That worked! Neat!

I’m continuing to play around with cawf. I realized that two of its output file formats have proper RISC OS filetypes (FWP (*) and PCL), but they didn’t have icons!

I’m not an old-school RISC OS guy, so all I know about FWP is that it existed. I stole an icon from !boot…..themes.370 (or something like that), a green Acorn logo and added a “+” to it for FWP.

But for PCL… I ran netsurf and googled for “hp icons” and got a nice little (256×256) png of the HP logo, and saved it. !privateeye was happy to display the png and save it as a sprite. !paint was happy to scale it down to 32×32 and then to 16×16 and I had my icons!

It was so easy! Last time I tried this sort of thing (linux on CHIP IIRC) it was a huge pain!!!

(*)First Word Plus aka 1st Word Plus aka 1st Word +

1st Word Plus was one of the first word processors for RISC OS, it was a port from the Atari ST, but pretty good despite this.

I used it for a lot of university projects back in the late 80s, as did my friends. One used a lot of footnotes in his documents and left them printing on my Star colour dot matrix, it used to drive me mad as it printed a super script numeral in red every few lines, which involved a lot of very slow chugging as it changed the ribbon and over printed several times. The damn things would be printing well in to the night when I wanted to get to sleep. I wont even go in to the smell of gherkins.

I used to like 1stWord+ because it is one of the few text editors I’ve come across that has a logical behaviour to numbered indents, doing it like this:

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  1, Xxxxxxxxxxxx
     xxxxxxxxxxxx
  2, Xxxxxxxxxxxx
     xxxxxxxxxxxx

when everything else wants to do it like this:

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  1, Xxxxxxxxxxxx
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  2, Xxxxxxxxxxxx
  xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Also, back when I had a dot matrix, it was extremely quick to print pages from 1W+.

If you think the red printing chugging was bad, don’t ask about printing a 12 page document written in Ovation and output graphically, overprinting each line numerous times (slightly offset), with lengthy pauses in between each shriek. And then one comes back to discover page six got mangled in the printer, and the next six pages just made things worse up until the point where the current page has a strip hammered out of it from hundreds of passes of the print head. So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get all the paper bits out of the printer, clean the ink stains off the roller, check the ink ribbon, check the paper path, check the paper path again, and then restart the print job from where it failed.

Was so happy when I picked up an unloved laser. Okay, it was probably the only laser in the world that didn’t support HP LJ, but it was a great improvement over the dot matrix!

I like retro stuff as much as the next guy (hey, listening to Heart 80s) but dot matrix printers are something I don’t hanker for. Nor, let’s be honest, any inkjet made in the previous millennium.

FWP must have been pretty important in early RISC OS. !printers still understands the file format, which is pretty cool.

I stole an icon from !boot…..themes.370 (or something like that), a green Acorn logo and added a “+” to it for FWP.

Steal, theft = removal with the intent to permanently deprive the rightful owner.

Nah, I think you will find you “re-utilised” and embellished. I was always in RO and the embellished version is in something else in RO.

The HP logo – dunno.

Did FWP actually use the AF8 file type? I vaguely recall it using Text.

Hopefully freeicons.com or whatever (source if the hp icon) lives up to its name.

As for the &AF8 filetype, I dunno.

As for the &AF8 filetype, I dunno.

Well the wiki says this:
AF8 1stWord+ First Word Plus document

<cough>

Set File$Type_AF8 1WPDoc
Set File$Type_D0B 1WPCfg
Set File$Type_D0C 1WPDict
|
Set Alias$@RunType_AF8 Run <FirstWordPlus$Resources>!Run %%*0
|Set Alias$@RunType_FFF Run <FirstWordPlus$Resources>!Run %%*0
|
Set Alias$@PrintType_AF8 Run <Obey$Dir>.!Run %%*0 -print

What on earth were they thinking to set the not very memorable &AF8 to be 1stWord+ while assigning the useful D0C type as the dictionary? Can’t help but feel that D0C for the documents would have made more sense… (though I’m surprised they didn’t snarf that for their DTP)

I’ve dropped the Sprites, Sprites22, and a test page I had around at http://heyrick.ddns.net/files/1wpspr.zip so you can have the correct icons.

By the way, does anybody have a [ disc image | zip file | floppy tied to carrier pigeon ] of 1stWord+?

I ask because mine hangs Aemulor, and I’m not sure if it’s something 1WP is doing that Aemulor doesn’t like, or if it’s because it would appear that somewhere along the way things were modified. I have two !RunImage files, plus a subdirectory called “modified” which contains… a lot of the same files as the main app. Uh-hu.
So I’d be interested in trying an unmolested version to see if that’s any better.

Looking in the uncompressed executable, it seems as if mine might be version “2.01 (25-Oct-89)”.

Thank you for the icons! :-)

(I took a brief look through the (known to me) Acorn abandonware sites and did not find FWP.)

I have noticed that the offical Filetype allocations seem to avoid hexadecimal puns. For instance, FLI file’s original unofficial filetype was &17F (fli backwards :) and was officially allocated some boring &Bxx number. Now I understand that &1xx is FOR unofficial “personal” types but the pun!!!!