A Collection of Patches to the RISCOS Ltd Programmer's Reference Manuals CD

This repository contains a set of patch files which correct various defects in the RISCOS Ltd. Programmer's Reference Manuals CD.

A PRMs CD reclines on red velour. Picture credit: C.J.E. Microcomputator's

Hey! An Old Man is Talking!

Way way back in the futuristic year 2000 I was responsible for producing the RISCOS Ltd. Programmer's Reference Manuals CD¹. It was intended to be an updated equivalent of The Tekkie Disc from Emerald Publishing, which had needed its own special reader software² to render its custom DrawFile-based file format. For the PRMs CD we would instead use HTML for the content.

We received the Framemaker source files from Pace Micro Technology³ and set about converting it to HTML. It wasn't easy. The HTML that emerged from our entirely legal student edition of Framemaker was coated in a layer of machine-generated grot that not even liberal reapplications of HTMLTidy would save us from. I ended up fixing a lot of the HTML manually, mainly to keep the structure consistent from section to section.

Additionally, many of the diagrams were missing, having remained as references to files still living on Acorn's/Pace's network. I re-drew them all from scratch in Draw, obtaining any required screenshots by reconfiguring my machine to look like RISC OS 2, or 3, as required. I am amazing.

In order to keep the manual pages readable across the typical RISC OS browsers of the day: Fresco, Browse and - god forbid - Webster X fucking L, we had to resort to removing the ornate characters like double arrows and math symbols and replace them with small PNG equivalents. Here in the future, now that we live on the moon and wear silver jumpsuits, these can now be removed, and we can fix various other issues too.

Patches

Plainly, I can't distribute the contents of the original CD. The rights are now likely mired in the perpetual, energy draining and boring RISC OS ownership squabbles. So instead here is a bunch of patches to hopefully fix most of the major problems should you happen to own a copy of the disc, or y'know find it on the internet...

Applying the Patches

• Clone this repository
• Copy the contents of the PRMs CD into PRMS_CD
• Run ./apply.sh

Fixes

• The HTML is changed to be UTF-8 encoded. Unicode codepoints replace the use of HTML entities, e.g. × is replaced with ×.
• Where small PNG files were previously used to replace problematic symbols, they have been removed and replaced by the correct Unicode codepoint.
• Regexps used in the original conversion resulted in some runs of uppercased text. These are fixed.

Related Projects

Gerph made PRMinXML which is the correct way to handle this. http://gerph.org/riscos/ramble/documentation.html

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Footnotes

1. I wanted to call it Programmer's Bookshelf. I'd drawn a lovely picture of an open book too. ↩

2. Which used to consume all of the RAM in your Arc, leaving no space for coding – useful! ↩

3. The then-owners of the RISC OS rights. ↩