Notes and Suggestions

If you run out of disk space, ThinkTank will display the message DISK FULL! See the error messages section for suggested courses of action.

You can avoid these conditions by using the PERCENT command to monitor your use of internal memory and disk space.

You give this command by pressing the percent C”%”) key at the Top Level of ThinkTank. ThinkTank responds by displaying the percentages of memory and disk space still available. If you are running short, you can take corrective action before it’s absolutely necessary.

changing ThinkTank’s Command Keys

When you press a key to give a ThinkTank command, it seems to trigger the command directly. Actually this is an oversimplification; there’s a great deal of translation going on, as illustrated in Figure 5—1. For example, suppose you press CTRL—Dto invoke the paragraph editor’s DELETE command. First your computer translates your keystroke into an electronic code, in this case 004, which is defined by the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII, pronounced ask—key). When ThinkTank receives this code, it translates it again into the DELETE command that performs the function you want.

There is nothing magical about either of these trans- lations. Many of the keystroke—to—ASCII conversions are stan- dardized, but some are not. For example, pressing the left arrow key might generate ASCII code 008 on one computer and 164 on another. Similarly, there is substantial flexibility in the way ThinkTank translates ASCII codes into commands.

You can’t ordinarily do much about the’ way your computer translates keystrokes into ASCII codes. But ThinkTank gives you quite a bit of control over its ASCII—to—command trans- lations, which allows you to customize ThinkTank’s command keys to your needs, preferences, and computer system. Although we have preconfigured ThinkTank’s command keys to fit most people’s requirements, there are several reasons why you might want to modify them. For example, you may be using an alternate keyboard that contains special keys you want to assign to ThinkTank commands. There nay be special characters

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