Blast from the past
Redesign your ears in WinWord
There's a way to hide the annoying message with Chkdsk, and it doesn't require a batch file: Use the older version of chkdsk that came with an older DOS version. To make the old version work, you'll need to load DOS's setver utility.
First, add the line device=c:\dos\setver.exe to your config.sys file. (If you're running DOS's EMM386 memory manager, you can load the program high using devicehigh=c:\dos\setver.exe; if you're using a third-party memory manager, check the documentation.)
Next, in your DOS directory, rename the file chkdsk.exe to something like chkdsk62.exe, then copy chkdsk.exe from an older DOS into its place. Unlike most files on DOS distribution disks, chkdsk.exe is never compressed.
Your last step is to enter the command setver chkdsk.exe x.x, replacing the x's with the version number of your older DOS. Reboot, and your chkdsks will be the older, message-free version.
- Walter H. Tortorici, San Jose, California
Editor's note: We tested this tip with chkdsks from DOS 5.0 and 6.0, and it worked fine on an uncompressed drive. Versions older than 6.0, however, may cause problems on DoubleSpace- or DriveSpace-compressed drives. As best we can tell, no configuration of setver will make IBM's chkdsk.com run under MS-DOS.
If you want to run an older utility on a newer version of DOS, setver is a good alternative. Now that some of the original DOS utilities come on a supplement disk that must be ordered specially from Microsoft, it may be easier to use setver than to wait for a disk.
Of course, running setver involves loading one more device driver into memory - always a potential problem. If you're not already loading setver to make some other program compatible, you may want to think twice about doing it just to get rid of a pesky message. On the other hand, if you already load setver, this trick can get rid of that message painlessly.
Look at the top of a page in a dictionary or reference book, and you're likely to find a special type of header called an ear. By listing the first and last entries on the page, an ear shows at a glance whether you're at the right place in the book.
It's not well documented, but you can use WinWord 6.0's StyleRef fields to create ears. By default, a StyleRef field searches backwards through your document, starting from the place where it was inserted, until it finds the first paragraph formatted with a particular named style.
It then displays the text it found. In a header or footer, a StyleRef field normally reprints the first paragraph on the page that is formatted in the given style. The trick to making a good ear is to have fields search for the first and last use of the style on the page and print less than the entire paragraph.
Suppose that you're writing a film encyclopaedia, and you use the subheading "Preston Sturges: Illegitimacy of the Sacred". If you set your StyleRef field to your subheading paragraph style, you will get that whole title in your header. A much more readable header would simply refer to the section as "Sturges".
To do this, create a character style: select Format-Style and click New. In the New Style dialogue box, enter the Name EarCharStyle and select the Style Type Character. Leave the Based On setting at Default Paragraph Font, and define the style to use the same font settings as your paragraph heading. After you've closed the dialogue boxes, select the name Sturges in your subhead, and assign it to the style EarCharStyle. The word will not look any different. Go through your document and assign the style to the key word in every subhead.
Now it's time to create your ear header. Select View-Header and Footer. Format the header as you like. To insert a reference to the first key word on each page, select Insert-Field. In the Categories field of the resulting dialogue box, select Links&References; for Field Names, select StyleRef. In the Field Codes text box, enter EarCharStyle. When you click OK, your header will contain the reference.
A proper ear, however, needs references to the first and the last entry on a page (for example, "Stooges-Sturges"). This requires adding a hyphen and another StyleRef field, this one searching forward to the page's last block of text with the given style. Create this field just like the other one, except in the Field Codes text box, enter EarCharStyle \l (that's the letter l, for last).
Here's an extra little trick: Suppose you want the ear to display some text that doesn't appear anywhere in your document. Find some unused space on the page (say, at the end of a paragraph), type in the text, give it the style EarCharStyle, and white it out by selecting Format-Font and the colour white (turning on the Hidden option doesn't work). Shrink the text to a tiny size if necessary so it doesn't push any other text out of the way; the size and colour won't affect what appears in the ear.
- Lou Argyres, Richmond, California