TWO COLUMN PRINTING

by Gene Bohot, TI Orphans of Puget Sound
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This may not be the fastest or slickest way to do a two column printout, but it shows a little about the file handling and is easy to explain. It will only work with a maxium of one page.
First type out the article with Funnelwriter, BA Writer, or TI Writer in any format you would like to use. Then make the first line .LM4;RM38;FI;AD and the second line .IN+5 and save it as usual. Then, in Formatter, instead of "PIO" enter "DSK1.TEST1". This will print the article to disk and format it with fill and adjust to a single long column. Nest, go back to the Editor, load TEST1 and remove the blank lines at the start and at line 60. These were put in by the Formatter. Now, you can clean up any lines that did not format properly into 34 columns, add a title at the top of the column, and check the layout.
For now just ignore the control characters in the file. Now, pad the file at the end if necessary to get an even number of lines and then print it to disk with "PF" and "C DSK1.TEST2". The C tells the file printer to delete the control codes. How, if you want to look at the file, you should see a single long article 34 columns wide and right justified just as it will print out.
Then run the following program.
100 DIM L$(128)
110 OPEN #:PIO
120 OPEN #2:"DSK1.TEST2"
130 A=A+1
140 LINPUT #2:L$(A)
150 IF EOF(2)=0 THEN 130
160 CLOSE #2
170 FOR X=1 TO A/2
180 PRINT #1:L$(X);TAB(41);L$(X+(A-1)/2)
NEXT X
200 CLOSE#1
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This will read the entire file and put each line into an array numbered from 1 to the last line number. When it reaches the End Of File marker, it will close the file and print the first line, tab to the center of the page and print the first line of the second half of the article. It will continue until each line is printed, then close the printer. Very simple.
The program could be modified to print a longer article by increasing the DIMension of the array, but you would lhave to add a line or two to make it skip over the perforation. Try the program with an article you already have typed in to see how well it works.
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