2008-02-21 by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
PADGen
PADGen is a simple fill in the blanks application, allowing you to describe your program is as many languages as you want. It handles the new PAD specification 3.01. It handles all the Vista variants. If you have an Microsoft Authenticode certificate, your can sign your PAD files. It import/exports PAD files, and exports HTML. You only have to fill in your company info once. To handle a new product you would load up a similar product’s PAD, modify it and save it under a new name. There is nothing similar to Java inheritance to group similar products by theme and variation. There is no particular place to record the Java JVM required. You do much of the work by selecting from drop-down boxes.
In Win2K, PadGen stores its internal information in C:\Documents and Settings\ %username%\My Documents\PADGen\canadian_mind_products. C:\Documents and Settings\ %username%\Application Data\PADGen\PADGen.ini is a traditional *.ini file you can edit if you are feeling adventurous. It contains the list of *.pml files, the names they have on the menu, and the names of the most recently saves *.htm and *.xml exports. I could find nothing in the registry or in PADGen.ini to control where it puts its files. It does record where it last put each pad file in PADGen.ini.
On Vista, PADGen stores its information in C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\PADGen\canadian_mind_products Where canadian_mind_products is my company. Sometimes it puts them in C:\Users\%username%\Documents\PADGen\canadian_mind_products. If files disappear, it can be because PADGen is looking in the wrong place. You can use the File menu to navigate to where they are. C:\Users\ %username%\AppData\Roaming\PADGen\PADGen.ini contains the overall configuration.
PADGen stores the detail information in separate xml *.cml (for company) and *.pml (for programs). The *.xml PAD files exports have both company and program fields. You can cheat and edit these *.cml and *.pml files directly to make bulk changes.
If you are restoring PADGen’s files, and PADGen is ignoring them, import one pad file to prime the pump. Also edit PADGen.ini to make sure it is pointing the correct directories.
Before you export your pad, you must hit Verify and you get a list of errors in your entire PAD. You don’t get any feedback on errors as you type. When you export a pad, it will call it pad.xml or even more confusingly the name of the last pad you saved, not someprogram.xml. It is up to you to type the correct program name. Imagine a word processor that by default saved your work overwriting the of the previous document your were editing! What were they thinking! Perhaps they just wanted to allow you flexibility in naming the pad files. To do that properly there should be a local pad file name field in the program section and a local pad directory name in the company section. These fields would not be exported. It makes you manually remove all trailing line feeds on your text and it insists you manually remove embedded newlines in your text. The HTML summaries it generates are in x-UTF-16LE-BOM (Unicode 16 little endian marked). Further they are just fragments designed to be inserted in a page. They don’t include the <html> and <body> tags. Read up on encoding and BOMs (Byte Order Marks) to learn what you can do with them. Free, sponsored by ASP, the Association of Software Professionals.
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