On 5/28/21 11:29 PM, Lawrence Wilkinson via cctalk wrote: > On 29/05/21 2:40 am, Fred Cisin via cctech wrote: >> Wordstar had some "drivers" for proportional spacing. >> I kinda doubt that there are practical Windoze drivers. > > Yes. I seem to recall that Wordstar had fairly sophisticated support for > printers, though you would probably still have to configure the basic > Escape sequences unless you're lucky enough to find the set for your > printer.
CP/M Wordstar 3.3 could do proportional spacing, but it was broken as released. For a few bucks, a third party would send patches and directions for use. Believe it or not, I still have that stuff. Wordstar 4.0 for CP/M-80 was much improved; I suspect it was altogether new code (possibly from New word?). I have that one also, still in the box. When MSDOS rolled around, the game for WS changed dramatically. I think that it went as far as WS 7 (I think I have an unopened box of that too). The problem was that the competition (Word Perfect, then MS Word) was just so much more capable. I used Wordstar for a long time, starting with version 0.90. I briefly moved sideways to Wordstar 2000. Not a bad product, but totally unlike standard WS, and too late to the party--I used it for documentation for a few years. I pretty much left the world of daisywheel printers when the first HP Laserjet broke onto the scene. Beautiful output--and so much faster and quieter! --Chuck
