Creating Different Versions of a Form Letter

You can set up instructions for printing different versions of a letter for different clients. You enter these instructions by putting conditional dot commands in your master document. WordStar tests the conditions set up in the dot commands and merge prints each letter accordingly.

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

Modifying the Letter for Selected Clients

Suppose your company wants to pay all shipping charges for West Coast customers and half the charges for all other customers. To inform your customers, you'll need two versions of the letter you just typed.

One version of the letter will contain this postscript for West Coast customers:

P.S. We'll gladly pay all shipping charges for your first order.

The other version will contain this postscript:

P.S. We'll gladly pay 500/0 of the shipping charges for your first order.

How will WordStar know which version of the letter to print for your customers?

With conditional dot commands in a document, WordStar can test data to see if a certain condition is true and then decide what to do.

Command .IF

. EL .EI

Function

Enters the condition and specifies what to print if the condition is true.

Specifies what to do if the condition is false .

Specifies the end of the condition and tells WordStar to resume regular printing.

Note: Every.IF command must have a matching .EI command.

Open the master document again.

1 At the Opening Menu, press D to open a document.

2 Choose FORM1.L TH.

Setting Up the Condition

You'll set up this condition for printing: If the zip code is greater than 89999 (for West Coast customers), print the text that follows. If not, skip the text and continue to the next .EL or .EI command.

Add the conditional dot commands to the master document.

1 Move the cursor to the blank line following "Vice President, Market-ing." (If the Edit Menu is displayed, pressing the PRDn key four times will move the cursor close to the end of the letter.)

2 Press ~ twice.

106

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

3

Starting in column 1, set up the condition with the conditional dot commands. (The ^#

>

.if &zip& #:> 89999 ~

p. S. We'll gladly pay all the shipping charges for your first order. ^~

.el ~

P.S. We'll gladly pay 50% of the shipping charges for your first order. ~

.ei ~

Other symbols can be used to compare numbers:

Symbol

#>

#<>

#<=

#>=

Meaning is equal to is less than is greater than is not equal to

is less than or equal to is greater than or equal to

TIP You can also set up conditions to compare words. For ex-ample, if you wanted to print a letter for everyone named Charlie in your data file, you would set up this condition:

.IF &FN AME& = Charlie .EL

.EI

Notice that the equal sign (=) isn't preceded by a number sign (#) when you set up a condition with words. See the "Reference Guide"

for a complete list of symbols used with .IF.

Saving the Master Document 1 Press AKD to save FORMl.L TR.

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

Merge Printing the Letter

Print the letters just as you did in the previous exercise. Make sure your printer is on and ready.

1 At t~e Opening Menu, press M, type form1.ltr, and press Esc.

Compare your letters with the examples on the following pages. If they're not the same', reopen the master doc1..lment and check the condi-tional dot commands. When you are satisfied that the master document is correct, merge print the letter again.

108

o

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

March 18, 1987 Concord, California 94520

I am an agent for a small rural cooperative producing specialty foodstuffs and craft items. Currently, the cooperative is selling the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. To add a

Vice President, Marketing

P.S. We'll gladly pay 50% of the shipping charges for your first

Lesson 10 Merge Printing Concord, California 94520

I am an agent for a small rural cooperative producing specialty foodstuffs and craft items. Currently, the cooperative is selling the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. To add a

Vice President, Marketing

P.S. We'll gladly pay 50% of the shipping charges for your first

o

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

March 18, 1987 Concord, California 94520

I am an agent for a small rural cooperative producing specialty foodstuffs and craft items. Currently, the cooperative is selling the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. To add a

Vice President, Marketing

P. S. We'll gladly pay all shipping charges for your first order

Lesson 10 Merge Printing Concord, California 94520

I am an agent for a small rural cooperative producing specialty foodstuffs and craft items. Currently, the cooperative is selling the most delicious honey I've ever tasted. To add a

Vice President, Marketing

P. S. We'll gladly pay all shipping charges for your first order.

You've created a data file and a master document and used merge print-ing to print form letters. You've also set special conditions for printprint-ing two versions of the same letter.

112

Lesson 10 Merge Printing

The "Reference Guide" has complete information about all the dot com-mands used in producing and formatting sophisticated documents for merge printing. If you want information about producing envelopes and one, two, or three labels at a time, see Appendix B, "WordStar Examples and Tips."

• Reference Guide

The "Reference Guide" gives detailed explanations of WordStar's fea-tures, functions, and commands. Topics are presented in alphabetical order. The entry titles are functional. For example, you don't have to know that the commands for changing margins are in the Qnscreen Format Menu. Simply look for Margins. If you don't immediately find the topic you are looking for, refer to the index.

Accent marks

Many non-English words have accent marks; for example, ecran or acces. To print accent marks, use the "PH overprint command. "PH causes the printer to backspace one character and overprint the charac-ter. See Overprinting.

Aligning a paragraph

When you edit a document, you usually change the length of some of its lines. You then need to align the paragraphs to make the lines fit within the margins again.

To align a paragraph, use the AB command. Move the cursor to the first line of text that you want to align, then press AB. WordStar starts align-ing at the left margin of the line-. If you press AB when the cursor is to the left of the left margin (for example, if you entered the text with the margin farther to the left than the current margin), WorclStar moves all text (including spaces) to the right of the cursor within the margins. If you are using a temporary indent ^(AOG),the temporary indent column is used as the left margin. WordStar stops aligning at the next hard car-riage return (shown by the

<

flag at the right side of the screen).

To align text, WordStar compares the length of each line with the length of the ruler line. If a line is too long, words at the end are moved to the next line. If a line is too short, words from the next line are moved up.

With hyphen help on COH), you can also hyphenate words while you're aligning. See Hyphenation.

TIP Use the "PO command to create a binding space when you don't want WordStar to split phrases during aligning. A phrase that uses binding spaces instead of normal spaces is treated as one word. See Binding space.

You can align more than one paragraph or even a whole document by using the AQU command. AQU aligns a paragraph, pauses briefly at the hard carriage return, then continues to align each paragraph until the end of the document. You can stop aligning by pressing AU.

When aligning a whole document, you can mark certain sections of text, such astables or charts, that you do not want to align. Type the dot command .A W off on the line just above where you want aligning to stop. Type .AW on on the line before you want aligning to resume.

Notice that during normal editing, the word Align appears in the status line. After you enter the .A W off command, Align disappears when the cursor is in the portion of the text that will not be aligned.

116

TIP You can use the .PF command to align text at print time.

This command is mostly used with merge printing but can also be used with regular printing. See Merge printing.

Auto indent

You can also align paragraphs automatically after substitutions during find and replace operations by using the A option on the Find and Replace screen. See Finding and replacing.

Alternate type See Pitch.

ASCII

ASCII is short for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

It is a standard format that lets different types of computers interpret information in the same way.

WordStar nondocument files are ASCII files. Document files are not ASCII, but you can convert them to ASCII in either of two ways:

• Edit the document in nondocument mode, Use AB or "QU to zero the eighth bit throughout the file. This method leaves the print control characters in the file .

• Print the file to disk. At the Opening Menu, press P (or M if the file contains variables) to print. At the last print option, Name of printer?, select ASCII. After ASCII, type the > symbol and the name you want to give the ASCII file. For example:

Name of printer? ASCII>LETTER.ASC

If you don't type a filename, the file is named ASCII. WS, This method removes control characters from the file. See also Print-ing to disk.

Auto indent

Auto indent is available only in nondo'cument mode. As lines are typed, this feature indents them automatically. Auto indent is especially useful for programming in languages such as PL/l, Pascal, and C, since the common practice in structured programming techniques is to indent the same amount for each level of nesting.

To turn auto inde'nt on, use the ^A6 command. Hold down Ctrl and type the number 6. (Use the number key above the letter keys; do not use the number on the numeric keypad.) When auto indent is on, Auto-In appears in the status line. Then, press the Tab key, "I, or the Spacebar to move the cursor to the column to which you want subsequent lines to be indented. Begin typing. Each time you enter a carriage return, WordStar begins the next line at the column you chose.

Background printing

To increase the amount of the indent, add blanks or tabs at the begin-ning of the line where you want the increased indent. To decrease indenting, erase blanks and tabs. WordStar indents the next line with exactly the same number of tabs and spaces as the previous line.

To turn auto indent off, press "6 again. The Auto-In disappears from the status line.

Background printing See Printing a file.

Backspace key See Keyboard.

Backup files

Each time you save a file, WordStar automatically saves the previous version of the file. This "backup" file appears in your directory with the same filename as the original file but with the .BAK filename extension.

The first time you save a new file, you have only one version of the file.

The next time you use "KS, "KD, or "KX to save the file, the earlier version becomes the backup file.

The .BAK files protect your work; if your working file is damaged, you can use the backup version. WordStar doesn't allow you to edit a .BAK file, but you can view it in Protected Mode. See Protecting a file. To edit a .BAK file, you must first rename it with a different extension. See Renaming a file.

TIP Saving your work while you're editing by pressing AKS takes only moments and protects the work you're editing from power failures and other problems.

It's also a good idea to make additional backup copies of your files on separate disks. See also Copying and "If You're New to Computers" in

"Learning" for more information on copying files and disks.

118

Block & Save Menu

Bidirectional printing

Many printers can print lines while the printing element is moving to the left and to the right. On some daisy-wheel printers, you can turn bidirec-tional printing off to improve print quality, or on to speed up printing.

The default setting for bidirectional print is on. You can change this default with WSCHANGE. See Appendix C, "Customizing WordStar."

You can also turn bidirectional printing on or off inside a document using the .BP on and .BP off dot commands.

TIP .BP 0 (zero) is the same as .BP off; .BP 1 (one) is the same as .BPon.

Binding space

The binding space commarid ("PO) keeps two words together as you align a paragraph. To insert a binding space between two words in your text, press "PO instead of putting a space between the words.

On the screen, the binding space is displayed as "0. The two words are treated as one word during aligning. "PO keeps the words together regardless of whether justification is on or off. See also Aligning a

paragraph.

Blank lines

To insert a blank line in your text, move the cursor to column 1 where you want the blank line and press -.1. The hard carriage return symbol

( < )

appears in the flag column, and the cursor goes to the beginning of the next line. (Insert must be on for the -.1 key to insert a blank line.

Check your status line. You can turn insert on and off using "V or the Ins key.) You can also press "N to insert a blank line and leave the cursor at its original position.

If the text is single-spaced, -.J creates one blank line. If it's double-spaced (using the "OS or .LS command), -.1 creates two blank lines (but one has a soft carriage return at the end).

Block & Save Menu

This menu contains file and block commands that you can use while you're editing. The commands are grouped under three headings, SA VE, BLOCK, and FILE.

Block math

To see the Block & Save Menu, press "K. You can choose any of the commands on the menu by pressing the corresponding key . To cancel the menu without choosing a command, press the Spacebar.

WordStar displays the menu only if the help level is set to 2 or 3. You don't need to see the menu in order to use its commands. Just enter the three keystrokes quickly and the menu doesn't appear. If the help level is set to 0 or 1, the menu does not appear.

SA VE commands instruct WordStar to store the current file on a disk.

See Saving a file.

BLOCK commands allow you to do cut-and-paste editing. See Blocks, Block math, Column blocks, and Place markers.

FILE commands allow you to do basic operations on files other than the one you're currently working on. You can erase or move files from your disk when it doesn't have enough disk space to save the document you're currently working on. See Copying, Deleting text, File operations, Logged drive and directory, Printing a file, Renaming a file, and Running a DOS command.

Block math

WordStar can total the numbers in a marked block, even if the block has words in it. You can use block math with regular blocks and column blocks. First mark the block. Then press "KM. WordStar displays the total at the top of the screen. Press Esc to return to editing.

You can press Esc and then ⁼ (or Esc $ for dollar amounts) to insert the result of the last math total in your document. See also Shorthand.

120

WordStar uses the following rules to determine whether digits it en-counters in a marked block are part of a number:

Blocks

• A number is any set of digits (the characters 0-9) surrounded by nondigits (any other characters).

• A hyphen in front of a digit is considered a minus sign.

• A period is considered a decimal point when the character im-mediately after it is a digit.

• The letter "e" surrounded by digits is considered scientific notation (for example, "2e25" means 2 x 1025).

• The maximum number of digits in a number is 30.

• A number within parentheses is considered negative.

Numbers in dot command lines are ignored.

Answers have a maximum precision of twelve digits. If the answer is longer, WordStar gives the closest answer it can, using scientific notation.