On 9 Dec 2011 at 7:48, Steven Hirsch wrote:
On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Chuck Guzis wrote:
WordStar was WYSIWYG until prop fonts came along.
I still have an
add-on kit for WS 3.3 (CP/M) that allows for prop spaced fonts, even
if they don't show on the screen.
PropStar? I still have a copy of that somewhere. It worked on
dot-matrix printers, but was painful. I couldn't afford a laser
printer at the time.
No, this was a series of patches to WordStar. I used mine on a
daisywheel (Diablo). It turned out that WS 3.3 always had the
capability to do prop spacing, but there were errors in the
implementation, so it was turned off. I recall that what I purchased
(still have it somewhere) didn't even come wih a disk--it was a
series of instructions for patching.
When I moved to 16-bit MS-DOS, I used WS 2000 for several years. A
good product, but it was too strange to old WS users to get
accustomed to, so it was much less popular. It came with a copy of
Star Exchange, which was very useful for converting from (and to)
alien WP formats. I've used it recently for some crufty old stuff
that old conversion packages like RdocX and WordPort couldn't handle.
I have a copy of WS 7 for Windows, but have never used it.
I recall that at one time, Adobe Pagemaker was the format that nobody
could handle in any reasable way. Fortunately, we rarely see it any
more.
--Chuck