PARALINER - a text formatting utility for typesetters, Amiga version 1.014

This little utility was written to sort out an incompatibility between
typesetting programs - particularly on PC and Mac platforms - and normal
ASCII text. The problem comes because most ASCII text editors and viewers
expect lines to be formatted to a particular width, with periodic end of
line characters to tell the displaying or printing device when to start a
new line.

These characters keep the display neat and help to ensure that lines of
text fit the space available, without wrapping untidily or vanishing at
the margin, but they're the bane of typesetters because they cause extra
new lines to appear in the middle of paragraphs, messing up the format
and requiring the sub-editor to scan through and eliminate the spurious
and invisible characters manually, a tiresome and problematic task which
often shows up hidden hiccups when text is reformatted.

The problem stems from publishing software that creates a new paragraph for
each new line. We still need some way of signalling a real paragraph break,
as few articles are intended to occupy one paragraph from start to end, so
this utility leaves in an end of line marker if it appears as part of a
completely blank line. Other end of line markers are replaced with a space,
so that words are not merged from one line end to the next start.

It follows that headings, captions and tabular information should have a
blank line before and after each line, or successive unseparated lines will
be collected together into one paragraph. This makes a real mess of tables!

Sometimes you may need to eliminate multiple (e.g. paired) spaces from the
resultant file, if your text output program does not trim spaces from the
end of formatted lines. This can easily be done by searching and replacing
pairs of spaces with single spaces, over and over again till no more pairs
are found. This can mess up table formatting but it's no loss as monospaced
tables must always be reformatted before setting in a proportional font.

I first came across this problem in about 1988, and wrote a little Qdos
SuperBASIC program to convert plain text for Helen Armstrong, the editor
of Sinclair QL World magazine. This Amiga version for AUI does essentially
the same job but is about 30 times the size, partly because it's a stand-
alone compiled task, and partly because it's relatively friendly, with a
a windowing interface, ASL file requesters for input and output, and a
progress indicator. This version was written for AUI Editor David Ward,
when he asked me to format copy for publication with lines 'as wide as
possible' and I realised that the Qdos tool deserved an Amiga counterpart.


USAGE

From the Shell or CLI, type the command name followed by the name of the
input and output files. If the output file already exists it will be
overwritten.

If you supply only a question mark as a parameter, a moderately helpful
message will appear:

    PARALINER is a file utility that converts formatted ASCII text files
    into long lines of one line per paragraph suitable for processing in
    Apple Macintosh word-processors and DTP applications.

    This expects its input files to have one completely blank line after
    each paragraph or cross-heading to mark the start of an output line.

                Example: PARALINER InFile OutFile

If the output file name is not supplied the input file name is extended
with the suffix .PARA (replacing .TEXT if present) to make a new output
file name. The separator TO may optionally be between the two file names,
with an arbitrary number of spaces on either side.

PARALINER goes faster if you do not both read from and write to the same
drive, as that causes a lot of seeking back and forth as lines are copied
from the old to the new file.

If you do not specify any file name, or start PARALINER by clicking on
its workbench icon, windows will appear telling you what the program is
for and asking you to nominate files in the usual way, one at a time.
Close the input file requester to Quit.


COMPATIBILITY

PARALINER is compatible with all known versions of AmigaDOS but you need
the ASL library to use the workbench-friendly menus; this has been part
of the Amiga System since Workbench 2, and is available as an add-on for
older systems. I only tested it from the Command Line on Workbench 1.3.
You should expect a library error if you try to use it with no parameters
on such a vintage system, as it will be unable to open the ASL library.

PARALINER has been successfully tested on Amiga 500 and A4000 systems
with Workbench versions from 1.3 (Kickstart 34) to 3.1 (Kickstart 40).


DISPLAY FORMAT

The graphical user interface is set up for a HiRes screen at least 640
pixels wide and 200 pixels tall (the minimum for an NTSC display). You
can stretch the file requesters in the usual way to see more names or
other file details.

The program tries to open the helvetica 15 font, which is part of the
standard Amiga Fonts distribution. If this cannot be found, a message
appears and you are asked to press a key or tap the left mouse button
to continue, using the default workbench font set on your machine. If
your window title font is more than 12 pixels tall, or your workbench
font is more than seven pixels wide, on average, the initial text may
overlap the progress indicator or the edge of the window. This is only
a problem on a minimal NTSC display. The window and requester adjust
to use extra lines on the workbench if they are available.


LINE TERMINATION

The Newline character has ASCII code 10 on Amiga, Qdos and Unix, 13 on
ST, and BOTH on MSDOS, old printers, and other belt-and-braces systems.
This program follows the Amiga convention, since it runs on an Amiga.

There are lots of programs on Aminet which convert line-ends between the
various conventions. My personal favourite is CRLF by Frank Swift. You
can do the same job by loading the file into many Amiga text editors and
saving it back out; the line ends are generally converted automatically.


DISTRIBUTION & UPDATES

I welcome suggestions for further enhancements and corrections for this
program. Next on the update list is trimming of spaces from around the
input lines, simple interactive input even in the absence of ASL.LIBRARY,
and a totally font-adaptive display.

This program may be freely distributed, as long as this text is included
and both text and program are unmodified. 1996 copyright remains with the
author Simon N Goodwin of Silicon Studio Ltd, Registered Amiga Developers.