abrams@MITRE.ARPA (Marshall D. Abrams) (05/30/86)
Thanks for your note of May 9th responding to my questions and observations concerning AW+. I've been busy and on travel, but tonight I got to checking some of my observations against your comments. Let me try to be more clear. I compared printing with underline under AW and AW+. AW+ was much much slower and involved much more head movement. My printer is an MX-80. I have a printer driver as an AUTORUN.SYS file on my AW disk. I used the built-in Epson driver for AW+. The printing modes are different for underlining. AW prints a word, positions the printhead back to the beginning of the word, and then does a continuous underline to the end of the word. AW+ prints each character with an underline by printing underscore, backspace, character. The output looks the same. My question concerns the configuration question in generating a print driver for turning underline mode on and off. I answered that question, but it appears that the information supplied is not used. Perhaps someone has an idea how to get that mode to work; it should be the fastest and involve no extra head motion at all. My next concern is preparing a file for uploading from the Atari to a host such as UNIX or Dialcom. I use AMODEM to perform the uploading. AMODEM (in light translation) changes the Atari EOL (dec 155) into an ASCII CR. This is necessary because most hosts will not accept infinately long lines (records). So I want a print-to-disk function which does not put any print control codes into the file but does end each record with an EOL. My AW printer driver allows me to do this with a Select-P command. AW+'s Control-S ASCII save command strips out ASCII control characters, but does not process the output into lines; so it is unsatisfactory. Printing to disk after the AW+ Epson handler has been loaded results in a file full of Epson control sequences. (That's how I confirmed what characters were being employed for underlining.) In order to load another print driver, I have to reboot AW+. The printdriver I have created has no control character sequences for anything. Furthermore, it uses 155 (EOL) as the CR,LF and CR character sequences. It will produce the same results as Select-P under AW. I only wish there were a way to avoid rebooting. In your postscript you state the you find AW+ to be superior to the UNIX vi editor. I can't say that I agree. In vi I make frequent use of the word-oriented commands: change word, delete word, move cursor by word. I make less frequent use of the sentence and paragraph-oriented commands. What does AW+ offer for these functions? I think the AW and AW+ are both excellent products for a home computer product. I have been writing large documents with them. But I wish .... Sincerely, - Marshall D. Abrams, phone: (703) 883-6938 The MITRE Corporation, 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd. Mail Stop W458, Mc Lean, VA 22102