johnh@wheaton (John Doc Hayward) (06/26/86)
I am not an apple II owner but am trying to help a friend with his applewriter program. In the applewriter manual there is an indication of how to set up the "special" file for various printer related commands (underline, boldface, pitch changes). We have changed these for his printer and we can get these functions by a control g and the letter (_ for start underline - for stop...). There is also an underline token in the print menu which by default is "\". But when this is used applewriter does not send the sequence of characters which we have defined for underline. Instead it appears to send an underscore followed by an attempted backspace and then the character. Somewhere between the applewriter program and the print head the backspace is removed so the output apears to be underscore followed by letter. In addition there apears to be no command to start and stop boldface or print pitch changes. My questions are as follows: 1) Is there any way to get the underline token to send a sequence we define? 2) What is the most likely reason the backspace is being ignored or stripped? Is this an artifact of applewriter?, the interface? or the printer itself? 3) Is there any way to specify boldface, pitch changes, super and subscripts in a manner which is printer independent so that a change to the special file is all that is needed to set up a document for another printer? Please respond via e-mail. Thanks in advance! -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= UUCP: ihnp4!wheaton!johnh telephone: (312) 260-3871 (office) Mail: John Hayward Math/Computer Science Dept. 501 E seminary Wheaton College Wheaton Il 60187 Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8b
ranger@ecsvax.UUCP (Rick N. Fincher) (06/30/86)
> > My questions are as follows: > 1) Is there any way to get the underline token to send a sequence we define? > 2) What is the most likely reason the backspace is being ignored or stripped? > Is this an artifact of applewriter?, the interface? or the printer itself? > 3) Is there any way to specify boldface, pitch changes, super and subscripts in > a manner which is printer independent so that a change to the special file is > all that is needed to set up a document for another printer? > > Please respond via e-mail. Thanks in advance! > > in applewriter you use control-v to enter control codes (v for verbatim) the control-g function is a keyboard macro. you can put control codes in a keyboard macro if you like. the keyboard macro can be invoked on an apple iie or iic with an open-apple-letter keystroke with the letter being your macro identifier. for example my printer uses escape w to turn on bold printing and escape x to turn it off. you can enter this in a macro by typing control-v escape w control v ... the text to be in bold ... control- v escape x control v. since this is such a pain to type out each time use a macro. i use a macro with an identifier of b to start bold face. to define this macro type control-g, follow the prompts to define a macro. when you get to the place where you enter a macro type: b control-v escape w <ret>, with no space between the b and control-v, otherwise the space will be typed as part of the macro. with this macro defined all you do is type control-g b to start bold face, or, if you have a iie or iic open-apple-b. ending boldface, or any other printer command, is done the same way. you will have to look up the control codes for your printer. as for underlining, applewriter's backslash does indeed try to backspace underline forward space for each character. this does not work for some printers, like the epson rx-80. define a macro, as above, that uses your printer control codes for underlining and use the macro instead of the backslash. there is no way that i know of to change the way apple writer's backslash command tries to underline. as for working with different printers, define a macro file for each model and load them using the control-q menu item. macro files are regular text, so they can be written using applewriter itself, rather than the control-g define entry method. rick fincher