Style Sheets

A style sheet can be your friend! My tip is to use them as much as possible. Any time you are working on something that is more than one page, it is probably worth it to use a style sheet. I really like the fact that I can change the color in one place and have it happen on all of the pages. They can also be a real pain... There are a few funky things they do (like ignoring one color because another came later). I don't like the fact that only Netscape 4.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0 and above can see the colors. Hopefully, that won't be a problem for too much longer.

Transparent GIFs

I really like transparent GIFs, but spent way too long trying to set the background color to be transparent in Paint Shop Pro. I learned the hard way that to create a transparent background, you must be working with 16 million colors. Anything less, and the background color will remain.

Pico

I am sure many other people have offered pico tips, but here is one more: the infamous pico spaces only seem to appear when you upload a document using the FTP program and then later edit in pico. If you write your document in another program, such as Microsoft Word, you can get around this "feature" of pico. When you are done writing in your word processor, copy the entire document. Then open your saul account and then a new pico document (with the command pico filename). To paste the text in, choose "paste to host" from the Edit menu (this is the command if you are accessing saul remotely--I think it is just paste for the on-campus access). This should paste your document in, with pico inserting carriage returns where they are needed. Thus, your text lines cannot be too long, a word cannot wrap from one line to the next, and there shouldn't be any pico spaces!

Access from home

I have had a number of problems trying to upload or edit saul files from home. Saul has a peculiar way of ignoring backspaces when accessed from home (at least for me). Instead of a backspace, you see a ^H. The only tip is to watch out for it and type carefully.
I have also had times when saul refused to let me access pico. It turns out I had accidentally typed some letter in the terminal type prompt upon login. For some reason, this gives you access to your saul files, but not pico. The only way to deal with this is to log out of saul and back in with the correct terminal type.

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