★ APPLICATIONS ★ BUREAUTIQUE ★ Supershift for Protext: Cut down on all that shifting ★ |
| Supershift for Protext (Computing With the Amstrad) | Applications Bureautique |
CHRIS NIXON presents a routine to make Protext easier on the fingers PROTEXT from Arnor is a powerful word processor for Amstrad micros and its speed, versatility and ease of use have made it very popular. Although difficult to improve upon, Protext can be customised with useful extra features by adding some RSXs Supershift is one such addition. It is a typing aid which can be used by anybody, but was designed for those who find word processing a slow and painstaking task. This includes people whose typing is impaired because of arthritis or other disabling condition. The idea is very simple. With Super-shift enabled, every time you type one of the puncuation marks . , : ; ! and ? a space will automatically be inserted after it. Furthermore, if the punctuation mark is a full stop and the first character in the sentence is a letter, it will be in upper case without you having to touch the shift key. Type in the program and save it before you run it because once it has installed some machine code it will wipe itself from memory. Incidentally, it's useful to add a few lines to the program to set up ink colours and key definitions. Once run you will have two new RSXs - |SON (Supershift on) and |SOFF (Supershift off). From Protext's command mode you can dispense with the I and use SON and SOFF. And that's all you need to know to use Supershift. It relocates itself to the highest available area of memory and works with versions of Protext higher than 1.00. If yours is earlier than this, get in touch with Arnor who operate an upgrade service. For the more technically minded here's how it works. If the Basic loader finds no errors, it will call Supershift's initialisation routine. This first scans the code for any direct memory references by Supershift to itself, and adjusts them according to Supershift's current location in RAM. |SON causes Supershift to divert the jumpblock entry for KM_WAIT_ CHAR (&BB06) to point to its own checking routine. Thereafter, all keypresses are checked according to these rules:
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