mic@lapis.berkeley.edu (Michel Bruneau) (06/24/87)
In my search for a good word processor, a friend showed me Word Perfect. I is indeed amazing, but as my needs are rather specific, I tend to look into the advanced features first before making my mind on a purchase. So, while I was looking a bit at word perfect I was happy to see they provided for a command that allows to send directly special commands to any printer. It kind of puts a [Cmd] in the hidden codes, which is followed by the string one needs (ex.: <27>%Z and garbage of the sort). That is a very important feature for anybody who wants to get as much out of his printer, but to my surprise there seemed to be difficulty to find those caracters back. The search command can find the [Cmd] part but cannot make the difference between the [Cmd <27>%Z] and [Cmd <27>%3]. This is critical as if you want to modify a text which has many different of those escape sequences to port it to another printer. If the system could search/replace such a set of commands, it would be much better! Has anybody found a way (command or macro) to perform such a task... It is more important than it may seem as that very nice feature would become rather useless as it would be impossible to quickly modify large customized documents. For the interested, the intend is to use customized downlodable character sets on dot matrix printer, and being able to port it with minimal trouble to a laser printer using multiple cartriges.
mvolo@ecsvax.UUCP (Michael R. Volow) (06/27/87)
<Miche Bruneau (mic@lapis.berkeley.edu) asks about replacing multiple and varying [Cmd] print formatting codes to facilitate use with different printers' downloaded fonts, using search and replace> How many different formatting codes do you need to use, beyond what is provided in the different printer's driver file? One WordPerfect driver provides, as you know, eight font choices right now; but my guess is th that the next version will provide more. Does the Ctrl/Alt key mapping facility (Ctrl-F3), combined with standard macros, have the capacity to do what you want? Don't know if this suggests a solution or not. You could also modify the drivers for different printers so fonts 1-8 are the same for each printer; and then make some of these fonts the downloaded fonts. For example, a macro ital.mac would cause italics to be printed whatever printer you were using, and so on. Or perhaps your application is much more sophisticated, in which case my suggestions would not help. --Mike Volow, Psychiatry, Durham Veterans Administration Medical Center Durham, NC, 27712 919 383 3568 mvolo@ecsvax.UUCP
feg@clyde.ATT.COM (Forrest Gehrke) (06/29/87)
In article <4083@jade.BERKELEY.EDU>, mic@lapis.berkeley.edu (Michel Bruneau) writes: > In my search for a good word processor, a friend showed me Word Perfect. > So, while I was looking a bit at word perfect I was happy to see they provided > for a command that allows to send directly special commands to any printer. > That is a very important feature for anybody who wants to get as much out > of his printer, but to my surprise there seemed to be difficulty to find > those caracters back. The search command can find the [Cmd] part but > cannot make the difference between the [Cmd <27>%Z] and [Cmd <27>%3]. XyWrite III Plus also allows embedded printer commands and has no trouble with search and replace of those commands. Forrest Gehrke