eTypewriter PRINTING

The Printing Help topic in both PocketPad and eWriter tells you that the printing on the File menu is a "smart" dump to the printer that yields a very serviceable copy for proofing.

The suggestion for doing pretty printing with margin setting, with headers and footers, with fonts and all that, is to go into Toolbox on the Tools menu and bring up any program you might want to print from. The printer dump will give you a file name in the upper left corner and page numbers there if you have two or more pages. The printing is in 10 point Courier. Any line that is more than 84 columns brings up a dialog letting you choose between inserting a line break and a dash or skipping the line with the skip and the length printed in the output. That's, mainly, for skipping those long header lines in an RTF file (when working on WinHelp Help topics) rather than generating lines you're not likely to be proofing.

Now, there's ePrinting!

All that printing and the Help topic telling about it was worked out before PocketPad became an ewriter (a 21st century typewriter or eTypewriter) and before eWriter was even a gleam in my eye. Now, if you look at the About dialog (on Help menu) in either program, you see that the "text editor" is the writing end of a duplex or distributed ewriter. The reading or printing end is a web browser.

So, now, the instruction for getting your final print is very different, though of course you can use Toolbox and print in anything from Notepad to Winword or PageMaker.

The ewriter way to print is to save your text, go to Tools / Browsers, open your browser of choice with the htm file saved from the active editor (or the last one opened if there isn't an htm in the active editor), and ...print from the browser. The duplex etypewiter, made up of a text editor and a browser, was conceived for just this purpose. You use a text editor rather than a word processor to get plain text without sweating export quirks so you can send your letter electronically without your recipient having any but the simplest email receiving capability. Then, your recipient can use the readily available web browsers to read and print a "word processor" look and feel letter.

But, suppose you haven't used HTML punctuation?

You won't, always, use HTML punctuation. eWriter or PocketPad is, presumably, your text editor useful for any task a text editor is useful for. But you want to print an eLetter copy. Maybe you even want some gifs or jpegs or a signature (the things that'd go in an attachment with an eLetter) embedded. Well, the embeddings would, indeed, require the HTML punctuation ...unless they're just at the end. If you want to make a copy of the plain text body, make an htm file copy. Look in eltr.tpt (a template file for eLetters) for the first and last lines. These are header and footer for an htm file and you'll want these in boilerplates for making your template "on the fly" rather than loading a template.

In your htm file copy of the plain text you want to print as if in the text editor but from the browser, insert the first and last lines from the .tpt (or boilerplates). Just under that first line, in an empty line type Ctrl+S. And at the cursor, inside the pointy brackets, type PRE. Just above the last line, in an empty line, type Ctrl+X. And at the cursor type PRE again. Save the file, Tools / Browsers gives you your browser with this file as the default choice. Click OK and you're ready to read and print.

Gene Fowler

<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY BGCOLOR=FFFFFF>
<PRE>

       Well, all this below my name there is what you're
       likely to see in your text editor, and what you
       see (here) below that last line is what you're
       likely to see in the browser. (Dashes added.)

       What I do to get the text moved to the right is
       to word wrap for my right and a tab for my left.
       After a first line, I don't actually use the tab
       (and anticipate wordwrap or turn it off), but
       use Shift+Return (or Enter) to keep that indent,
       even through double spaces.

</PRE>
<BR></BODY></HTML>

--------------------------------------------------------------

       Well, all this below my name there is what you're
       likely to see in your text editor, and what you
       see (here) below that last line is what you're
       likely to see in the browser.

       What I do to get the text moved to the right is
       to word wrap for my right and a tab for my left.
       After a first line, I don't actually use the tab
       (and anticipate wordwrap or turn it off), but
       use Shift+Return (or Enter) to keep that indent,
       even through double spaces. (Dashes added.)