This document will only answer questions which are really "frequently asked". For general information on the boxes program, installation instructions, and information on box design creation please refer to the main documentation page.
Q. 1. What is a text filter program?
Answer: There is a separate page
explaining this. boxes is mostly used as a filter program.
Q. 2. I have compiled and installed boxes, but when I run it,
I get an error message "input in flex scanner failed"!
Answer: Upgrade to version 1.0.1 or later. Versions prior to
1.0.1 gave this error message when the config file they were trying to read
was in fact a directory. This is your fault, of course ;-). The
global config file name is /usr/share/boxes on most systems.
This is the name of the file, not the name of a directory into which a
config file would be placed.
Q. 3. Boxes destroys my tabs!
Answer: Yes it does, by default. However, you can change
this behavior using the -t option (since version 1.1). The
-t option only affects leading tabs. Tabs which end up inside the
box are always converted into spaces.
Note that you can also set the tab stop distance (== how many spaces per
tab) using the -t option.
Q. 4. "Can't read file C:\TEMP\VIO44.TMP" when calling boxes from vim
Answer: On Windows, this error message may appear instead of a
box when boxes is called from vim. This is not a problem of boxes. In fact,
it's a misleading message from the vim editor which is supposed to tell you
that boxes is not in your PATH. Solution: Copy boxes.exe and
boxes.cfg to a directory which is in your PATH. (thanks
Jeff Lanzarotta, 05-Jul-00)
Q. 5. Compilation problems?
Answer: The current version (1.1) includes changes to solve
all compilation issues reported to the author. So please check that you are
using the most current sources. Still, there are many different systems out
there, so here's a short list of things to try:
lexer.l:1309: warning: `yy_flex_realloc' defined but not usedIt's a known bug in flex, and has no impact on boxes. You can safely ignore this warning.
... to be continued ...