FINDING PAGES
by Richard S. Williams, PAKUP, June 1987

(Tricks on how to mark text for finding pages)

One of the irritants encountered in editing WordStar is its lack
of a page finding command.  When editing short texts like this
newsletter, there isn't much of a problem, but when doing
material approaching 10 pages, a "go to page" command would sure
be handy (that, and the unerase function, are the primary reasons
I use NewWord).  You can use "markers" in the text (^K0,^K1, etc.
to ^K9) for a single editing session but they are temporary and
are lost whenever you exit the file.  Well, there is a way to
deal with the problem.  Like most "fixes" this is a compromise
which means that it is a good deal more work than simply having a
page finding function.  But it does work after a fashion, and
that is the whole point of the exercise.

Page numbers can be inserted in the text with the double dot
comment command.  Any line that begins with a period (dot) is a
command line to WordStar.  Two dots beginning a line are used for
comments, meaning that the line is totally ignored:  it won't
print, won't cause any changes, and doesn't exist as far as
WordStar is concerned.  What you have to do is to insert the page
number by hand in a comment line.  That is, type ..page# X and
hit a carriage return.  You can use anything at all there, but
"page#" is easily recognizable to me and can easily be found with
a search command.  Because of the idiosyncrasies of paragraph
reforming and such, it is best to place this number in between
paragraphs.  Otherwise when you reform, you might get the dot
command in the middle of a line where it will no longer be
ignored but printed in all of its stupidity.  Murphy's Law will
insure that you will then forget about the existence of two of
these comments until 5 minutes after you have sent the paper in
to a publisher or handed it in for class.  The insertion process
can be eased a bit by using a program such as Xtrakey or Smartkey
to set up two macro commands:  the first being three ^C's, the
second ..page#.  The first moves you from page to page quickly. 
I am assuming here that you have graduated from dependency on the
menu and use help level 2 or lower to give you a full screen. 
Three Control-C's equals a page.  You can always check the status
line to confirm you are where you expect to be.  You then find
the appropriate blank line and hit the second, then fill in the
page number and hit a <cr>.  Then on to the next page.

You can find the page you want with a ^QF command, telling it to
look for page# 6 or some such.  The major drawback of this whole
scheme is that there is no way to automatically renumber the
pages to correspond with reality.  As long as your editing
doesn't insert lots of pages or move things around tremendously,
you have useful markers.  But if you do a lot of moving, then you
will have to change the numbers to correspond to the pages.  You
don't have to remove these lines because they won't print.  But
you can do so by using the find command  and hitting a ^Y when
you get to the lines.
