Wordstar an RTF editor?

[Feret]

I have been doing research and found your site on Wordstar and was trying to figure out if Wordstar is as I have suspected one of the earliest examples of a rich text editor.  Or is it just plain ASCII?

[Forum Admin]

WordStar for DOS and CP/M saved its files in ASCII but with the text surrounded by formatting codes. Early versions also changed the 8th bit of characters to indicate line breaks, etc.

From WordStar 5 and 2000 onwards the program was supplied with Star Exchange, which could convert WordStar files to and from Microsoft Rich Text Format (RTF) files. But WordStar itself was not based on RTF as its file format.

Does that answer your question?

[Feret]

ah I see.. SO it's not really a True ASCII Text editor either, but something in between that and an rtf editor?

[Forum Admin]

Be careful with your terminology here. RTF if a specific file format, as used by Microsoft's Windows Write and WordPad, and by most Windows word processors as a format in addition to the program's native file format. This allows for easy transfer of files between programs but may result in the loss of some special features that are specific to one program or another.

WordStar saved all its files in a relatively simple format, originally using 7-bit ASCII. to benote bold, etc., formatting codes were added, and later on paragraph styles would be embeded in the file.

WordStar, when used as a text editor (non-document mode) didn't add these codes, so you got a file of just plain ASCII text - no special formatting. So it works as both a plain text editor - for programming, etc; and as a word processor providing advanced formatting of documents, but not by use of the RTF file format.

[Feret]

I am aware fo the differences between RTF and Plain Text ASCII  Just trying to get a good feel for what wordstar is in the scheme of things.

[Forum Admin]

Think of WordStar as an early Microsoft Word, or as Word Perfect, etc. It's a word processor, but at the same time it can be set to work like Notepad on steroids.

Whereas Word has a built in export and import function to allow the use of the RTF file format WordStar only introduced this functionality with WordStar 2000 and version 5 of the main DOS product; even then, this was done by using an additional program - Star Exchange.

RTF, as I'm sure you're aware is an ASCII file format rather than a binary format - except for embeded graphics, etc., just as WordStar was. You may find this article on ASCII and RTF interesting: http://www.wordstar.org/computing/pages/asciirtf.htm.

Also have a look at: http://www.wordstar.org/wsdos/pages/nondoc.htm which explains the basics of WordStar's file format and the difference between the word processor (formatted text) mode and the plain (unformatted ASCII) text mode. If you want full descriptions of the file formats used I'll provide links to these - I'm in the process of adding them to the site.