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What is fltdj?
--------------
fltdj is a PIM program in the making. 

What does PIM mean?
-------------------
Personal Information Manager (I think), a program which manages daily notes,
appointments, alarms, to-do lists, contacts, addresses, etc. 

What can it do, in its present form? 
------------------------------------
If you are in the habit of keeping daily notes, or a diary, or a journal  of
your activities, fltdj can keep them organised and accessible. In this version
you can maintain your appointments, to-do lists, addresses and contacts. It will
alert you 10 minutes before any upcoming appointments as well.

That's nice, but will it ever do anything useful?
------------------------------------------------------
If it will, do you think I would be giving it away free?
While there is no guarantee that it will do anything useful, or anything else,
there is every probability of the version number increasing in the future as
and when I get the time to add more features (especially if anyone asks).

How do I use it?
----------------
The user interface is a nice looking calendar. You can store your thoughts
for a particular day by clicking on the appropriate date, and entering the 
data into the editor at the right. To retrieve the notes for a particular day, click
on the desired date. The same editor window displays the notes, and you can add to or
modify the text if needed.
A click on the "Appointments" tab brings up your appointment list for the 
current day. You can add and make changes to or delete any appointment.
The row of tabs gives access to options for maintaining a To-do list, a 
holidays/anniversaries list as well as names and addresses of your contacts. 
Selecting these tabs will display windows where you can enter, modify, or delete 
data.
Read the file "help.html" in the doc/ subdirectory for more details.
There's a nice clock displayed as well, so you can see what time it is. And the
current day and date is shown at the bottom of the calendar window.
fltdj is a small program, and takes up very little space on the desktop, as
well as your hard disk.

What do I need to compile it? 
-----------------------------
You need FLTK (pronounced Full-tick), the Fast Light Tool Kit, a
multi-platform library, from http://www.fltk.org.

The program has been tested on version 1.3.8 of FLTK.
This should be downloaded, compiled and installed in the default places 
BEFORE compiling fltdj.

Changes in version 0.7-rc1
--------------------------------
Some more key-bindings have been added. See the documentation.

The global search facility scans and reports separate results for the journal entries and
appointments. You can click on the results to display the journal or appointments.

Sorting of contact data, which somehow got left out in 0.7,  re-enabled.

Major changes in version 0.7-beta
---------------------------------
There have been extensive changes in the user interface. The plethora of windows
popping up all over the screen in earlier versions has been discarded in favour 
of one window with a row of tabs which provides access to the various functions. 
The documentation has been updated to reflect this.

Starting from version 0.7-beta, the program no longer uses the Fl_Editor
widget written by Robert Kesterson. The editor class provided within
FLTK is used instead. This does *not* automatically word-wrap, which means that
a carraige-return needs to be typed in when you reach the end of a line, else the
words start flowing off the right edge with a horizontal scrollbar automatically
popping up at the bottom of the editor window.

One of the reasons for substituting Robert's otherwise excellent Fl_Editor
was that syntax highlighting is possible with the internal editor. 

Not that I know what to do with this facility, at the moment...

Also starting from this version, the excellent Multitabs widget provided  
by Alexey Parshin in the FLTK bazaar has been included in the source
for fltdj. Many thanks, Alexey.

What else does fltdj use?
------------------------
fltdj uses the 'cal' utility to generate the calendar display, and the 'date'
command to show the current date. These are a part of all Linux distributions.

How do I compile and install it?
--------------------------------
First copy the file fltdj-XX-src.tar.gz to your home directory.
Type 'tar -zxvf fltdj-XX-src.tar.gz'. Press Enter. This will decompress and
extract the files to a directory called 'fltdj-XX-src', where XX stands for the
version number.

Change to that directory, 'cd fltdj-XX-src'.

Type 'make clean', if you are recompiling, just to be on the safe side.
This removes any old object files and binaries, 

To construct the dynamic executable, just put all the files in one subdirectory
and type 'make fltdj', or just 'make'.
This creates the smaller executable, which is around 0.1 MB after installation,
but which needs the required libraries at run time.

If you want the static executable, type 'make static'.
This command creates a larger executable, which is around 2 MB after installation,
but which can be copied and run on another system which does not have the required
libraries. 

The Makefile will create a "hidden" directory in your home area called ~/.fltdj.
This is where the help file (help.tdj) and your data files will be kept.
Copy any data file ending in the suffix ".tdj" from earlier versions of the
program into this directory. The program will continue to read and use them.

After becoming superuser, type 'make install'.
This will strip the debugging information from the binary, thus reducing the size
to the values written above. It will copy the binary (named fltdj) to /usr/local/bin
and allow you to run the program from any directory.
If you are not the superuser, ask the System Administrator to copy the
file 'fltdj' to /usr/local/bin.

That's it.

Contact me if there is a problem. It would be nice to hear from you even if
there isn't any. But do contact me if you find a bug, or if your compiler reports
some errors (see below).

Are there any bugs?
-------------------
Of course there are. Did you really have to ask? I have tried fixing what I 
could find. The others are left for you to discover.

There are some differences in the checking of function declarations
between different versions of the GNU C compiler.
From user feedback, I have been able to rectify some
of them.

The code for this version compiles cleanly with gcc/g++ version 11.2, which is what
I have at present, on KUbuntu 22.04.
If you have any other version of Gcc, reports of any errors you encounter while 
compiling will be highly appreciated (and fixes, too, if possible!).

Known issues in 0.7
-------------------
This means that these are bugs which will be fixed later. Small bugs, but bugs all
the same.

While searching for text globally (when the "Global Search" tab is in the
foreground), a phrase typed in the "Search for" box may lead to
spurious entries in the results window. So only a single word should be typed
when searching globally.

However, when searching inside a particular month (that's when the "Journal" tab is
visible), a phrase typed in the search box there does not seem to trouble the program.

When a particular word has been found in the text describing an appointment, the program
always displays the journal entry for that particular date when the "Show" button on the
Global Search tab is clicked. To see the result of the search, click on the Appointments
tab.

Acknowledgments, Thanks and Feedback
------------------------------------
Many, many thanks are due to:
-Robert Kesterson, for his excellent FLTK editor widget, used in earlier versions
     of fltdj
-Juraj Ziegler, who reported errors and also sent the required modifications.
-Lance Perry, who suggested putting the data files in a hidden directory in the
	user's area, and supplied the patches.
-Greg Sjaardema, who urged me to enable the program to save the notes file without
	exiting.
-Don van der Haghen, who sent error messages encountered on his system.
-Joe Krahn, who suggested that the program should check for multiple instances on startup,
	and that file access operations should be verified, in case the hidden
	directory ~/.fltdj is absent. Apparently some users may do an "rm" on it
	by mistake!
	One of his suggestions is still not implemented. It will be, Real Soon Now...
-Torquil Gault, who wanted to use parts of the fltdj code for a
	(quote) "quick & dirty GUI set date pgm for the ipaq" (unquote)
	Be my guest, the program is released under the Gnu GPL. I hope you were
	successful.
-Benjamin Long, you never told me if you succeeded in cross-compiling fltdj
	for your iPaq Handheld!
-R. K. Marwah, for valuable, live, actual user feedback, and constructive
	suggestions.
-Richard Holt, for catching the date not changing after midnight. 
-Rajesh Deshpande, for catching the errors with new versions of FLTK.
-Tom Brown, for the bug reports and error messages.
-Janet Casey for putting fltdj in the GNU software directory, and for pointing out that
	the GPL license as supplied with fltdj in not quite complete.
-Darald Bantel, just for mailing me that he could successfully install fltdj.
-Leslie H. Watter, Jeremy M. Dolan, Luke Th. Bullock, Szabo Peter and SG for
	alerting me about the broken links on the web page containing
	the download files.
-Alexey Parshin for the excellent Multitabs widget.

What is the copying policy?
---------------------------
While it is copyright, (C) 2001 onwards, Kartik Patel, the program is also free
software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU
General Public License as published by  the Free Software Foundation; either
version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.  This program
is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY;
without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.  You
will receive a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program;
for more information, write to the Free Software  oundation, Inc., 675 Mass
Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. 

What else?
----------
That covers it, more or less. Email me if there is anything left out. 
Enjoy!

Kartik Patel
letapk@gmail.com
https://letapk.wordpress.com