The Journal Newsletter
Introduction
Welcome to The Journal Newsletter!
This month’s “How I Use The Journal” is a bit different. Stevan Lockhart shares with us how he setup The Journal for use under Linux using the Wine Windows emulator.
Also, learn how to export The Journal entries as HTML files in this month’s Tips & Tricks, and check out the latest writing exercises.
Thank you for supporting DavidRM Software’s The Journal!
Tips & Tricks
TIP: Saving entries as HTML files
If you want to post your entries on the Web, The Journal makes it easy with its support for HTML exporting.
- Click on the “Entry” menu, and choose “Export Entries…” to bring up the Export Entries form.
- Select the entries you want to save as HTML files.
- Under “Select Export Format”, select “HTML (.HTM)”.
- Click on “Export” to export the selected entries.
If you would prefer that each entry be exported into its own HTML file, then bring up the “Options” tab on the Export Entries form.
- Under “Rich Text/Plain Text/HTML Export”, select “Create a Document per Entry”.
- For the “Document Name Format”, I recommend entering: %e
- If you are exporting daily entries, then you will need to specify a “Daily Entry Name Format”. I recommend: %yyyy-%mm-%dd
As much as possible, The Journal attempts to export all formatting to the HTML file. This includes the font, font decorations (bold, italic, etc.), and tabs. Some formatting doesn’t convert to HTML, though.
Writing Prompts
by Susan Michael
Free Writing Exercise – Write for twenty minutes using “white noise” as your title.
Writing Prompt – Flip through a magazine and select a page for your inspiration. You can use the subject matter, or the illustration.
Poetry Exercise – Write a free verse poem using “sparrows”.
Prose Exercise – Develop a character or create a scene in the style of afilm noire.
About the author: Susan Michael has facilitated several writing groups, and has lead writing & creativity workshops for the Arts & Humanties Council in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
How I Use The Journal
Editor’s Note: The Journal is used by people from all over the world, from many nations, representing a variety of personal, professional, and religious backgrounds. Journaling is by definition an intensely personal undertaking, so it should not be surprising that when someone writes about how or why they keep a journal that they will end up sharing personal information. The Journal Newsletter does not support any particular personal or religious lifestyle, but rather attempts to support anyone who keeps a journal, for whatever reason they do so. Thus, the views and opinions expressed in “How I Use The Journal” are solely those of the submitter and not necessarily the views of DavidRM Software. Whether you agree with the submitter’s views or not, I encourage you to read the article and glean from it the information and techniques that “ring true” for you.
HOW I USE THE JOURNAL ON LINUX
by Stevan Lockhart
A few technical details to begin with. These notes were made on The Journal running under the Wine Windows emulator on Linux.
Machine:- IBM Thinkpad X21 700MHz PIII, 128MB memory
Dual Boot Windows 98 and SuSE Linux 7.2
Linux standard of KDE 2.2 as the desktop
As I dual-boot, The Journal was installed as per normal on the Windows partition.
I installed (using the rpm package manager) the codeweavers-wine-20010626 release of Wine (available from http://www.codeweavers.com). This is done as root (superuser) by typing:
rpm -ivh codeweavers-wine-20010626-4.i386.rpm
Ensure that the Windows partitions is mounted. On my system this is /windows/C, but on RedHat or Mandrake systems it might be /mnt/windows or similar. You could make the Windows partition mount automatically by placing an appropriate entry in /etc/fstab
As a normal user, run the command “winesetup” This runs a graphical configuration utility that tries to autodetect any existing Windows partitions. In my case, it worked flawlessly and determined that the emulated drive C:\ should be /windows/C. I chose the default options throughout.
Change directory to the Journal executable. In my case, this is /windows/C/Program Files/The Journal.
To run The Journal:
wine Journal.exe
Note the capitilisation.
If you want to create a menu icon, I find it best to create a two-line stratup script, and then invoke that as the menu item. For example, create the file RunTheJournal with the following two lines:
cd "/windows/C/Program Files/The Journal" wine Journal.exe
Now make that executable:
chmod +x RunTheJournal
All the standard functions I use work well, and quite quickly, except for fonts, which don’t appear in the font list. As I use this for convenience, this is quite acceptable to me, but I bet if I tweaked a bit, I’d get fonts to appear.
I have tried installing The Journal while under the Linux Wine environment, but it fails halfway through the installation. This would be useful if you didn’t have an existing Windows partition, and wished to stay in a purely emulated environment.
Two tips – if the startup script fails, don’t forget to make sure that the Windows partition is mounted. Also, if you need to crash out of a Wine application, it may leave a file in a directory of your home area; for example, in my case, /home.stevan/.wine/wine-server/socket. That file “socket” will need to be deleted before Wine will restart.
Of course, The Journal works under other emulator mechnisms as you would expect, such as VMWare, but that actually provides a true Windows environment on emulated hardware rather than the speed of simply lauching the application that then appears like any other graphical application. And, of course, you don’t need to wait for the emulated environment to start before launching The Journal.
As The Journal is becoming an increasingly critical part of my life, the convenience of running under Wine is of real use to me.
Submission Information
If you would like to contribute to the “How I Use The Journal”, “Writing Exercises”, or “Tips & Tricks” sections, or would like to submit an article about journaling, writing, or another The Journal-related topic, we would love to hear from you.
Submissions for the newsletter should be sent to: support@davidrm.com
If you are submitting for a particular section, please indicate which one. Try to limit your submissions to 500-1000 words. Submissions may be edited for length and content.
If you prefer to remain anonymous, please state this in the email. Otherwise your name (but not your email) will be used in the article heading.
As always, if you have any suggestions for, or bug reports about, The Journal, please feel free to email them. Both are always welcome.