HP Fortran Programmer's Reference (September 2007)

I/O and file handling
ASA carriage control
Chapter 8 227
ASA carriage control
The program asa (1) processes the output of a Fortran 90 program that uses ASA carriage
control characters so that it can be properly handled by many printers.
The syntax of asa is:
asa [ file-names ]
where file-names is a list of file names to be output with carriage control characters
interpreted according to ASA rules.
Table 8-8 describes the ASA carriage-control characters.
asa reads input from file-names or from standard input if file-names is not specified. The
first character of each line is interpreted as a control character. Lines beginning with any
character other than those listed in Table 8-8 are interpreted as if they began with a blank,
and an appropriate diagnostic appears on standard error. The first character of each line is
not printed. The asa program interprets input lines and sends its output to standard output.
Each input file begins on a new page.
To properly view the output of programs that use asa carriage control characters, asa should
be used as a filter. For example, the following example pipes the output of fortran_asa, an
executable HP Fortran program that outputs lines with ASA carriage control characters,
through the asa filter to the line printer command, lp:
fortran_asa | asa | lp
Table 8-8 ASA carriage-control characters
Character Meaning
blank Advance one line.
0 Advance two lines.
1 Advance to top of next page.
+ Do not advance; overstrike previous line.