Mary Bernard's Customization and Programming Notes

Resources

The Customization and Programming Guide

The CPG is the principal resource. I have revised and updated it for v. 8 of Nota Bene for Windows.You can download it from the CPG page of the Nota Bene website or from the CPG page of  Rick Penticoff's NB Users' website:  

    http://www.notabene.com/cpg.html

NBKEY.NB--the Keyboard Table

This table shows the key assignments of all keys in all the shift states (Unshifted, Shift, Ctrl, etc..) in NB.KBD as delivered. You should print it out if you are doing keyboard customizing. Open it by clicking Help, Key Charts.

Greg Polly's Tutorial

Next is Greg Polly's basic tutorial on how to write a program in Nota Bene for Windows. You should use the codes lists in Chapters 2 and 8, rather than his appendix of command codes, which are taken from the DOS edition of the CPG.

    http://www.penticoff.com/nb/help/howtorun.htm

XYWWWEB.U2

This is an extraordinary compendium of XPL programs, written and maintained by Robert Holmgren and Carl Distefano. They came to NB by way of XyWrite, Nota Bene's now-defunct parent program. It is safe to say that they know more about XPL programming than anyone but NB's own programmers.

The compendium is called XYWWWEB.U2, and you can download it from http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/. It contains hundreds of XPL programs. Some of them are only for XyWrite (noted in the documentation), but Holmgren and Distefano have worked hard at making much of U2 compatible with NB. You install U2 by unzipping it, copying its files into your main NB program directory, and copying a string to an empty key definition in your keyboard file: a key which will thereafter be your U2 help key. You can then run U2 programs by typing their name on the action line and striking your U2 help key.

The Nota Bene Users' List

This is a helpful and friendly group of NB users, from complete novices to people who have been using the program for many years, have done a good deal of NB customization and programming, and are happy to share their experience.

There is no such thing as a stupid question on the NB list, and you won't be told to Read The Manual--especially for customization questions, since the manuals are many years out of date. For more information, or to subscribe, go to the following page:

  https://lists.h-net.org/mailman/listinfo/notabene

Rick Penticoff's NB Users' website

This is a major source of tips, manuals, user programs and useful links. It is at: http://www.penticoff.com/nb/index.htm

The XyWrite Programming Language User's Guide

On the XyWWWeb site you can find a very detailed programming guide: http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/XPL.PDF. It was written for XyWrite for DOS. It also has the disadvantage that you have to know ways in which XyWrite differed from NB: for instance that F5, not F9, goes to the action line, and that phrase keys are called save/gets. But it is a valuable resource for anyone who gets serious about XPL programming, since most of the core XPL code is unchanged.

It is not about programming; rather, it provides an excellent introduction to using the NB word processor, especially in conjunction with Orbis and Ibidem. You can also view his useful short videos on these topics.