Some of the best operational tips comes in letters to UPDATE. A bunch of these are given in this issue, nuff to help almost everybody with at least 2 or 3 head scratching problems.
John Juergens, Pacifica, California uses Quill with a typewriter———
Your October issue (my first) just arrived. I’m very glad I accepted your recent invitation to subscribe.
There are a few things I have found to make life easier when working with QLWP:
1. One of our printing devices is a typewriter. One of the difficulties with both a typewriter and a dot-matrix printer is starting out; that is, does one line up the top of the paper, start printing and hope to catch it under the paper bail on-the-fly or is there an easier way? Go into Design (F3, D) and set Upper Margin to zero and Bottom Margin to 12 – assuming you wish a one inch margin top and bottom. When ready to print align the top of the paper at the print line and press the Line Feed button seven (if the paper is one below) or six (if on) the print line – this is the top one-inch margin. Paper bail down and start printing. Multi-pages can be done easily if tractor paper is used on the typewriter and the required number of pages is left connected (you can then use Continuous Forms YES when configuring the printer_dat for your typewriter and print the whole thing out at once without stopping for the Insert New Page and Press Enter interrupt.) If a Footer is desired (with or without pagination) put it in but be sure to deduct the lines used for the Footer from the 12 lines designated for the Bottom Margin in Design.
2. The setting up each time of the margins, header, footer, tabs, gaps, etc. has always been a pain. I set up a blank page with all desired settings or a number of blannk pages for different settings or devices and Save it/them to mdv1_ on the backup QLWP. Each blank page requires 5 sectors; if more than one is used be sure each has a different name. After the first month, the on-screen Help via F1 was never used – so, I deleted it from mdv1_ giving me more room there for things of more help.
3. With more than one printing device one must configure, usually, more than one printer_dat. Without the assistance of a ram-disk doing more than one tends to be a chore. What I did was to bring up install_bas (or is it INSTALL_bas?), do the configuration changes and then replace the cartridge in mdv1_ with another and install the replacement. If there are more than two to do replace with another and install it. Make sure you know what is on which though because they all have the same names: printer_dat and install_dat will appear on each. What you are interested in though is printer_dat. Get back to SuperBasic and put your QLWP backup in mdv1 and the other/first in mdv2_. Then, copy mdv2_printer_dat to mdv1_ptr_dat (mdv1_typ_dat or any name and extension you choose); do the same for the second (or the third if you have one or both.) In QLWP once you are ready to print go to F3, (O)ther, (F)ile, (D)elete mdv1_printer_dat; ESC, (B)ackup mdv1_ptr_dat (or mdv1_typ_dat) as mdv1_printer_dat and you are ready to print to your favorite device.
4. If you are really set on making life easier, committing all of the pre-sets loading, (D)elete and (B)acking up to a single keystroke and speeding up QLWP very noticeably, purchase Turbo-Quill + (about $35 from an UPDATE vendor) and follow the directions; T-Q+ will even do it all automatically (without even the keystroke) upon start-up by using the CTRL S defined key.
I share your view concerning the reliability of the microdrives and their usability for around the home tasks. One of features which attracted me to the QL was that it took up so little space and had a minimum of wires and cables strung around. I have often considered a disk system which would make QL-life even a easier but the used-space and clutter is just not worth it.
I also had a problem with a Procedure named SORT (Bob Hartung‘s thoughts, page 44, UPDATE, Oct 88.) I would guess that somewhere in the QL ROM is something named SORT which was supposed to do something but design and marketing consideration aborted the effort – and it is still there causing problems for the unwary. SRT, SRTE (Fr?) or ST will work but not SORT. It was a neat name for what I was doing and I hated letting it go – sort of like how George Gobel felt when he remarked that by the time he was recognized and the time came for him to pick out a disease to sponsor all of the good diseases were taken.
Again, I enjoyed the issue, thank you and keep up the good work.
Very truly yours,
John E. Juergens
To John and others– MULTIPLE LETTERS in QUILL: As can be seen, UPDATE’s letter volume is quite heavy. Most letters deserve a reply and that is time consuming. The average letter output is about four per day. What I do is to type in 4-5 letters into Quill and pad out with ENTER’s to the end of a page. Then the next letter begins. Once I turn Quill loose for printing, the letters print in daisy chain fashion. So if you should get a letter that starts on page 3, you’ll know why. While the 4-5 letters are printing there is time to stamp the envelopes with return address and write in the persons’ name and address. Since I type about 682 WPM (kidding) the daily letter production time is about 4 minutes. Trouble is, I type faster’n I think, and the literary composition “think time” is the msf (most significant factor).
SLS: Once in a while the SLS gets me and I have to re-think and re-type 4-5 letters. (Sudden Lock Syndrome). Fortunately my QL locks up only once or so a week, and usually it is during QUILL operation. But I operate mostly with Quill and maybe the software has nothing to do with SLS? Sometimes I can attribute SLS to a flock of blackbirds landing on the power line coming into the house. Other times the Wife turned on the microwave oven, and SLS grabbed me. The ole heat problem ain’t it because a re-set gets another week of free operation. Does anybody have an understanding or a generic fix for SLS?? –BJ