hutchinson%UMass-ECE%csnet-relay@sri-unix.UUCP (12/11/83)
From: Charles Hutchinson <hutchinson%UMass-ECE@csnet-relay>
I don't know if this is the proper place for this message, but here goes:
A friend here at Umass is having trouble with Wordstar. Her set up is the
following:
Franklin Ace 1200 - with z80 card (supposedly similar to Microsoft)
C. Itoh Prowriter 8510A
Tymac parallel interface
It seems that Wordstar's resident underlining command produces text with
the toes cut off (bottom of the characters get's overstruck). The
Prowriters underline command (codes $1B58 and $1B59) produces proper
underlining, but ignores the left margin setting, sending the printhead
to the leftmost position. Is there a way to fix this?
Any help is appreciated,
Hutchakp@isrnix.UUCP (12/15/83)
#R:sri-arpa:-1452000:isrnix:9400002:000:1817
isrnix!akp Dec 14 05:01:00 1983
Lord knows I won't get mail from here to ARPA; could somebody please forward?
What you're up against is this: WordStar's "built-in" underlining consists
of printing the line, then issuing CR without LF and printing UNDERSCORES
where there should be underlining. Obviously, in your case, the underscore
character (specific to the printer) fires the same pin as the bottoms of
the characters. That's too bad.
The printer's underscore feature underscores EVERYTHING, including
spaces. Well, WordStar automatically (that is, by default) offsets the
pages it prints by 8 spaces, and it does this by *actually sending 8
spaces to the printer before each line*. Those are the spaces which the
printer is underlining (along with the intended text).
The fix? There might not be one. Can you convince the ProWriter
that the left margin is actually (physical) column 8? Or shift your paper
over by 8 spaces (or enough to get by)? The idea is to tell WordStar not
to offset the page at all (.po 0 at the beginning of the file), and
center the text some other way. Even this might not do it, if WordStar is
not talking nicely enough to the printer, or the printer is just being
obstinate. That is, if WordStar can't control TO THE LETTER which parts of
a given line get underscored. You might also try NOT breaking an underscored
section across two lines. Do all your paragraph justification, then, where
you want underscoring, do something like this:
Dr. John Q. Smith, ^SNondeterministic Algorithms^S
^Sfor the Complete Idiot^S, Huey - Muffin, 1984,
New York.
That is, bracket each line with ^S's seperately. You might try that (with
the ProWriter doing its built-in underlining) first, in fact.
-- Allan Pratt,
WordStar Hack Extraordinary
...decvax!ihnp4!iuvax!isrnix!akp