Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!garfield!john13 From: john13@garfield.MUN.EDU (John Russell) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Devices in general Keywords: devices speak 1.3 1.4 Message-ID: <5015@garfield.MUN.EDU> Date: 28 Nov 88 23:35:52 GMT Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's Lines: 33 Just as an addendum to my earlier posting re: the speak device losing the last character in most write requests, there's also strangeness involving punctuation; I haven't been able to make speak: recognize punctuation marks for inflection unless the mark is immediately followed by a "pronounceable" character, ie. not another punctuation mark or whitespace. This seems to be related, as if the very last character of each sentence is being dis- regarded. I am still very interested in seeing what sort of devices could be constructed and integrated into the general environment. 14 (the number assign shows as being mounted now) is only a start :-). One which comes immediately to mind is a spooling daemon, spool:. Although I know of a number of spooling programs and facilities, the ones I've seen all require you to either know the filenames in advance, or go through extensive physical interaction to print new files. A spool device would allow this process to be automated, and remove the need to wait for DPaint to finish printing before sending that Pagesetter document. The device would simply need to stash the data in memory, wait for the printer to become free, then take control and send the next available job. Another which appeals to me is a Tek emulation device, which might be opened with a filename that specified the size, colours, scaling etc. for the drawing screen. This would allow any terminal program to become a Tektronix emulator, as long as it had the ability to do an ASCII capture. This sort of device would lend itself to more built-in intelligence, perhaps featuring the ability to pan, zoom, and dump data to disk based on requests passed to it. John -- "Media is Ignorent, Researchers Say" -- either this is an incredibly sarcastic headline-writer, or...