Exporting text from Newsroom
By Michael Hickey
Copyright (c) 1991 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Well 1990 is just a memory and the council has collected the remnants of our New Years Eve excesses (TWO bottles of Chateau Fizz), the relatives have been packed up and sent home so FINALLY I get to sit around my office (noting the bent joystick - I'll blame it on my brother) to contemplate the dilapidated state of my software library. Out of the corner of my eye I note a familiar looking blue and beige manual. Could it be... no it couldn't, I lost it during the last move didn't I? Closer inspection resolves my wildest thoughts, it is... The Newsroom!
Remember those late nights pushing a chubby mouse around to produce intricate doodles and enhancing the built-in clipart on the old but faithful Apple II? Before the Macintosh became a useful machine, before laser printers were commonplace, before Desktop Publishing had been conceived of as a great way for Apple to make money, there was... The Newsroom. This nifty little program wasn't intended to be a Desktop Publishing masterpiece, it attempted to simulate, rather well I thought, the activities necessary in creating a newspaper. Banner creation, photo production, copy writing, layout, wire service, and printing were all represented in this tiny, exquisitely written program. On 64k, 1 MHz Apple II's this program flew along despite being graphic based and produced a rather respectable printed copy.
The Newsroom set me free from the hassle of trying to combine graphics and text by leaving blanks in my Appleworks Word Processed document and filling it with a Print Shop graphic. At last I could put together a nice-looking sheet which was informative to boot. I produced several of these education-type pamphlets for my Ward when I was working as a Registered Nurse back in Newcastle. Ward orientation for new staff, training for correct handling of Underwater Sealed Chest Drainage, pre-operative Prostatectomy education for patients and correct use of Nursing Diagnoses were just a few of the topics for which I produced pamphlets.
For all its initial usefulness The Newsroom has one major flaw, the artwork and text you create in it cannot be exported easily to other word processors. As time went on the Macintosh grew up and matured, the IIgs arrived on the scene and programs like Graphic Writer took over from The Newsroom. Yet despite this I still had to use The Newsroom to printout my old pamphlets. Graphic Writer couldn't read the files and no amount of fudging would let me load those Newsroom photos. In 1988 I bought The Graphic Exchange and was able to get my pics into super hi-res format for importing into Graphic Writer but the prospect of retyping all that copy back in really threw me. There HAD to be an easier way.
Possessing some knowledge of computers, I quickly discovered that all of The Newsroom panels were saved as binary files.
So I copied a few Newsroom panels into ProDOS, and exited to BASIC. Then I cleared hi-res page 1 with a quick HGR and BLOADed the nearest Newsroom panel. I didn't expect to be able to read it on the hi-res screen so I entered the monitor with a CALL -151 and proceeded to disassemble (in 80 columns) locations $2000 onwards. To my surprise and relief there was the text I'd typed in some time ago, safe and sound. I exited back to BASIC with a hearty 3D0G and CREATEd a TXT file. I then BSAVEd filename,A$2000,L820.
When I eventually got back to ProDOS and entered AppleWorks I was able to create a new word processor document from the BSAVED text file. The rest is history. I wrote a small Applesoft BASIC program to do all the hard work for me and I was able to convert all of my Newsroom panels into text. Graphic Writer let me combine the text with graphics in much the same way as the Newsroom but with a lot less hassle.
I outgrew Graphic Writer eventually and sold it to an acquaintance. These days I use Publish It! 3 and print directly to disk for later laser printing from a Macintosh system. Publish It! is superior to Graphic Writer (and AppleWorks GS) in that it can read The Newsroom text panels as if they were (ProDOS) Bank St Writer files so importing is easier for text and Newsroom photos can be read directly from DOS 3.3 disks. If I only had Publish It! from the start!
Here is the (modified) code I used to convert my Newsroom files, I hope you use it in one of your programs.
100 REM PROGRAM TO CONVERT A BINARY NEWSROOM FILE INTO A STANDARD ASCII FILE
101 REM 1988 - 1991 Michael Hickey
102 REM Canberra ACT (06) 231 3787
110 ONERR GOTO 210 : REM UNEXPECTED ERROR - SHUTDOWN
120 D$ = CHR$ (4) : REM PRODOS COMMAND CODE
121 PRINT D$;"PR#3" : REM ACTIVATE 80 COLUMN FIRMWARE
130 PRINT D$;"CATALOG,TBIN" : REM ONLY DISPLAY BINARY FILES
140 PRINT "Which NEWSROOM file to CONVERT?": INPUT FILE$
150 IF LEN (FILE$) < 1 THEN PRINT "Filename in ERROR, RUN this program again!": END
160 REM INITIALISE PAGE 1 OF HI-RES DISPLAY
170 HGR : TEXT
180 PRINT D$;"BLOAD ";FILE$;",A$2000"
200 PRINT D$;"CREATE";FILE$;"2,TTXT"
210 PRINT D$;"BSAVE ";FILE$;"2,A$2000,L1000"
220 PRINT D$;"CLOSE ";FILE$;"2"

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