
                    MAGSCAN


                  The BEEBUG


               Bibliography Disc



























WARNING At no time should you alter or compact the
MAGSCAN disc, since it is specially prepared for both 40 and 80
track users and an alteration could corrupt it completely. 







































(c) BEEBUGSOFT 1985 

P.0. Box 50, St. Albans, Herts.


All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced in
whole or part by any means without written permission of the
publisher. Unauthorised hiring, renting, loaning, public
performance or broadcasting of this product or its constituent parts
is prohibited. While every care is taken, the publisher cannot be held
responsible for any errors in this product. 









page1


                         MAGSCAN

              The BEEBUG Bibliography Disc 


                    I. INTRODUCTION


Beebug has passed its third anniversary, and the thirty or so issues
of the magazine produced to date comprise a formidable reference
work of articles, hints, tips, reviews, programs and ideas on almost
every imaginable aspect of the BBC micro; but as this source
becomes richer, so it becomes more difficult to locate specific items
in the ever increasing collection of issues. 

MAGSCAN is our answer to the problem. It allows you instantly to
locate all references to any chosen subject that have occurred
anywhere in the first 30 issues of BEEBUG; and it is easily
extendible to cover volume 4. 

MAGSCAN is supplied on a dual format 40/80 track disc and
contains almost 1000 entries each giving the title, a brief description
of the article, and the volume, issue and page numbers. Flexible
search routines allow you to interrogate the database by volume
number and article type and to specify up to two strings. MAGSCAN
then searches its database of titles and brief descriptions for a match. 







                    2. GETTING STARTED 

Insert the disc into your disc drive (drive 0 if you have dual drives).
Hold down the Shift key and press Break, then release the Break key
and finally the Shift key. This will auto-boot the disc (regardless of
whether you have a 40 or 80 track drive), and MAGSCAN is now
ready for use. 











page 2

                 3. USING THE BIBLIOGRAPHY 

On booting up MAGSCAN you are presented with a panel of options
from which to enter the criteria for your search. At any point during
this process, pressing Escape will take you back to the previous
entry. Or if a search or printout is in progress, Escape will return you
to the front panel. The search criteria are selected as follows: 


VOLUME NUMBER

First of all, enter the volume number that you want to search through
or enter " * " to search through all three volumes. The default on
boot-up is " * " , which can be entered by pressing Return. 


ARTICLE TYPE

Next select the letter from the list displayed for the type of article you
want to find, or enter " * " to search through all types. The default on
boot-up is " * " , which can be entered by pressing Return. 


THE SEARCH STRINGS

MAGSCAN allows you to enter up to two search strings, and to
select the logic linking the two strings. Each string can be up to 12
characters in length and is terminated by pressing Return. Strings
may contain upper or lower case text but searches are not case
specific. Thus if you enter "ACORN", MAGSCAN will search for
"Acorn", "ACORN", "acorn" etc. 




















page 3

When the first string has been entered you are prompted for a
second. This is optional, and pressing Return at this point will enter a
null for the second string: though if this is not the first search after
boot-up, you may need to press the space bar to delete any
previously searched word from the slot before pressing Return. 

After entering the search strings you may specify search logic.
When performing a search for a single string the search logic plays
no part, and we will deal with this later. Moreover, when searching
for a single string, you may enter the search string in the first or
second string slot. 




AN EXAMPLE 

As an example of a single string search, suppose that you wished to
locate all reviews in vols 1, 2 and 3 covering Epson printers. To do this
set up the search as follows: 

   Vol no                              * <return> 
   Article type                        C <return> 
   String 1                        EPSON <return> 
   String 2                              <return> 
   Logic                                 <return> 
   Hard copy                             <return> 


If you try this you will see that MAGSCAN finds six reviews on this
search. They appear on screen in blocks of three, with an instruction
to press the space bar between blocks. A beep announces that the
search has been completed, and a final press of the space bar takes
you back to the front panel. 
If you begin a second search you will notice that MAGSCAN retains
the previous search parameters as defaults for the next search, and
pressing Return on any field will re-enter them. 















page 4



Thus for example if you wish to repeat the search carried out above,
but for Acorn rather than Epson, just press Return on the first two
fields, then enter ACORN where EPSON appeared in field three.

To find all references in a particular article type, select your first two
fields, then enter a null in fields 3 and 4. This is done by pressing the
space bar followed by Return to overwrite an earlier default string.
Again the logic is not important for this form of search.



WILD CARDS

The word searches covered so far have made no use of MAGSCAN'S
wildcard facility, and the words searched for will only be found if they
appear alone rather than as part of a longer string, so that a search
for "ROM" would miss the word "EPROM" for example.

MAGSCAN allows wild cards to be selected by placing a full stop at
the beginning or end of a string. For example "ACORN" will find the
exact word "Acorn" or "ACORN" but will reject occurrences of the
string within a longer string, and "Acorns" for example will not be
found. But "ACORN." will find "Acorn", "ACORN", "Acorns",
"Acornsoft" etc, and ".ROM." will find "Rom", "Prom", "Eprom",
"Roms", "Proms" etc.

























 page 5




THE SEARCH LOGIC


So far we have glossed over the selection of the search logic in
MAGSCAN. Quite simply the user may specify the logic linking the
two search strings as either OR or AND. To do this, enter either "O"
or "A" on field 5 as prompted. The default on boot-up is "OR" and this
can be entered by pressing Return. If you select "OR" a find will be
made if either of the strings is found in an entry. If you select "AND" a
find will only be made if both strings are found in an entry.

As you will appreciate, both options have their uses, and the choice
allows the user considerable flexibility.

For example if you are looking for an FX call to redefine the Escape
key, and you think that it was covered in a Beebug Hint, a good option
to go for would be:

                           String 1      .FX.
                           String 2      ESCAPE
                           Logic         AND

This will pick out all occurrences where "FX" and "ESCAPE" appear
in either the title or description of an entry.

Alternatively if you were searching for all references to Micronet or
Prestel, you might search for the following:

                           String 1      MICRONET
                           String 2      PRESTEL
                           Logic          OR

HARDCOPY
To produce a printout of the results of a search you should enter a "Y"
in field 6. The default on boot-up for this field is "N", and as usual the
default is entered by pressing Return. Printout can be halted by
pressing Escape.











page 6


        4. CREATING YOUR OWN BIBLIOGRAPHY

It is possible to create your own bibliography providing you have a
simple knowledge of Basic programming and a text editor (such as
View or Wordwise). The following notes should allow you to extend
MAGSCAN for volume four of Beebug. 



DATA FILES
The data for each entry is stored in three text files called VOL 1, VOL2
and VOL3. Each file is for a particular volume of Beebug and should
not exceed &5700 bytes long. 

Note: In actual fact the files VOL 1 and VOL2 have been split into two,
to fit onto the MAGSCAN disc which is supplied in a special dual
format. When you produce a file for volume four it should be a single
file similar to VOL3 but called VOL4. 




FILE FORMAT
Each entry in the file comprises five lines: 

Line 1 - The character " ^ " followed by a letter "A" to "J"
followed by a Carriage Return. Where " ^ " is the symbol
marking the beginning of the entry - it should not be used
anywhere else. The letter following this indicates the type of
article : 























page7



   A - General Article 
   B - Programming Article 
   C - Review 
   D - News 
   E - Hint 
   F - Points Arising 
   G - Application Program 
   H - Utility Program 
   I - Games Program 
   J - Miscellaneous Program 

Line 2 - Title of article. This should have a maximum of 39
characters and each word should be separated by a space.
The line should end with a Carriage Return. 

Lines 3 & 4 - Two optional lines that give a brief description
of the article. Each word should be separated by a space and
the line should end with a Carriage Return. Again, each line
should contain a maximum of 39 characters. 

 Line 5 - The character " " followed by the issue number
and the page number. The two numbers should be separated by
a space and the line should end with a Carriage Return. 

Each entry should follow on straight after the previous one and the
character " [ " should be placed at the very end to mark the end of a file
 The final entry in a file should Iook something like this: 

   ^ B 
   A New Graphics System 
   Software Review - Computer Aided Design 
   Published by Software Ltd 
   \3 23
   [ 

















page 8



As the searching is carried out on lines 2 and 3 of the entry, these two
lines should contain all additional key words that relate to the subject
of the article. 



ALTERING THE BASIC PROGRAM
It is necessary to alter the value of the variable N% in line 110 of the
program "INDEX" to 4, which is the last volume number. 



DUAL FORMAT DISCS
The disc supplied is a dual format disc and contains no free space for
extra files. To add VOL4 to MAGSCAN you should copy all the files
except # -******1 # -******2 to a blank disc and use that instead.
You must copy each file individually with the command  COPY. A 40
track disc should give you an extra 35k of storage, which will be more
than enough for volume 4, while an eighty track disc should contain
enough space to take Beebug into the nineteen nineties! 

At no time should you alter or compact the MAGSCAN disc, since it
is specially prepared for both 40 and 80 track users and an alteration
could corrupt it completely. 




























               MAGSCAN UPDATE DISC
              VOLUME 4 NUMBERS 1 TO 10
1.  The Magscan Update Disc cointains the file VOL4 which is
the Magscan entries for volume 4, numbers 1 to 10. 

2.  Both this disc and the original magscan disc are dual
formatted and should not be altered in any way. 

3.  The following notes explain how to produce a new master
disc containing the original three volumes plus the new
volume 4. 


i. Copy all files from the original Magscan disc to a
newly formatted disc using: 
                    *COPY 0 1 $.* 
This new disc will be the new Magscan master.


ii. Copy the file VOL4 from the Magscan Update Disc to
the new Magscan master using: 
                    *COPY 0 1 VOL4 
the new Magscan master now contains all the necessary files. 


iii. Load the program "INDEX" from the new master, and
change the value of the variable N% in line 110,
from 3 to 4. Now resave "INDEX". 


iv. Finally, with the new master in drive 0, type: 
                    *OPT 4,3 
This is to set the disc for auto boot.


NOTE: If you only have a single disc drive then the COPY
commands in (a) and (b) above should read: 

                    *COPY 0 0 and not *COPY 0 1 


4.Data far further issues of Beebug can be found on the
monthly Beebug magazine cassette and disc. Each new issue
for volume 4 should be added to the end of the file VOL
 using Wordwise or View. Remember to reposition the end
of file marker as explained in section 4 of the Magscan manual. 


