poynton@vector.Sun.COM (Charles Poynton) (03/13/89)
MS Word 3.0 documentation is woefully inadequate with respect to the saving of text-only documents with or without line breaks. Here's how it works. TEXT ONLY ASCII carriage return codes (^M) are saved in place of end-of-line and paragraph marks. Tabs are retained, independent of tab settings in the document. Codes outside the ASCII set, such as accented characters and symbols, are saved as codes in the range octal 200 through 377. After saving Text Only, Word removes all formatting from the document, so the document will be displayed in the Default Normal style. If any formatting is subsequently applied to any part of the document, then the File Format will silently revert from Text Only to Normal. TEXT ONLY WITH LINE BREAKS In addition to the Text Only actions, additional return codes are saved where each line ends with respect to the margins of each paragraph of the document at the time it is saved. That is, return codes are inserted exactly where the lines break on the screen as displayed immediately prior to saving. After saving Text-Only with Line Breaks, the File Format silently reverts to Text Only. 79-CHARACTER LINES If it is desired to save a document with lines of a certain maximum length, then the entire document must be in a fixed-pitch font such as Monaco, and have appropriate margin settings. For example, to insert return codes every 79 characters use Monaco 9-point with default margins (1.5" left. 1.5" right, 8.5" paper width, leaving 6" between margins). This process will be facilitated if the Default Normal style is set to Monaco 9 point, and Paragraph Spacing Before is set to zero. This can be done using the Set Default button in Define Styles. Once a document is saved with line breaks, re-word-wrapping is a big nuisance. I've found that the easiest way to edit documents (such as this article) is to perform the editing using this style and saving text-only until editing is complete, then finally saving text-only with line breaks to do the final word-wraps for transfer. Charles Poynton <poynton@sun.com> Sun Microsystems, Inc. 415-336-7846