Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    		I have been using Transcript real time with Ppage,and
    it works great.You may want to look through the PPage manual,and
    note how the "." commands work.PPage has the ability to import
    Scribble,and transcript files while maintaining the formatting info
    given thru the use of the dot specifiers.If you become familiar
    with these formatting structures it may be possible to save a text
    file in ascii and import it using the formatting commands.I don't
    bother doing so.Professional Page is designed to handle the typsetting
    for you,and often you are working in a counter productive way if
    you try to use a word processors formatting capabilities.Once you
    get the hang of it it will only take seconds to mark a block(or
    F4 will mark the whole box)and select the features you want.
    
    The transistion from WP to DTP is always bumpy.While it would be
    best if I learned to use the "." commands in Transcript so my text
    would be formatted when I import it into PPage,I just find it to
    easy to do the formatting in the DTP for now.It was wih his in mind
    that I purchased Transcript,and set Scribble on the back burner.When
    it comes to preparing text for DTP all you really need is a fast,lean
    program that allows word wrap.You do not want a program that forces
    carrage returns because you want to be able to flow your text into
    any size colume.Even if you could keep your formatting from ProWrite
    when importing it into PPage,I think you would find yourself redoing
    much of the file once it was in the DTP.While I am not an expert
    on WP,or DTP my experiance to date supports the above.TRY a plain
    text file in PPage first,and then if you are not happy look for
    other ways to convert your WP files.You may be suprized !
    								bill
    PS it is obvious that I rely on my spell checker,and DTP too much
    already as you can see from the above note

> TRY a plain text file in PPage first,and then if you are not happy
> look for other ways to convert your WP files.You may be suprized !

	Thanks, I'll try. 
	In fact, I intend to keep redundancy to a minimum and keep
	formatting/justification and the like for PPage. What I had
	in mind was mostly things like fonts, size and style. Also
	I'll keep using ProWrite when I need simple text layout and
	only when fancy DTP is required will I use PPage. All I'd like
	is get existing documents and load them straight into PPage.
	I might change my mind as I get familiar with it though.
Yv

    Fonts,styles,justification etc: can all be set from within PPage
    with the mouse driven menues.As a matter of fact you will wnat to
    take advantage of the compugraphic outline fonts that ppage supports
    							bill

re: .1
>    You may want to look through the PPage manual,and note how the "."
>    commands work. PPage has the ability to import Scribble,and transcript
>    files while maintaining the formatting info given thru the use of
>    the dot specifiers.

	I'm not quite sure what you mean by "." commands. I had a quick
	look through the manual and the closest I found was "\" commands
	(backslash) in Appendix F (Formatting Text). If I can really
	include these formatting codes in any ASCII file, then I could
	automatically produce them from ProWrite (IFF|WORD) files with
	minimum programming effort.
Yv

    
    Probably meant for you to look through the Scribble! manual for
    info on the "." commands!
    

	I gave up the idea of converting from ProWrite to WordPerfect but I
	still wrote a program to convert IFF|WORD into PPage ascii + embedded
	formatting codes (\xx) since I still use Prowrite for simple documents
	and text entry. I'll probably buy Transcript in the future.

	The program is on YIPPEE::AI$USER_14:[GOULNIK.PUBLIC]IFF.{C,H,EXE}
	What it does is read a ProWrite file and write it as an ascii file,
	skipping all pictures and other info irrelevant to PPage, such as
	tabs or margings definition. Options allow minimal text extraction
	(equivalent to save TEXT ONLY), header/footer extraction and producing
	formatting code for fonts and paragraphs. Syntax as follows:

%	%syntax  $ IFF [-switches] inputfile [outputfile]
%
% switches:
%              d,D      document only, no header/footer
%              h,H      header only, no document/footer
%              f,F      footer only, no document/header
%              t,T      ignore all formatting, text only
%              j,J      ignore justification/indentation
%              l,L      ignore line spacing
%              m,M      ignore misc, subscript/superscript
%              x,X      ignore fonts
%              s,S      ignore font styles
%
% default output:       terminal
% default options:      all switches off
%

Yv