Corn Corner

by Cresby

Naspen Extension from B&L (£15 disk or tape)

I only have the tape version of this but find it solves some of the gripes of Naspen. Generally, it is claimed to be faster in most commands but more spefically on the time consuming block inserts, etc. A nice touch is character A0H which displays as a triangle but prints as a space to keep blocks on one line. Eg. equations. New commands include:–

‘B’

block delete

and additions to the find command like:–

‘r’

replace

‘g’

global (replace all) – designed to help bad spoolers lyke me

‘T’

top kill – deletes all before cursor

tHere Is A Caps Lock Which Is Handy

‘U’

can unwrap the display which I prefer to use on difficult formatting problems

‘J’

command can now fail safe, and

‘Q’

will overide the stop print character

The cursor stays on screen in nearly all situations now, which is an improvement, but the cursor also goes past the end of the line in ‘U’nwrap which makes it hard to see where the insertion of spaces is.

The extension allows you to insert almost the whole character set so that control characters can be dumped to the printer, but, in desperation at Naspen itself (which recodes some keys) I have had to modify buffer locations in Nas-Sys starting around 1021H to get the right characters quickly. Even then, codes 1ike 00H and FFH must be avoided which precludes some data bytes to my printer set-up facility. The real plus was the re-discovery that ‘i’ allows insertion of ESC which, with my printer, invokes all the fancy fonts and highlights.

The disc version is by and large the same but sorts out all the disc write commands transparently except that it asks for a filename after the ‘W’ command.