Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!alan
From: alan@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Alan Phillips)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Plain text output from W4W: Problem Solved
Message-ID: <1351@dcl-vitus.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: 10 Jun 91 09:49:07 GMT
Reply-To: alan@lancs.ac.uk (Alan Phillips)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 35

A couple of months ago I posted a note here about problems using the
generic/textonly print driver in W4W to get formatted text output to a file. 
This hit text that was fully justified, so that if you had

     abcd

in a justified paragraph, output to file contained

     <CR>a
     <CR> b
     <CR>  c
     <CR>   d

i.e.  one file line per character and megabytes of unnecessary spaces.  We
later found it was even worse than that: the crazy output got the driver's line
count confused, so that you got only about the first dozen lines of every page
in the file at all. 

Several people replied, but all suggested variants of File Save As, using
different format options to preserve the _text_, but no-one could suggest how
to preserve the _formatting_ also.

Microsoft have recently admitted there's a bug in the TTY.DRV program as it
interacts with W4W (Windows Write can produce plain text in a file with no
problems), and sent us a new version; this fixes the problem, so that the
output file now contains sensible lines and retains all the formatting.  The
only bug we've seen so far in this new driver is that occasionally it will
justify to a right margin one character too far to the right if you mix fonts
on a line. 

I can't say how to get hold of the new driver (it's not the one shipped in
Windows 3.00a) other than to suggest you ask Microsoft.  It may be on Microsoft
Online. 

Alan