Reading C=Hacking

Starting with Issue 11 of Commodore Hacking, the new QuickFind indexing system is utilized to aid readers of the text version in navigating the magazine. At the top of each article or other important place in the magazine, a word prefixed with a special string is present. (If viewing the text version, See the title of this article for an example. Throughout the magazine, if an article is mentioned, it will be followed by a reference string. For example, if we mentioned this article, we would add (Reference: rch) after the name. By using your favorite editor's search function and searching for the string after the word "Reference:", prefixed by the magic prefix string, will move you directly to the article of choice. To merely skip to the next article in the magazine, search only for the magic prefix string.

Some handy indexing strings possibly not referenced anywhere are:

top
top of issue
bottom
bottom of issue
contents
table of contents
legal
legal notice
For those with access to a UNIX system, the command "what" can be run on the issue, which will result in all the article titles being printed.

A slightly different magic prefix string "#(A)" is used to delimit sub-topics or main heading in articles. The text after the magic string differs depending on article content. For the Input/Output column (Reference: io), the text after the magic prefix will either be "c" for comment, or "r" for response. In features and columns, a number after the prefix indicates the ordinal of that heading or sub-topic in the article. If a specific sub-topic is referenced elsewhere in the article, a sub-topic reference will be indicated. A reference to "#(A)r" would be written as "(SubRef: r)".

As time goes on, the role of this indexing system will be expanded and changed to ease navigation of the text version, but minimize the clutter added by these extra items.


Last Updated: 1995-12-4