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Utilities Tape - WordACE

Full title WordACE
Year of release 1985
Publisher Boldfield Computing
Producer / Author(s) Charles Wehner
Memory 19k
Type Utility
Cost : £9.89
Download WordACE [CRC32 FAC416C1]
Distribution Permission Allowed | Group 1

Instructions

Sinclair ZX-printers are only capable of printing 32 columns of normal text. We can increase this figure by clever tricks such as using thinner characters (THINPRINT), but only to a limited extent. WORDACE, however, uses an interesting technique to overcome this problem; it prints sideways!
Instead of having 80 lines of 32 columns it produces 32 sideways lines of 80 columns. Although the page length (ie. paper width) is small the advantages are considerable.

Load WORDACE (load wordace) to display the program instructions. With a little practice you will soon become proficient in its use, but there are a few points to remember:

The final printed page is 32 lines of 80 column text (2560 characters), and there are four of these to the whole document. To fit on the screen and leave room for instructions, the visual display area is only 9 lines of 32 columns (288 characters) which is called a section. The computer allows 9 such sections per page. The current Section and Page number are displayed at the top of the screen. To let you know where the cursor would be with respect to the final printed document, a line number and tab position are also displayed prior to the input of new script.

There are two functions that are only accessible outside the program. To use these you must BREAK the program (an ERROR 3 is displayed and can be ignored).

The command QUANTITY counts the number of words after the current cursor position - so to count all the words in a document you must place the cursor at the beginning of the script before BREAKing. QUANTITY may take some time to count a full document.

The other command is REVERSE which reverses the video status of a named string. Hence: REVERSE THE will cause the computer to change all occurrences of "THE" or "the" to inverse video. Note the warning displayed at the start of WORDACE that this facility will change occurrences where the string is a substring of a bigger word - such as in "whether". Again, this command can take some time if the document is large. To revert to the main program after BREAKing simply enter WORDACE.

When you type in your script it is initially in the input buffer which means you can insert or delete in the normal ACE way. The amount of typing you do at this stage is limited by the space available below the horizontal line. To place this script in the document simply press ENTER. The text is processed (including justification) and stored in the document. To insert new script within the stored text, place the cursor at the point where insertion is to begin and select E from the menu. As before, your typing is initially in the input buffer, and when you press ENTER, it will be processed and inserted into the document.

You may delete text in only one, rather limiting, way. Place the cursor at the position where deletion is to commence and press DELETE (SHIFTed 0). The program asks if you really mean it (press Y For YES) and everything after the cursor position is deleted.

The commands to print the document are clearly given in the program. To save a document on a cassette, you simply SAVE the entire program containing the text. For example, BREAK when you are ready, and enter: SAVE LETTER When this file is loaded (load LETTER), and you run WORDACE, you will find your document intact!

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