back forward contents index

unformatted files

In comparison to WSformat and Hypermake, WSedit (unformatted) interpretes only a few dot commands:

.TB 5,7,10,#25,30

With ".TB" (a Wordstar 5 command), you can set the tabulator stops: You can let jump the cursor to the next tabulator stop by typing TAB or ^OG; up to the tabulator stop, "snow characters" are automatically inserted. The default setting is ".TB4". With "File - Export", snow characters are converted to spaces or ASCII tab characters.

The Hash character # tells WSedit that the number relates to the last character in the column. That means the column gets right-orientated. Wordstar also knows the # character, but in Wordstar, the number describes the position of the dot separator of a number and not the last character.

You can change the ".TB" value and then type Ctrl-B on the lines which you want to have modified. Ctrl-B is a on-screen formatting command which uses the tab stops of the last ".TB" command.

.BE (enabling word wrap)
.BD (disable word wrap) (or .BA)

Normally, word wrap is on. In tables, it can be necessary to turn off and on word wrap functionality. You can do it by typing the commands ".BE" word wrap enabled and ".BD" word wrap disabled.

Because WSedit cannot handle lines larger than 255 chars, ".BA" sets the right margin to 250, and this will have (nearly) the effect of turning word wrap off. The same fact is with the "Word wrap" on menu item when handling normal text files.

A .BD command in the very first line will be ignored by WSedit, (but not by WSformat).

.RM 60

The Wordstar Right Margin command is interpreted while writing an unformatted WS file to disk. By default, a WS file created by WSedit will have set the right margin to 78, so you can read the WS file with a DOS Wordstar without problems. On the WSedit screen, you won't see an effect of ".RM".

forward contents index