Playing with GrandView

Posted by Derek Cornish
Sep 16, 2009 at 06:28 PM

Jack,

I just use “/A /V” at present. I’ve been using /A for years but had completely forgotten why, until you asked. It supresses the initial splash screen, which is dramatic but slow. There’s quite a lot of GV arcana in the original outliners.com archives, e.g: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/archives/viewt/2160

More or less everything else is as Cassius has mentioned. In the Misc tab, I don’t check the “Alt-Enter” shortcut key, which switches GV from its DOS window to full screen. This is because (a) I never use “full screen” as my laptop DOS fonts are awful, and I get an almost full-size DOS window with my current font setting (see below); and (b) because within GV itself “Alt-Enter” makes a new child heading or sub-heading.

One general point about setting up GV in XP: When one makes a Grandview shortcut icon (the “gv.pif”) by right-clicking on “gv.exe” this provides access to a complete range of settings - the ones Cassius discussed. On gv.pif’s “fonts” tab I have GV set to use 9x15 TruType fonts.

Once one is in Gv, however, one can access another set of settings by right-clicking anywhere on the top line of the initial menu screen (or any other screen thereafter). By top line I mean the top frame of the screen, which contains the name of the program (Granview, with a little c:\ icon in front of it). In addition to “Move, Size, Minimize, Maximize, Close”, right-clicking on the frame also provides access to Edit functions (including cut and paste to and from Windows), Defaults, Properties, and Hide Mouse Pointer.

This Properties tab has a small set of sub-tabs: Options, Font, Layout, Colors. On the Font tab I have 12x14 Raster checked, and this gives me pretty much a full-size window on my 15” laptop screen. Just why there are two potentially conflicting ways of setting up the fonts is a mystery to me, but it works. I have an idea that the 12x14 raster font may not be a standard one but one I bought from Uwe Sieber for $8. http://www.uwe-sieber.de/dosfon_e.html

I have experimented with a variety of ways of getting better cut-and-paste between DOS and XP than the ones provided by XP’s DOS window. TameDOS http://www.tamedos.com/ is probably the best of all programs for tweaking DOS programs in XP, but it is very fiddly to set up, and I’ve not unfortunately persevered enough to get it working satisfactorily - so I currently don’t use it.

Incidentally, as well as Cassius, prresent and past experts on GV in this forum include Steve Cohen, and Steve Zeoli. They have a much deeper appreciation of the scope of the program than I do.

Good luck!