FINDING YOUR UNDERLINES by Richard S. Williams, PAKUP, December 1986 (How to change the WordStar search wildcard from ^S) WordStar marks underlining with ^S before and after the underlined string, but does not display the underlining on screen, even with newer Kaypros, so it is easy to "lose" an underlined passage by forgetting the second ^S until you are printing and find half your book in underlines. Unfortunately, you can use Wordstar's search function to look for anything but the missing ^S because the search function designates ^S as a wild card. Well, Albert J. Klee of Fayetteville, OH has discovered the relevant bytes, and by making a simple change in your WSOVLY.OVR file, you can change the wildcard and thus search for the ^S. First, you must designate a substitute wildcard. Ted Silveira (Profiles, Nov. 1986) suggests ^Y, Bernadette Freedman (Profiles, Dec./Jan. 1986/87) suggests using ^L. Whatever you decide, you need the hexadecimal equivalent for it (^L=OC, ^Y=19). Then you need to make the patch. To do this, you should have a spare disk with a copy of WS.COM and its overlay files (never try to patch a file on anything but a copy) and DDT.COM. It will be helpful later to have NSWEEP.COM or PIP.COM on the disk too, so you can copy the files onto your working copy of WordStar. I'm assuming here you have WordStar version 3.3. At the A-prompt, type: DDT WSOVLY.OVR . The program will respond: DDT VERS. 2.2 NEXT PC 8400 0100 - At the hyphen (DDT's prompt) you type in 'L20DC' and DDT will respond with some strange readouts starting with CPI 13. If so, all is well, (if not, quit), and you can go on by typing what appears in brackets, ([], but don't type the brackets themselves.) The other text is what the software displays. -[S20DD] (That is 'two zero dee dee'. Caps never matter, by the way) 20DD 13 [19] (You enter '19'. This is for ^Y, enter 0C (zero cee) for ^L) 20DE CA [.] (You enter a period) -[G0] (that's 'gee zero', not the word go) A0>[SAVE 131 WSOVLY1.OVR ] (save the new version at the A: prompt) Now try it out, testing the new wildcard character on the search functions (^QF and ^QA) as well as searching for underline sets. If it works, you need to copy this new overlay file onto your working copy of WordStar (use PIP or NSWEEP). For those of you with MS-DOS, the corresponding change would be as follows: [DEBUG WSOVLY1.OVR ] -[E 20D5] 5533:20D5 13[.19] (this is for ^Y, enter 0C (zero C) for ^L) [W] Writing A100 bytes [Q] There you have it. By the way, NewWord doesn't have the problem because it handles wildcards differently. Next month I'll have more on searches in WordStar and NewWord.