- From: Nelly Llerena Martinez

This is what I have found when creating a button for INTKEY. It worked relatively ok; the content of the button appears, but *cut*. For example, to create a button called characters.

1. Create file "characters.bmp" and placed it in C:\delta.
2. Create file "characters.txt" containing any text to be displayed.
3. Inside the Directive Intkey; I edited the file Intkey.ink like this​

*DEFINE BUTTON characters.bmp
"CONTENTS characters.txt"
"characters"​

['character.txt contains:]

Melastomataceae Leaf characteristics
Leaves opposite (rarely pseudo-alternate) and decussate.
Epidermis often with hairs
Acrodromal venation .

When opening in Intkey:

Melastomataceae Leaf
Leaves opposite (rarely pseudo-alternate) and
Epidermis often with
Acrodromal venation

The Intkey 'CONTENTS' command in not intended for displaying files. The command for that is 'DISPLAY FILE'.

The purpose of the 'CONTENTS' command is to display a menu. The window containing the menu is headed 'Select topic'. The last word of a line of the 'contents' file (in this case, characters.txt) is interpreted as the name of an Intkey input file, and the rest of the line is used for the menu entry. In this case, the first line of the menu is 'Melastomataceae Leaf', and the input file is 'characteristics'. This input file (presumably) doesn't exist. So when you select that line of the menu, and click 'OK', you get a message "File '...\characteristics' does not exist".

To get the desired result, the button definition should be changed to

*DEFINE BUTTON characters.bmp
"FILE DISPLAY characters.txt"
"characters"

You can see an example of the correct use of the CONTENTS command in the Angiosperm families dataset at https://www.delta-intkey.com/angio/index.htm. There is an Intkey button definition

*DEFINE BUTTON inc_tg.bmp
"CONTENTS taxgeog.ind"
"Select special subsets of families"
"The input files accessed by this button exemplify how Intkey operations
can be confined to arbitrary subsets of the taxa. The user can easily
define other subsets from a list of the taxa to be included. ..."

'taxgeog.ind' contains

All *INCLUDE TAXA all
Australian Capital Territory act-taxa.inp
Britain and Ireland britain-taxa.inp
Canadian Arctic Archipelago canarctic-taxa.inp
Cultivated in south-eastern Australia cultsea-taxa.inp
Cultivated in south-eastern Australia cultsea-taxa.inp
Fed upon by Apes and other Primates food-taxa.inp
...

If you want to see all the files, download the dataset by clicking the link 'DELTA data files' on the Web contents page.

For a description of the CONTENTS command, see 'User’s guide to Intkey' at https://www.delta-intkey.com/www/intkey-ug.htm.

-- 
Mike Dallwitz
Contact information: https://delta-intkey.com/contact/dallwitz.htm
DELTA home page: https://delta-intkey.com