Re: Translating XyWin to Word or WordStar

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

K-Mac writes:

>The WordStar export looks even uglier. . . .

I'd imagine that your Sri Lankan collaborator is using some version of
WordStar that was produced when WordStar had a more than negligible share
of the market. If so, his WordStar will happily digest files in pure ASCII
(a term I use here in its proper and strict sense): if you have "foreign"
characters (e-acute, etc.), then what happens depends on the version of the
program.

>I'd settle for a clean translation of the text into double-
>spaced 65-character monospaced lines with paragraph indents,
>no hyphenation, and a running header with page numbers.

With WordStar up to version 4 (at least), you'd achieve this with a file of
the purest ASCII preceded by a very small number of lines each starting
with a period. I don't remember what these are offhand, but they're of the
order of:

.rm65
.po5
.he         Blood Feast of the Venusian She-Devils: The Sequel  #

[Again, these are *not* the actual commands. You could get them by asking
your collaborator to send you a very short sample file formatted the way he
likes things to be formatted.]

One problem is that
MAIL.PRN and STRIP.PRN
both insert hard line
breaks at the right
hand margin whereas it
is of course much easier to manipulate text that only has hard breaks at
paragraph ends. You could of course get Xy to fix this, or there are
various utilities -- typically with filedates from When We Were Very Young
-- that do the same thing.

(If your man in Serendip is using a newer WordStar, then I really don't
remember. Actually I bought WordStar for Windows 2, mostly out of idle
curiosity because it was so very cheap. I found it rather less awful than
Xy for producing tables, no match for anything else that I ever wanted to
do. The files it produced were as bloated as those produced by Word. On a
486/33, it was slower than WordStar 3.3 had been on a 4MHz 64kB CP/M
machine. It was pretty good on a 486/133. Installation crashed
spectacularly on a 586/133.)
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Peter Evans