Communication with other applications
-------------------------------------

Alphatk uses 'cat.exe' to allow correct capturing of both stdout and
stderr from spawned processes (e.g. javac, tex,...).  There are GNU
copyrighted versions of cat, diff etc. freely available, and Alphatk
is distributed with some of these (in 'Tools').

Printing:
---------

Alphatk is distibuted with the 'printer' and 'gdi' packages to enable
printing (you can also get these from http://www.du.edu/~mschwart/tcl-tk.htm).  

If you are using Tk 8.3.2 or older, you can also install 'Winico' to let
Alphatk use nice icons for its windows (the author of Alphatk contributed
code to newer versions of Tk so this is built in).

Make sure you install versions of any extension which are compatible with
the version of Tcl you use (or Tcl will crash when Alphatk starts up and
tries to load them).

How to 'Edit' a file from explorer?  
-----------------------------------

Enter the dde message "openAction {%1}", the dde application "TclEval", and 
dde topic "Alpha". For the 'dde application not running' enter:
	<location of wish> <location of alphatk.tcl> "%1"

For pre Tcl8.1 you could try to enter as the 'edit' action under the 
particular file type the following:
  
  <location of wish> <location of runalpha.tcl> "%1"

E.g. I use C:/Apps/Tcl8.3/bin/wish83.exe C:/Apps/Alpha/runalpha.tcl "%1"

Then you can just right-click on a file of that type and select edit to have it 
open in Alphatk.

How to send files to Alpha from other applications?
---------------------------------------------------

For applications which do not support dde, you can tell them to open files
using Alpha with a line like the above, or if that doesn't work, there is
an attached batch file which you can send files to.  It's not a very quick
or pleasant solution, but it does work (alphatk.bat).

--------------------------------------------------

Prowrap: you can attempt to prowrap Alphatk using this command line:

cd Alphatk

prowrap -uses wish -startup alphatk.tcl *.* */*.* */*/*.* */*/*/*.* 
  -relativeto C:/PROGRA~1/TclPro 
  C:/PROGRA~1/TclPro/lib/tk8.2/images/pwrdLogo150.gif

but this doesn't work because prowrap needs to be updated to use 
the proper vfs support in Tcl 8.4.