
  6. Replace NSGMLS DOS wrapper OLE Automation Class with James Clark's New Grove 1.0 OLE Automation Class. SPAM however can not be fully implemented under Grove 1.0 OLE Automation Class because there is no access to the document type public identifiers and other functionality. Initial performance testing shows that there will be at least a 1000% increase in the speed of an NSGMLS parse over the current DOS OLE Automation however there is a limited command line switch availability. The upgrade to Grove 1.0 OLE Automation for NSGMLS only will be released with version 1.5.x of SP Wizard.
If you any suggestions, please send mail to Larry Robertson.

Disclaimer

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of SP Wizard and associated documentation files (the ``Software''), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so., subject to the following conditions:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL LARRY ROBERTSON BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

PLEASE BACKUP ALL OF YOUR FILES BEFORE USING THIS PRODUCT!

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