Robert J. Sawyer sawyer@sfwriter.com On Wednesday, August 1, 2018, a WordStar user asked me how to select A4 paper. Here's what I had to say: The short answer for WordStar for DOS 7.0 is this: issue ^OY (which brings up WordStar's "Page Layout" dialog), then select the paper bin you want from the drop-down menu. (WordStar 6. 0 and below do not have the ^OY menu; some of the same features can be found in those versions on the ^OR menu.) In the absence of any dot commands in a file, WordStar get its page-sizing defaults from WSCHANGE menu D,A,A, the "Page Sizing and Margins" menu. The long answer: WordStar uses the "paper bin" dot command, .bn#, where # is an integer, to specify the paper source for the printer. The actual printer-control selection screens are set (and modifiable) in the WordStar .pdf file: From the PDFEDIT main menu, select "Additional modification," then "Sheet Feeder Tray Definitions." The order in which the sheet-feeder trays are listed is the order of their .bn numbers. The first tray defined is selected with .bn1, the second with .bn2, and so on. Cassette Ltr .bn1 Manual Ltr .bn2 Cassette Lgl .bn3 Manual Lgl .bn4 Cassette A4 .bn5 Manual A4 .bn6 Cassette Exec .bn7 Manual Exec .bn8 Manual Com-10 .bn9 Manual Monarch .bn10 Manual DL .bn11 Manual C5 .bn12 You can get a simple point-and-shoot menu of all your paper bins on WordStar's "Page Layout" menu, ^OY -- choosing a bin by its name simply inserts the appropriate .bn command. (The huge problem with this is that if "Manual A4" happens to be .bn6, as it is here, in one PDF but .bn5 in another, changing PDFs screws things up.) Within the WordStar editor, on that same ^OY menu I mentioned above you can also select either portrait or landscape mode, which inserts WordStar's miscellaneous printer .pr command with the appropriate argument, either "or=p" for orientation is portrait or "or=l" for orientation is landscape: .pr or=p .pr or=l But .bn only selects the source of the paper. WS.EXE is still blissfully ignorant of the actual page dimensions. So, you have to set page length within the file (if different from the default, which is 11" -- I'll tell you below how to change the default) with the page-length .pl command. A4 paper measures 8.27x11.69" or 211x297 mm, so you'd set: .pl 11.69" You can also use the letter i (upper or lowercase) instead of the double quote to indicates inches; WordStar also recognizes c for centimeters, p for points, and r for "ruler units" which are 1/10th of an inch (a column's width in Courier 10-pitch / 12- point) when used for a horizontal measures or 1/6th of an inch (default six-lines-per-inch line height) when used for a vertical measures. Any of these will do the trick for A4 paper: .pl 11.69" .pl 11.69i .pl 11.69I .pl 29.7c .pl 116.9r .pl 841.68p (My own preference is to always use lowercase i for the in inches indicator; that way, I know when searching for the double quotation mark, I'm always finding dialog and not a dot command.) On that same ^OY "Page Layout" screen, you can adjust all paper margins. However, WordStar's printer technology predates laser printers, which have a dead zone at all four margins (areas where the printer simply can't print). WordStar is blissfully ignorant of these, so if you want the first character on a laser printed sheet to be one inch from the edge, you have to mentally subtract the .3" deadzone on the left side, and use this "page offset" .po command: .po .7" You'll also want to set an appropriate right margin; the "Ruler Line" menu is accessed with either ^OR or ^OL. For A4, which is 8.27" wide, rather than the 8.50" of letter- sized paper, if I wanted one-inch left and right blank space, I'd use: .rm 6.27" Actually, WordStar solves all dot commands as equations, so you can type the actual page width minus the blank space you want on the left minus the blank space you want on the right: .rm 8.27-1-1i which resolves to 6.27i. Side note; WordStar assumes all logical statements in dot commands are true while editing; it doesn't evaluate logic until print time. So you can use that to have one set of conditions while editing and another at print time. The .if "IF" and .ei "END IF" dot commands let you do cool stuff like have a ragged- right margin while editing but fully justified text when printed (.oj is the "output justification" dot command): .oj on <-- condition you want at print time .if 1=0 .oj off <-- condition you want onscreen while editing .ei The one place where WordStar can automatically take into account the printing deadzone is Advanced Page Preview. In your Advanced Page Preview folder there is a file called FONTID.CTL where you can set a TOP_OFFSET and a LEFT_OFFSET value. For laser printers, I leave me TOP_OFFSET blank: TOP_OFFSET= and set 0.3" as 216/720th of an inch thus: LEFT_OFFSET=216 LaserJet III and below had smaller offests. Use a LEFT_OFFSET value of 144 for LaserJet II or a value of 180 for LaserJet III and IIP. Good luck!