Out with the old, in with the new
Marginalising WinWord
Q I have a 486DX-33 with 4Mb of RAM, 256K cache, 212Mb hard disk, plus a number of other features, and an HP DeskJet 540 printer. I use DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1, MS-Works for Windows 3.0, QFiler and XTree Gold (for file management), PC Tools, plus graphics programs.
My main word processor is an early model Galaxy, which has been modified so it is still a very useful program that, for ease of use, in some ways leaves MS-Works for dead - especially when it comes to knowing precisely where you are on the page as you type, ease of reformatting, block handling and sorting columns, etc.
In conjunction with Galaxy I use a desktop publishing program called Key Publisher. This is also simple and straightforward to use, sufficiently so that with the combination of the two I have written and published several small books (up to 96 pages), most on the subject of local history.
It is only recently that I invested in MS-Works for Windows 3.0, as I thought a more modern word processor may be useful - in some ways it is, but there are disappointments, particularly not knowing exactly where I am on the page, but I can manage.
All the above is a preamble to acquaint you with what I have and use. Within Galaxy and Key Publisher, both DOS programs, I have hundreds of files which I wish to retain or work on, so now I come to the problem.
When I import a text file into MS-Works it arrives with a hard return marker (^p) at the end of every line and paragraph, instead of only at the paragraph end. The beginning of every line has four dots and every space between words has a single dot. All these can be seen when I turn on View-Show all characters.
The fact that this garbage is present prevents me from formatting, justifying and any other work, as everything is locked between the end of line/paragraph markers. If I type work straight into MS-Works there are no problems - it does all it is supposed to do. If I remove the ^p using Replace (with nothing), then naturally everything runs together.
I have enclosed a page of original text printed from Galaxy, complete with bold and italics, which was in response to printer commands placed there by me. Another page shows it exactly as imported to MS-Works, minus the special characters of course, as they will not print. A third page shows the result of removing the ^p from each line.
I could stay with Galaxy and Key Publisher but do not see why I should ignore MS-Works, which, amongst other things, offers various fonts and sizes that I need to get from Key Publisher, not being available in Galaxy.
I have imported files directly into MS-Works from Galaxy, directly from Key Publisher and saved as ASCII files - all with the same results. I also used QFiler - the file manager - to move a file directly from Galaxy to MS-Works, with the same result.
By spending considerable time, I can unravel that which appears on the third page so it finally looks like what I want, but it's a waste of valuable time. The imported text can be centred or left aligned despite the ^p etc.
Obviously, my question is whether there is any way I can import text from Galaxy to MS-Works, so that with the minimum of work, it can eventually look OK.
Enclosed is a disk with a copy of the Galaxy text and on the same disk is a copy of the imported text, taken from MS-Works. When I look at these two files in Galaxy, they are exactly the same, so the double importation has made no changes.
I note in your preamble that you request a copy of MSD etc, but I don't think this will help you as mine seems to be a software compatibility problem, and the computer is running OK in all respects. Incidentally, I also have a Panasonic KXP1123 24-pin dot matrix printer and the same print-out occurs there.
Sorry to have been so longwinded, but it seems impossible to tell you of all the possibilities in less space.
I will be most grateful if you can surmount the problem. If I am trying to do the impossible then I will have to live with it - I can still access everything I have in Galaxy and format it in Key Publisher, so all is not lost!
- Eric Jamieson, Meningie, SA
A Galaxy grew out of a basic DOS text editor and still has the old-fashioned text editor way of organising lines, namely with a hard return at the end of each. Modern word processors carry line length information in the paragraph format block and break the line for display purposes on the fly. This is how it can quickly and easily break the line in other places when you change one of a number of factors - indents, margins and font size for example.
The dots displayed in the "Show all characters" mode are simply spaces made visible and reflect the way Galaxy formats the text. You can modify the arrangement of spaces by automated search and replace, but unfortunately the search feature won't let you search for the end-of-paragraph symbol. So if you want to convert files from Galaxy to MS-Works, I'm afraid you're up for a bit of elbow grease.
However, all is not lost. You can use Windows Recorder to mechanise most of the process. Put the cursor at the start of the text, then start recording. Press <Ctrl> + <down arrow>, then press <Backspace>, finally press <Spacebar>. Stop recording and assign your macro to a function key you're not using, say <F12>. Now, every time you press <F12> (or whatever), you replace the next end-of-paragraph with a space and if you keep rattling that key, your text will become a single paragraph. Breaking it up into paragraphs again is just a matter of "mousing" the cursor to where you want it and pressing <Enter>.
You can create macros for reformatting paragraphs in exactly the same way, by recording the keystrokes. You can create several, for different paragraph formats, which is one up on Galaxy.
If you start each such macro with <Ctrl> + <up arrow> it lets you reformat without worrying about where in the paragraph you start - the macro will always start at the beginning and you only have to plonk the cursor down somewhere within the paragraph.
All this would of course be easier in Word for Windows or some other high-end word processor, because it has its own macro language and ready-made paragraph and header styles.
Now, it's a funny thing about "knowing where you are on the page" - in lines and columns, I assume. That was important back in the non-graphic DOS days, because the fonts were always equally spaced as in a typewriter and the same numbers always described the cursor position on the page.
With modern what-you-see-is-what-you-print word processors, which MS-Works is, albeit at entry-level, fonts vary wildly and are variably spaced anyway, and the only meaningful information about cursor location is gained simply by looking at the display.
Interestingly, WinWord displays the vertical position in centimetres from the top of the paper (not the margin) and lines from the top of the margin, and the line count wraps around any columns. The horizontal position is given in columns only, starting from the left edge of the column.
I'm sure you'll find that once you've changed your viewpoint to working graphically with the rulers on the display, you'll never look back to the old character-based days.
Q As a screenwriter, I use macros constantly in Word 6.0 for Windows for dialogue margins, inserting repeated text like "Continued", etc. The problem I have is that Word seems to hate having margins changed on small portions of the document. Regardless of settings in Page Setup and Options, it constantly changes the margins on the whole document. Sometimes it works, but other times the same document repaginates itself (even when this option is turned off!) with the dialogue margin (5.25cm left and right) for the entire script.
Surely I don't have to resort to WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which can do it effortlessly? I don't really want to buy the Script Wizard available for Word when other word processors can do it.
- Terry Kyle, Kirribilli, NSW
A The thing to remember about margins is that they're originally a printing issue and as such relate to the whole document. WinWord allows you to set different margins by sections (see Margins, Overview in Help-Index), but section boundaries can be tricky to handle whether you tie them to page boundaries or not. You'll find it a lot easier to achieve the effect you want by using indents.
You can apply indents in a number of ways, but I find the following easiest for the sort of thing you have in mind: if it's a single paragraph, just place the cursor within the paragraph, and if it's more than one paragraph, click anywhere within the first paragraph and drag to anywhere within the last one. Now grab the indent pointer in the ruler and drag it to where you want it.
If you want a precise numerical indent, you can right-click anywhere within the selected paragraphs, select Paragraph from the pop-up menu and operate to your heart's content on the dialogue box that appears.