Hugi Interface User Guide
Minimum Requirements
- Pentium 120,
- 32MB of RAM,
- Graphics card with 2MB of onboard memory,
- DirectX 5.
The graphics card should have a hardware blitter for better performance. To
enjoy true color modes, the graphics card should have at least 4MB of onboard
memory.
Troubleshooting
Some popular graphics card drivers have a bug that causes the program to lock up on startup (known to happen with S3Trio and Intel740). In such a case you can try to run the program in high color mode (disabling true color option) or to disable vertical retrace sync. option. A better solution is to get newer drivers from the manufacturer.
Speed Tradeoffs
On old systems the program may run slow. To make it run smoother, you can disable some options in the startup dialogbox, for example decrease music quality (or turn the music off for good), disable special effects or decrease JPEG quality (speed up JPEG decompression).
Navigating
It is easy to navigate through articles both with mouse and keyboard. As there are two types of articles, ones with continuous contents, and ones with fixed-height pages that can contain columns, the techniques of scrolling them differ a bit.
To scroll a typical contiguous article, you can:
- use up/down arrows, which select links and scroll articles vertically by a fixed small amount (typically a line),
- use Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll articles by a page,
- press Space key to precisely scroll articles down,
- roll the mouse wheel which scrolls articles in a way depending on the wheel settings,
- move mouse cursor to the upper or lower edge of the screen and press left mouse button to scroll articles by a line,
- move mouse cursor to the left or right edge of the screen and press left mouse button to scroll articles by a page,
- drag the scrollbar thumb to quickly position articles,
- click on the scrollbar beyond the thumb to cause scrolling by a page,
- press Home or End key to scroll an article to the beginning or to the end.
To scroll an article with columns you can:
- use up/down arrows, which select links and scrolls articles by a column,
- use Page Up/Page Down keys to scroll articles by a page,
- use left/right arrows, which scroll articles by a column,
- roll the mouse wheel to scroll articles by a column per threshold,
- move mouse cursor to the upper or lower edge of the screen and press left mouse button to scroll articles by a page,
- move mouse cursor to the left or right edge of the screen and press left mouse button to scroll articles by a column,
- drag the scrollbar thumb to quickly position articles,
- click on the scrollbar beyond the thumb to cause scrolling by a page,
- press Home or End key to scroll an article to the beginning or to the end.
Some other legacy key combinations also exist:
- Shift+arrow down/up work like Page Down/Up,
- Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End work like Home and End,
- Ctrl+Page Up and Ctrl+Page Down also work like Home and End,
- left and right arrows in single-column articles scroll by a page up and down.
You can move through visible links either using up and down arrow keys or by pointing on the links with the mouse. To enter (activate) a link you can press Enter, Ctrl+right arrow or simply click left mouse button on that link. This way you can enter an article or cause some external action (e.g. start a web browser).
To exit an article and return to a previous one you can right-click, press Backspace, Esc or Ctrl+left arrow.
To quit being in the main article (e.g. menu), you can double click right mouse button, press Backspace or Esc. In any other article you can press F10, Alt+Q or Alt+X.
Pressing keys 1 through 8 you can select a tune. Of course the actual number of available tunes depends on an issue. To select a tune entered in the startup dialogbox, you can press the F3 key. To turn off the music, you can press 0 key. You may also want to adjust the overall sound volume with + (plus) and - (minus) keys up and down respectively. The music is normally playing in cyclic mode, i.e. song by song. To select other modes you can press the R key for random playback or the L key for looping playback. To return to the cyclic mode press the C key.
If an issue (or an article) contains more than one background image/theme, the other themes can be activated with Ctrl+number keys (numbers 1 through 9 are available).
Other available keys:
- F1 - display help,
- F2 - save current article to disk in HTML, if only possible,
- F4 - enable/disable effects (e.g. smooth scrolling) at run-time,
- F7 - search through articles by words,
- Ctrl+Enter - copy selected link to clipboard.
Technical Stuff
The program uses registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Chris Dragan\Panorama to store configuration information.
The program uses system temporary directory (TEMP or TMP environment variable) to store temporary files (usually font libraries).
Articles are saved in a subdirectory SAVE (sub- to current directory). The list of visited articles is saved in file visited.txt in current directory.
The program uses Intependent JPEG Group's JPEG decompression routines: http://www.ijg.org/
The program uses unrar decompression routines: http://www.rarsoft.com/
The program is capable of playing modules (XM, IT, S3M and MOD) as well as MP3s and WAVs using BASS music system http://www.icl.ndirect.co.uk/music/.