Help for users of Apple Macintosh who want to run PQMethod under
DOSBox.
For help with PQMethod itself, please refer to the file PQManual.htm. Users may wish to
locate it and keep it open in a browser window the first few
times they run the program. This "help4mac" file does not
repeat the information in the PQManual, but is concerned with
issues such as special key combinations or file format issues
that Mac users may face in using PQMethod within DOSBox on the
Mac.
1. Alternative Key Strokes
Since version 2.0, the rotation add-on program PQROT (contained in
the PQMethod 2.35 package) has got a handy workaround for most
problems with certain keys that do not exist on the Mac keyboard and
for the F-keys that are typically bound to certain functions on the
Mac. It consists in alternative keys or key stroke combination which
you always find in the instructions on screen or in the dedicated
help screens. For instance, pressing F4 on the Mac often
starts Dashboard (as usual) and PQMethod never receives the
keystroke. Now you can, instead of F4 hit ESC first and
then the 4, which does the same. Similarly, on Mac keyboards that do
not have an END key, the alternative key combination ESC - e should
work (if not, holding down the Command
key while pressing the right arrow will do).
2. Full Screen Mode
Holding down Option and pressing Return will toggle the DOSBox (and
PQMethod within it) in and out of full screen mode. On some systems
this reportedly helps PQMethod receive key presses that didn't work
otherwise.
3. File Translations
All input and output files in PQMethod are plain text files without
any formatting. At
this very basic level of sharing data between computer systems there
are nevertheless two compatibility issues. The first consists in the
way characters, that is, the letters of various alphabets and some
special characters, are encoded. The second compatibility issue
refers to the definition of the newline symbol that is necessary to
divide the stream of data into separate lines or paragraphs.
3.1 Character Encoding
If you are using PQMethod only with statements written in English
and SortIDs (names or shortcuts for persons) without special
letters, you can skip this section.
The code pages that are nowadays in use for encoding characters of
the various alphabets differ from those used in the times of MS-DOS.
There are (as far as I know) no differences for numbers and for the
normal Latin letters used in the English language. But if you write
a text with, e.g., German Umlaute like: Ä ö ü ß with a DOS
program like the editor ed.com packaged with PQMethod, and later
view it on the Mac with TextEdit you will see strange symbols
instead of the correct letters.
The PQMethod results file (.lis) is written in English, except for
the statements that are passed through without modifications from
the statement file (.sta) to the output tables. Hence, when a Mac
text program is used for viewing, editing, and printing the PQMethod
results file, only the character encoding of the statements
may be critical. My recommendation therefore for entering the
statements is not to use the DOS editor (ed.com) that can be invoked
from within PQMethod, but to use Mac software like TextEdit.
3.2 Newline Characters
In DOS/Windows text files a line break, also known as newline, is a
combination
of two characters: a Carriage Return (CR) followed by a Line Feed
(LF). In Unix
text files a line break is a single character: the Line Feed (LF).
In Mac text
files, prior to Mac OS X, a line break was single Carriage Return
(CR)
character. Nowadays Mac OS uses Unix style (LF) line breaks.
There are various versions of a pair of tools, unix2dos and
dos2unix, for converting text files in either direction. Erwin
Waterlander's set of Dos2Unix /
Unix2Dos tools contains also the option of character
code conversion.
Many text-file processing programs of both platforms, DOS/Windows
and Mac OS X, have no problem reading text files from the other
system. This is the case with the PQMethod main program. Therefore,
a statement file (.sta) that was created or edited with the Mac
TextEdit, need not be converted. However, if you want to manually edit the data file (.dat)
with TextEdit, it is necessary to translate it to the
DOS/Windows format afterwards because the PQROT plug-in
program that reads the SortIds from this file cannot cope with
the Unix style format. Instead of downloading an extra tool, the
file conversion can also be done with the DOS editor, ed.com, that
is contained already in the PQMethod package:
For loading your data file in the editor, type
ed project.dat
at the c:\PQMETHOD\PROJECTS>
command prompt, where "project" is the name of your
project. Next hit F2 for saving the file again, and Alt/x (= Option
together with X) for exiting ed.com, and the file is saved in the
DOS/Windows type format.
The following section is outdated, perhaps some time somebody
rewrites it to work with the current PQMethod for Windows
version
4. Making a "QSTICK" USB Installation Usable on Both Mac
and Windows
It is assumed that you have installed PQMethod with DOSBox
on your Mac already.
After plugging in the USB flash drive change its name
to QSTICK
Download and unzip the pqm220win.zip,
and copy (drag & drop) the resulting folder PQMethod to
your QSTICK drive.
Copy or move the PQMethod220_DosBox.dmg to the QSTICK
, double-click it for changing its
content:
Open the file dosbox.conf with Textedit, and search
for the command
mount c ../..
and replace this command by
mount c /Volumes/QSTICK
For avoiding duplicate copies you should remove all
files outside the DOSBox folder that are also in the
PQMethod folder of the Windows version. If you have created
new project files already don't forget to copy them to
the PQMethod/projects folder of the Windows version.
Using the QSTICK on a Mac computer, the
RunPQMethod icon
can be used to start DOSBox with PQMethod. On a Windows PC, you
must locate and double-click the DOSBox.exe in the DOSBox
subfolder.
Back to the QMethod Page
Peter Schmolck <Peter@schmolck.org>
2014-September-01