Character in document not visible - causes page break

[wjb]

Hi, Just purchased Textpad. It is a great program, but I am struggling with a few things.

I am trying to print text files generated by a DOS program. The printouts were intended to be sent to a dot matrix printer.

The text file has a "form feed" character at the end of the file. The old DOS ibm "personal editor 2" used alt-012 for this character.

Textpad is interpreting this"form feed" character to be a page break, and prints a blank page at the end. (The character is not visible , but displays a line at the end)

Is there a way cause Textpad to ignore this so I can just open the file and print without deleting the last character?

Thanks,
Bill

[nvj1662]

Welcome to TextPad wjb

I don't know whether there is a better way, but you could define a TextPad macro to do the printing by selecting the whole file, then deselecting just the last character, then printing the selection.

If you post your question into the Regular Expressions forum, learned folk there may be able to give more detailed help.

Good luck.

[bveldkamp]

Is there anything after the formfeed character (use: View > Visible Spaces), for instance a line break, because if there is, it will (correctly) be printed on a new page.
Otherwise, could this be a printer driver issue, I certainly don't see an extra blank page on the Print Preview screen.

[wjb]

Thanks for the replys.

I recorded a macro to go to end of file and delete last character (that is causing page break)and then print the file. Assigned to a keyboard shortcut. That speeds things up.

When I toggle View > Visible Spaces, the last line appears as a space followed by some character that looks likes a "sideways semicolon".

If I delete the leading space the "sideways semicolon" turns into a box. The same box you get using edit>insert>page break.

I see in help that "The Page Break character is only recognized when it is the first character of a line." I

I take that to mean that "The Page Break character is only visible as a box when it is the first character of a line, however it will preform a page break regardless of its position."

Anyway, problem solved.
Bill