Read the !Help file to understand how to use the program  - this
file just tells you what it is actually for.

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                STRIPSTYLE --  VERSION 23 30th January 1998

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This program is of use only to users of Impression Publisher (or Style) or Impression II.   It is designed to remove the style definitions from the head of a document saved in Computer Concepts' 'DDF format' -- that is, one saved as text 'with styles' so that italics, headings etc will be preserved when it is dropped back into an Impression document.
   If you actually examine one of these text files you will find that they start with a hundred or so lines of style definitions, often followed by a much smaller quantity of text!   In many cases these definitions are unnecessary since the eventual destination Impression document will already contain all the styles used and there will be no need to redefine them from the DDF file.   Also, many of the styles may not actually have been used in the document itself -- for example, unless you have deleted these styles, all Impression documents (and hence DDF files) contain the styles "Table" and "Hanging indent", though most documents have not used them.
   I can envisage two main cases where this application would come in useful -- the one for which I designed it, where many 'chapters' of a document are generated (or collated from a selection of magazine articles etc.) and saved in DDF format, only the first chapter needing to retain the style information for when they are eventually compiled into chapters of a single Impression document, and the (frequent) case when documents contain no 'user-defined styles', or only commonly used 'house styles' which are already contained in a standard blank copy of the newsletter or whatever for which these excerpts are destined.

I also find Stripstyle useful when attempting to print out documents created on another machine whose master pages are the wrong dimensions for my printer.   Altering the original master page ought to work, but often gives rise to further problems -- I find it more convenient to save out all the chapters as stripped DDF files, then drop them into a document with my own default master pages, dealing manually with any formatting errors caused by the pages' now being a different size.

   Note that Stripstyle'd documents are of no use at all on their own -- their only purpose is eventually to be fed back into Impression, meanwhile reducing storage space....

   "Stripstyle" supports interactive help.

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      Why use Stripstyle rather than saving documents in Impression format or as plain text without styles?

Some statistics:
Impression 'application' style document        28506 bytes
Impression Publisher single file document      28036 bytes
Impression II style DDF document               18197 bytes
Impression Publisher style DDF document        18851 bytes
Plain text file                                14711 bytes

Same document Stripstyle'd                     15743 bytes

   As you can see above, for a single chapter document, using the default A4 master page, with no extra frames on any of the pages (that is, one where there is no information which cannot be contained in a DDF file) a DDF file is considerably smaller than the original document - which means you can fit a lot more of them on a disc.   In fact, for short files, the 'overheads' of an Impression document are often larger than the textual content of the file itself!
   In this case, you can also see that 28% of the DDF file consists of style information rather than text.   This file was one of a series of (20!) articles in 'Archive' magazine -- assuming that you wished, as I did, to reassemble the lot into a reference document for your own use, you can see that only one copy of this information would be needed, rather than 20....
   After passing through "Stripstyle", the document now contains only 7% style information -- but, dropped onto an Impression document which already contains all the styles (i.e. the previous 19 chapters!), it will produce exactly the same result as the original DDF file.   A side effect of being Stripstyle'd is that the DDF file becomes a lot more 'tweakable' in "Edit" -- in this particular file, 118 lines out of 362 are taken up by the initial style definitions, since these lines are disproportionately short;  rather a lot to scroll through before you can check the content of the file!

   (All the above is just justification for having written the program;  my real motive was simply to avoid having to delete the incredibly long list of unused styles from other parts of the magazine that were being added to my style list every time I appended a new article to my document!)

   If you drop a Stripstyle'd file onto a document which does not contain all the styles used in it, any extra styles will be created and added to the style list for you as 'null styles' which currently do nothing -- but all the places where they apply are recorded, and you can restore any missing formatting by editing them back to their original form.   And if an original document does contain some graphics, you can always save them out separately as Draw files before saving your text 'with styles' and Stripstyling it, then put them back into the eventual destination document.

   To summarise:  Stripstyle is of most use to people like me who save large numbers of short DDF files all sharing an identical set of styles, and who are paranoid about 'wasting space' on their floppy discs or 40/80Mb hard drive, and always delete unused styles from their Impression documents... probably a subset of one, i.e only me.   That's all right, I wrote it for my own use.

   Incidentally, the original 2k BASIC file Stripstyle inside this application can perform all the functions of the 65k application except for multitasking and checking for stupid input -- the only reason for WIMPifying it was to show off -- so if you want to be consistent in your paranoia, delete the main application, edit the variables at the beginning of the BASIC program (or put in some INPUT statements) and use that instead!
