Date   : Wed, 30 Jan 1985 00:55:18 GMT
From   : Dave Brower <daveb@rtech.arpa>
Subject: Re: MINCE, PERFECT WRITER, backspace w/SCRIBBLE, etc.

> does anyone know how to do this?  In principle, it seems that you
> should be able to insert into a MINCE-processed file a CTRL-H
> (backspace), SCRIBBLE it, and then CRAYON it to get overstriking of
> two characters, but I can't do it.  Can anyone out there help?

The Scribble formatter, from which Perfect Format and the Final Word are
derived, tokenizes input and strips out 'garbage' characters such as
CTRL-H.  In practice and principle you can't embed ANY control codes and
special  characters directly in a .mss file and expect to see them in
your output.  You really don't want to do thie anyway, since it destroys
the printer independence that is one of the strong points of the
scribe-ish formatting model.

The method suggested by Perfect Software's old Berkeley tech support was
to define one of the extra printer strings, such as the italic on/off to
include a backspace. You therefore create an 'e' overstruck with a '`'
with something like:

       e@i(`)

Of course,  this creates some problems justifying things, since the
width of the grave accent gets counted even though it never really took
up a space.  You can make justification work if you only need to do a
few characters:  You include the CTRL-H and the grave-accent directly in
the italics string, doing the same with other special character and the
boldface, underline, etc. strings.  But you'd be screwed if you wanted
to use some of those attributes as originally intended at the same time.
(And I don't want to think about the proportional spacing implications...)

You'd be in slightly better shape if you have one of the MS-DOS Perfect
Formats, which handle MUCH larger TOCs and indeces, and have three more
special printer control string pairs as 'font1,' font2' and 'font3.'  I
don't know what additional flexibility is provided by The Final Word,
though it would be worth checking out.  The less said about PW 2.0 the
better.

Personally, I'd run with a PC Mince and a Perfect Format or a Final Word
formatter.

I have a number of things from the old 'Amythyst Users Group' that might
be of interest to diehard Mince hackers, and a (relatively) good 'C'
mode of my own design.  Reply via mail and I'll try to dredge it out of
the CP/M archives:  A) If there seems to be enough interest, and  B) I
can find a machine to read my old Osborne-1  disks.  Yes, I hacked Mince
with 90k drives, and it was VERY painful.

-Dave Brower

Mince, Scribble, Crayon and The Final Word are trademarks of Mark of the
Unicorn, Inc. (I hope still getting money from PSI and Thorne/EMI.)

Perfect Writer & Perfect Formatter are trademarks of Perfect Software,
Inc.

Barry A. Dobyns was the Amythyst User's Group and PSI's chief programmer.
-- 
-dB {ucbvax, decvax}!mtxinu!rtech!daveb

"The closer you look, the worse it gets."