MOOseum Tools Project

This page is part of the documentation on the MOOseum Tools Project, a collaboration between Kalí Tal and ConnectionsMOO. The purpose of this project is to provide a suite of tools based on a museum metaphor to humanities scholars who are interested in integrating new media technology into their courses. The tools, currently under development, will be distributed freely as a suite, and will run on LambdaCore, JHCore and enCOre MOOs. If you are interested in beta testing these tools, contact Kalí Tal.

Conventions of this help document:

Items typed <inside angle brackets> should be typed without the brackets when you give commands on the MOO. For instance, if you saw the following command:

@create #624 named <name of your animatronic>

You would type:

@create #624 MyAnimatronicName

 

Help on Generic MOOseum Cue Card

The generic cue card, created by Percival/Tari, 6/26/99. Questions, problems, bug reports to Percival/Tari.

The generic cue card is for use in animatrons and random narrators. (See `help #624'[1] for information about the generic animatronic, and `help #625'[2] for information about the generic random narrator.)

To make a cue card, first you need to make a child of the generic cue card:

@create #629 named <your cue card's name>

There are two ways to write on your cue card.

The command:

@edit <cue card name>
allows you to edit your cue cards the same way you edit children of $note and of the generic shareable note, sending you to the in-MOO editor, or, if you're using client editing, to your local editor.

The command:

write <"your text"> on <cue card name>
allows you to write text on the cue card without going to an editor.
(Don't leave out the quotation marks around your text!)

To preview a cue card without having to load it in an animatron or random narrator:

read <cue card name>

To delete a line from a cue card:

erase <line number> from <cue card name>
For example: erase 3 from card2

Erasing hints:

• "Line" here does not refer to the physical length of a line on your screen; it refers to a logical line. Logical lines in MOO usually look like paragraphs; if you used the command `write <"a bunch of text"> on <cue card name>', everything you entered with that command is in one line.
• Each time you delete a line, the lines get renumbered, so use `read <cue card name>' between `erase' commands to make sure you're about to erase the correct line.

To clear all the text from a cue card:

clear <cue card name>

Cue card formatting hints:

• In order to make the cue card have more than one paragraph, use a separate `write' command to enter each paragraph.
  
• You can make blank lines between paragraphs on a cue card by entering `write "" on <cue card name>'.
  
• Let the MOO do the wrapping of the lines for you; e.g., if you're using an editor to write your cue cards, press [Enter] or [Return] only at the ends of paragraphs; if you're using `write <"your text"> on <cue card>', enter a complete paragraph with each `write' command. If you put in your own line breaks, your cue cards may print fine on your screen, but the lines will break in odd places for those using different screen/window widths than you are.
  
• For animatrons, separate paragraphs are probably best placed on separate cue cards in order to give the reader a break.
  
• For random narrators, although each cue card needs to be a self-contained passage, don't forget that more 10 or 20 lines may scroll off the screen, which annoys some readers, so be as concise as you can.