DotWriter

DotWriter was an early-1980s word processor and print formatter for the TRS-80 series and the Apple II. (Or maybe unrelated programs of the same name for the two platforms? Details are kind of sketchy.) It consisted of two main programs, a text editor which produced and edited plain ASCII text files, and a print formatter (DotPrint) that took ASCII files (with various embedded commands) and produced formatted printouts. The print formatter could work with text files created with other programs as well as the DotWriter editor itself, so you could still use a different program to do your editing and produce outputs with DotPrint.

On the Apple II version, text files were stored with the high bits of characters set (and hence had character code positions in the range of 80 to FF hex instead of 00 to 7F), so it is necessary to subtract 128 (80 hex) from each byte to get the proper ASCII values.

Print control commands consisted of lines starting with the dot (.), as well as some embedded commands starting with the upright bar (|) which were used within the flow of text for such things as underlining.

Links

 * Emulation of Apple II version in JSMESS at Internet Archive (displaying article, converted to DotWriter format, which claims that emulation is unfeasible)
 * Manual of TRS-80 version (v4.0)
 * Another copy of manual
 * 1983 review from Creative Computing