Stretch Your Text

By Derek Walker

Originally published in EUG #12

I would like to offer some help to George Hersee regarding his problems with View. (Mailbag, EUG #11)

View has a maximum line length of 132 characters and can be defined by designing your own Rule. Either use Default Ruler or Mark as Ruler options and edit by adding more full stops and asterisks to the maximum allowed.

The 132 character maximum includes any Highlight characters, so if you add Highlights then you will have to sacrifice the amount of printable characters on that line.

Three emphasised names taking up 54 character spaces seems a bit excessive - Using the VIEW PRINTER DRIVER GENERATOR and Highlights 1 & 2, only two character spaces are used for the emphasised name. If you need more than just Bold and Underlining, the Extended Highlights can be selected which means that six character spaces per emphasised name are used. This is a maximum of 18 characters for the three highlighted area. I would like to know how George used the 54 characters.

If George is not using a Printer Driver, he can get in touch with me and I should be able to help out.

I have come across a similar problem of getting only 80 characters from a 132-character printer - the answer was in the DIP switch settings. Some wide carriage printers have the option of restricting the print head to 80 characters, it might be worth looking into.

Derek Walker, EUG #12