WSDOCON Version 1.2 for MS-DOS (c) 1984,1985 William C. Parke


DISTRIBUTION

WSDOCON Version 1.2 may be freely copied and distributed as long
as the only charge is for media and reproduction costs. Under no
circumstances should the program be distributed with a commercial
product, sold for profit, or distributed in modified form without
express permission of the author.

DESCRIPTION

The WordStar Document Conversion program, WSDOCON, is a utility
for converting ordinary ASCII text files into a format which
WordStar uses in its Document mode. In addition, a WordStar
Document can be converted into an ordinary ASCII text file.

The advantage of converting a text from a WordStar Non-document
to a Document is the abililty to edit and reformat paragraphs
within WordStar.

WSDOCON is a simple and extremely fast conversion utility. Disk
activity is held to a minimum. Moreover, arbitrarily large
files, up to the storage capacity of the disk, can be converted.
This is made possible by giving the user the option of specifying
only one file on the command line. The converted file will then
overwrite the original file. If this is not desired, a new
converted file can be created, leaving the original one
unchanged. Converted files will always be the same size as the
original one.

Several optional switches are available. In document mode,
WordStar inserts spaces when the tab key is pressed. WSDOCON will
change each tab character in the original text to a space in
converting to a Document, unless the tab switch '/T' is used on
the command line. All carriage returns within each text paragraph
will be 'soften' in the Document. A paragraph boundary will
normally be defined by a double space (i.e. two carriage return-
line feeds). If indentation is used as a paragraph indicator, or
if data in a column is to be preserved after a reformating
instruction in WordStar, then the '/C' switch should be used on
the command line. This will keep the carriage returns before
these column indented lines as 'hard' returns in the WordStar
Document.

A WordStar Document can be converted to a standard ASCII text
file using the '/N' switch on the command line.

Several example command lines follow:

If no files are specified:

WSDOCON

a brief help screen will be displayed.

Conversion of ASCII text file named TEXT.DOC to WordStar
Document:

WSDOCON TEXT.DOC

The user will be asked if he wishes to overwrite TEXT.DOC with
the converted file.

Conversion of TEXT.DOC to TEXAS.DOC:

WSDOCON TEXT.DOC TEXAS.DOC

The file TEXAS.DOC will be created as a WordStar Document. If it
already exists, the user will be asked if it is to be overwritten.

Conversion of file with column indentation as paragraph
separator:

WSDOCON TEXT.DOC TEXAS.DOC /C

The /T and /C switches can be used together on the same command
line.

Conversion of Document file to ordinary ASCII text file:

WSDOCON TEXAS.DOC TEXT.DOC /N