There's been quite some complaining on the nets about the new drivers for the StyleWriter and the Personal LaserWriter LS, not so much because of the drivers themselves, but because the driver kits now include TrueType versions of the LaserWriter Plus fonts (earlier they shipped with only Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol)

Welcome to TidBITS-100 and our new setext format! The term "setext" stands for "structure-enhanced text" and we have designed and optimized the format for use primarily by online publications such as TidBITS (i.e., 7-bit text only)

ResEdit Template Goof -- In our last issue, which was the last HyperCard stack, I had planned to include a ResEdit fmnu template to aid in editing the System 7 Finder (for those of you who didn't see that issue, it included a number of ways to modify your Finder to make it faster, more useful, or merely different)

RasterOps 364 Video Bug -- Mark H. Anbinder writes: Owners of the RasterOps 364 video card for the SE/30 who have tried using System 7 may find that they get occasional, unexplainable system errors (usually reported by the Mac as bus errors)

Again, from Mark H. Anbinder. On page 97 of the Macintosh User's Guide for PowerBook computers, there is an illustration showing how to insert a battery into the PowerBook 140/170 recharger

I've written in the past about the cute personal organizer (nanocomputer?) from Infogrip called the miniBAT. I've used one since early August when Ward Bond, Infogrip's president, sent me one to try

Virtually every article ever written about ResEdit warns you to always work on a copy and to keep backups and so on. This warning has become somewhat cliche, but we're going to do it anyway: only work on a copy of the file and keep backups

If you don't have an fmnu template (see below) and you want to change or add a command key to a menu item, you have to poke around until you find the text of the menu item's name (e.g

The System 7 Finder has been completely rewritten in C++, so none of the old ways to customize the Finder with ResEdit work anymore. There are, however, a couple of things you can do with ResEdit in the new Finder, too

Sometimes it's nice to quit the Finder. This frees up a little bit of memory (not as much as you would think) but, even better, it lets you edit the Finder or rebuild your desktop without rebooting (you can hold down the Command and Option keys when the Finder restarts and it rebuilds the desktop)

When the Finder opens or closes an item, it shows an animation effect usually called the "ZoomRect" (zooming rectangles describes it pretty well, so that's what those innovative programmers called the procedure)

When the amount of free space in the Finder is more than one megabyte, the Finder displays the free space in megabytes. I like it to keep displaying in K

The rename delay is tied to the setting for double-click speed in the Mouse Control Panel. The slower the double-click speed, the longer you wait for the Finder to enter edit mode after you click on a file name

One of the new features in Finder 7 is that it can substitute one application for another, assuming the second application can open the first one's documents

This is our last weekly issue for 1991, although I hope to release a special issue about ResEdit tricks that you can play with your System 7 Finder later this week