TEXT FOMATTER C64 and PLUS/4

  By James Hehl

 This cute program was the result of a programing error!  Yup, back when I was I working on a recent upgrade of TEXT PACKER, I was playing around with saving text from memory.

 Much to my irritation, the final drafts of the programs were finished, so I thought... upon putting the programs through their paces, I found that the text was reformatted, depending on whether I'd just read it in 39 colums or printed it in 79 colums.  The word wrapper was doing its job, but also inserting a carriage return in RAM, after each line.

 I used a different approach to finish the packed text readers, but held on to the program that caused the problems.

 They worked around in one of those hollow spots in my brain, until I decided to make use of them... and TEXT FORMATTER was born!

 These programs will quickly reformat your text to any line lengh, up to 79 colums, that you'd like... without being in a word processor environment.  That is, along with being a fest sequential reader/printer utility, it will also SAVE to disk a prefixed, new file incorporating the current word wrap.  These files are handy for "pasting" into side-by-side two colum pages or for use in any doc program that requires colum formats of 79 colums or less.  If used with the the fast RETURN STRIPPER programs, included in this package, you will be able to strip and refomat text files to any colum width that you'd like.  These programs are great for fixing up those awkward documentation files, that we all downloaded.

 The menus are "bar selected" and the programs will boot from any drive number that you are currently using.  The number of files that they will handle is limited only by the type of drive that you are using.  They will handle 144 files on the 1541. 296 files on the 1581 and up to 1000 files on the CMD or hard drive device.

 The active keys, on the main menu, are the cursor keys, the HOME key and the Return key.  The CLR/HOME key, if tapped a couple of times, will return you to the top of the filename list, no matter how far down into it you are.

 After you select a file with the Returnkey, you will be prompted to enter the line length (number of colums) that you want to word wrap at.  You may enter any number up to 79.  Just pressing the Return key, at this prompt, will default to 39 colums, if you are going to read it and at 79 columns, if you are going to print the file.

 The next prompt will ask for "P" for print or "S" for screen.  select the mode that you'd like.  Just pressing the Return key at this prompt will default to the Screen Mode.

 SCREEN MODE OPTIONS

 When you have finished reading the fil and checking your line length selection, you will be givin a number of options:
 1. Pressing the "N" key will allow you to change to a new disk of sequential files to read.

 2. Pressing the "Q" key will quit the program and go to basic.

 3. Pressing the \ (English pound)..key will allow you to SAVE the file, with the current column setting, to a disk.  You will be asked to "Press Any Key TO Save".  This is a deliberate pause, allowing you to change to a different destination disk ti you'd like.  When the file finishes SAVing, you will be prompted to "Press Any Key To Continue".  This is the time to swap the disks back, if you've changed them.  You will be returned to the file select menu.

 4. Pressing the Spacebar will return you to the file select menu.

 PRINT MODE OPTIONS

 The file will print with the currently selected word wrap.  When the file has finished printing and you are happy with the word wrap, you will have two options[
 1. Pressing the "\" (English pound) key will SAVE the disk to file, using the currently selected word wrap.  You will be prompted as in the Read Mode, to swap disks if you'd like.

 2. Pressing ANY other key will return you to the file select menu.

 The new formatted sequential files are SAVEd to your disk with an "F". prefix to help you identify them.  If you feel that they need some additional touching up, as in the case of files created by the RETURN STRIPPEER program, you can do it with your favorite word processor program.  This should'nt be necessary on most files.

 I hope that this program will be of some use to you folks.  It sure beat tossing out a couple of evenings of work.  I just wish that all programming mistakes would be useful ones. Enjoy!