Chapter 3 describes how to sign on, and how to navigate using menus and jumps.

For now, I have kept the original title, "Signing On, Using Menus, and Exiting." I'm wondering, though, whether something like "Navigating in VISTA" would be a better title.

One of the things I did initially was go through the book and remove any illustrations that had formatting problems, or had patient or user names in violation of VA standards. There are some illustrations left in this chapter. I'm wondering whether the remaining illustrations are really needed, and if they are, whether they should be re-done in a more up-to-date style. I'd also be interested to hear if anyone thinks that additional illustrations are needed, and if so, where.

Also, obviously, I'd welcome any other suggestions or feedback anybody has.

I think illustrations are useful for people that are more visually focussed. I definitely think they should be redone... ideally to be made in such a way that they look as closely identical to the actual VISTA terminal emulator as possible.

Thanks, Duglas. I wonder if we could use actual screen shots in a couple of places. Or would the printing process degrade the image too much?

Programmers can override "?" and "??" help, so there may be some menus where they do not function as described.

Instead of screen captures, I'd use text in a monosapaced font (e.g., Courier). You could probably cut and paste from a terminal emulator and change the font.

Maybe you talked about the read timeout (DTIME) and I just missed it, but this is configurable and is almost always set to 300 seconds (5 minutes).

Thanks for taking the time to look this over, Greg!

I have added the following paragraph to the "Help with Menus" section:

"Occasionally, you may type one or two question marks and get an unexpected result. This is because the programmers at your facility have the ability to override ? and ?? so that they do something else instead. Hopefully, the change is one that actually helps you in your task. If it is not, contact your IT department and let them know."

There is a timeout feature described in the security chapter; I don't know if it's the same one. When you say it's configurable, do you mean by the programmer or by the user?

There are two things that can happen. A system manager (someone with the XUMGR key) can edit the default timeout for a user using the XUSEREDIT option. A programmer can change the value of DTIME (the variable containing the timeout value), but the programming standards forbid circumventing the system specified timeout for user reads. This timeout doesn't apply to other types of I/O (e.g., reading disk files, reading from TCP/IP connections and the like).

Okay. I've added the following to the security chapter (which is where timing out is discussed):

"Your facility has some leeway in determining how long the system will wait before it logs you off. If you feel that you are getting logged off too often, or if you feel that the system is waiting to long to log you off, contact your IT department to see if the amount of time can be changed."

"Instead of screen captures, I'd use text in a monosapaced font (e.g., Courier). You could probably cut and paste from a terminal emulator and change the font."

I have been re-working some illustrations with Kathy using Omnigraffle, and I was using DejaVu Sans Mono to represent the VISTA terminal. Is Courier the actual default typeface I should be using? I wanted the "screen" illustrations to represent the closest to a default VISTA look as possible.

Duglas

Well, I use Courier New because it is common, but any monospaced font should work. Depending on the format you use, unusual fonts may be a problem for people who do not have them installed on their systems. I've never heard of Omnigraffle, but I wonder if it has something akin to CSS stylesheets where you can define a style for screen captures and thrn define a set of fonts to be used (in order of preference) ending in "mono" for a generic monspaced font.

Okay, I've been looking at OmniGraffle, and it seems like a nice complement to the modeling tool I use on my Mac. Thanks for the pointer!