Tech Tips

DEFAULTWRITER PLUS

Paul Alhart of Lompoc, California originally wrote this program for the Atari Federation users group newsletter.

Whenever you load AtariWriter Plus, you must go to the Global Menu and set the defaults the way you want them. If you want to do double-column condensed printing for a newsletter, then it's back to the Global Menu to set the font, left and right margins, second left and right margins, etc. Wouldn't it be nice to have all this already programmed in? Well, you can. You can even have two different sets of your own defaults loaded in at the same time.

At the bottom of the Global Menu it says, "Press TAB for defaults." There are already two sets of defaults: Atari just chose to make them both the same. The first set loads when the program is first booted, and the second set loads when you press [TAB] from the Global Menu. The only catch is that they aren't the defaults we want, so we'll just have to change them. That's exactly what DefaultWriter Plus lets you do. And it works on either the 48K or the 130XE versions of AtariWriter Plus.

1. Carefully type in this listing and SAVE it to disk. Double-check lines 700 to 730.

2. Copy the file AP.OBJ from your AtariWriter Plus disk onto a freshly formatted, single-density disk. Make another copy just to be safe.

3. RUN DefaultWriter Plus and follow the prompts. You can enter any number from 0 to 255 for each default value, but AtariWriter Plus is fussy. Page Wait for instance can only be a 0 or a 1, so be careful.

5. Copy AP.OBJ back to your AtariWriter Plus Disk.

That's all there is to it. You now have two sets of your own defaults: One when AtariWriter Plus first loads, and the other when you press [TAB] from the Global Menu.

NOTE: AtariWriter Plus uses a bad sector for its copy protection. This sector is not actually part of the AP.OBJ file, or any of the files for that matter. So you can copy the files back and forth without problem. However, don't format your AtariWriter Plus Disk-- the program checks for the bad sector and won't run without it.

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