Wp Scripting Guide

John’s WordPerfect Scripting Guide John Rethorst Except for the beautiful bookplate above, found authorless on the net, All Contents Copyright © 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 by John C. Rethorst. All rights reserved. Permission is given to copy and distribute this document, in whole only and including this copyright notice, only if no charge is made. To my Students Foreword A search for a good word processor is well worth the time. When starting a Ph.D. program – for which I would be doing a ton of writing – I toured Word, FullWrite, WriteNow and MacWrite Pro, and then tried WordPerfect, at that time in version 1. It had been panned in reviews, but I wanted to see for myself. What I found was one of the friendliest and most competent programs I had ever used. The reviews had taken the Mac version to task for being too DOS-like, and un-Mac like in other ways. “Too many hierarchical menus,” went one criticism. But most programs of any complexity these days have more hierarchical menus than WP 1 did. “Mac users don’t like codes” said someone else. Of course not, but Word now has them too – just because they can make some complex tasks much easier. I thought WP was a great program in many ways, but what I liked most were the macros. When version 2 added a scripting language to the macro engine, I was hooked. Driven by a typical Mac user’s quest for ultimate elegance, I found that I could add or fine-tune features with astonishing power and flexibility. Also, scripting was just plain fun. Then I taught an introductory computer course and wrote a lab manual for it that turned into my first book, Welcome to the Macintosh – From Mystery to Mastery. Before I knew it, I had become hooked on teaching and writing about computers, as well as on the beasts themselves. Putting two and two together, I thought I would write a book on WordPerfect Mac. Version 3 was then in development, a massive piece of engineering representing WP Corporation’s increasing commit- ment to the Mac marketplace. If I got busy, I could write about the program just in time for its release. Although I knew the book would be fun, I didn’t know I’d like doing it so much that instead of the 350 pages my publisher wanted, I gave them 550. The good people at Henry Holt were as supportive as ever, but we knew the market wouldn’t want a book much larger than that. Also, as Teach Yourself WordPerfect was to be a beginning to intermediate guide, I was lucky to be able to include a few examples of WP macro and AppleScript code. There was much more to write, and this is what turned up. A very special thanks for the collabo- ration of the World’s Greatest Technical Editor, Dan Smellow, who also taught computers with me at Cornell, and is a better programmer besides. Thanks also to Scott Lawton, Allan Greenier and Gero Herrmann for their valuable advice on AppleScript. This book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but you should know how to use the Librarian to copy and install macro…