egb@burl.UUCP (egb) (05/11/85)
*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MESSAGE *** SPEEDSCRIPT 3.0 - A REVIEW This review was written with use of "SpeedScript 3.0", which is clearly the most appropriate way to write a review of Speedscript 3.0. Being somewhat new to the world of personal computing (eight months or so experience), I am not in a position to do an exhaustive comparison of SpeedScript with other word processing programs that run on the C-64, but I can say that for the price (free) it sure does a nice job! It does not have all the sophistication of, say Fleet System 2 or of WordPro3/Plus64, but it does have some very nice features which those highly-regarded programs do not. If you need a compact, convenient, smooth-operating, really neat word processor, read on! The program was written by Charles Brannon, Program Editor at COMPUTE! magazine and published in the April, 1985 issue, together with an article that does very well as a user's manual. Companion articles in subsequent issues presented versions of the program modified to run on Atari and on Apple machines, which is why COMPUTE! was chosed over "COMPUTE's Gazette" (designed for Commodore users specifically) as the vehicle for introducing it to the world. Presented as a 100% machine-language program, the job of typing it into memory is pure drudgery, no doubt about that, but the rewards, in my view, are well worth the effort. (COMPUTE! will sell you a tested disk for $12.95 plus tax and handling expense - more as a service than as a profit-making act.) The program is about 6K bytes long, so typing it takes a while. Yet 6K is very compact for a word processor. The program leaves plenty of memory for text storage. See point 5, below. Some of the rewards especially worthy of mention here on the net are: 1. The program loads in less than 20 seconds *without* 1541 Flash or Epyx Fastload. I have the FastLoad cartridge and can load SpeedScript in about five seconds. 2. Cursor control is designed for writers, not programmers. CRSR left-right moves the cursor one column at a time, but CRSR up-down moves it to the beginnings of sentences, not line-by-line. Function keys f3 and f4 work the same as CRSR up-down. The f1/f2 key moves the cursor to the beginning letter of each word (f1 forward, f2 rearward) and function keys f5 and f6 cause it to leap over paragraphs in either direction. The keys are "repeating", so the cursor can be moved with lightning speed to any point in the document. During this time while I am becoming accustomed to their action, my tendency is often to overshoot the target because of such speed. 3. Editing can be done with the same tools as are used to enter and edit BASIC programs, but additional tools of great power are available. Search and replace can be invoked separately or together, a continuous-insert mode can be toggled in and out, correction by typeover is the norm but is enhanced by little things like single-keystroke correction of adjacent transposed letters and single-keystroke exchanging of upper and lower case versions of any letter. The "RUN/STOP" key has been programmed to provide automatic insertion of five spaces, useful for indenting paragraphs and "SHIFT-RUN/STOP" will insert a 255-byte block of empty spaces to speed up insertions where lots of text follows the cursor position. This may be too much space, so "SHIFT-CTRL-BACK ARROW" will instantly eat up all blank spaces between the cursor and the following text. 4. The "erase" function is multi-purpose. When invoked it offers the user options of erasing words, sentences or paragraphs, but it puts the "erased" material into a temporary buffer from which it can be recalled as many times as one likes. Therefore it can be used as a means for moving text from anywhere to anywhere in a document as well as for producing multiple copies of text segments at any desired places in a document. 5 The amount of memory SpeedScript makes available for text storage is impressive. At this point in this writing, if I press "CTRL =", I am informed by a message on the "command line" at the top of my screen that there is still room for 39828 more bytes! The total available as one approaches a clean slate for a new document is 43520 bytes. The buffer into which "erased" material goes has room for 12K bytes. That means one may handle about 10 pages of single-spaced text in memory at one time. 6. If you have more to say after 43520 bytes, a clue you can plant in the final line in your unfinished document will cause linking of a subsequent file wherein a new slate will start clean all over again. 7. The display is 40-columns wide, which users know is often a bummer when using the C-64 for word-processing, but Brannon has done some things to make me happy with 40 columns! First is word-wrap. No word gets split at the right edge of the screen, although any word longer than "supercallifragilisticexpialidocious" may require the writer to do some preplanned splitting. Second, he has provided a module for printing to the screen as if the screen were a printer so one can see how the final printout will look and, third, formatting specifications in the document will provide computed left- and right-margin control. The only use one makes of the "Return" key is to end paragraphs or to terminate short lines. 8. It is possible to exit from SpeedScript to BASIC to do some presumably important things, then return to SpeedScript by a SYS command. If you haven't used too much "joint use" memory space while in BASIC, you will not have lost the SpeedScript text you have in "live" memory. "SAVEing to disk is so easy, though, that I don't take chances on losing text that way. In any case, the SpeedScript program itself is not destroyed by a return to BASIC. Function key f8 invokes the "SAVE" routine in a one-keystroke operation 9. Output options may be selected both as to where the output is to go (screen, tape, disk, printer, modem) and as to format (PET ASCII, True ASCII or C-64 screen code). 10 The control commands have been selected for the maximum possible mnemonic content. Nearly all commands are entered with use of the CTRL key, sometimes with the simultaneous use of the SHIFT key. CTRL-b changes color of (b)order and (b)ackground. CTRL-l changes the screen color of (l)etters, CTRL-i toggles the (i)nsert mode, SHIFT-CTRL-h activates the (h)unt feature to find occurrences of specified strings, CTRL-e invokes the (e)rase mode, CTRL-r (r)estores erased material (at the cursor position) and so on. A few commands had to be otherwise because the preferred mnemonic had been assigned, examples: CTRL-a toggles upper and lower case for the letter under the cursor and CTRL-j invokes the hunt and *selective* replace function. (Brannon says "j" was selected only because it's next to the "h" on the keyboard.) I didn't intend to go into this much detail because Brannon's article covers all this material plus a good deal more and does it better. Moreover, it is published and widely distributed. I thought it unlikely that other magazines would pick up on it, however, since that would unduly boost a competitor's appeal. In the same April issue of COMPUTE! there is published a "proofreader" program that produces a checksum display at the top of your screen after entry of each program line and a machine-language monitor program called "MLX" which one can enter practically error-free with "proofreader"s help. The MLX program is not only useful, it is probably essential to the successful error-free entry of SpeedScript itself. In my case, I first learned about SpeedScript after COMPUTE!'s April issue had been replaced on the stands. So, wanting a copy of my own, I ordered the back issue from the publisher. It's not entirely true to say the program is "free" - COMPUTE! charged me six bucks for the back issue, for one thing, and the five or six hours of "spare" time I spent typing must be assigned *some* value. I might have been ahead of the game if I had ordered the disk in the first place! A final note: the program stores your text in "screen" code, which is neither ASCII nor CBM's version of ASCII. While you can command a copy to be made on disk in True ASCII or CBM ASCII instead of screen code, such copies cannot be recalled by SpeedScript for further editing without first re-translating them back to screen code. A part-BASIC, part ML program is published as part of the article which is supposed to accomplish these translations - making translated copies on the same disk as the source files. I used it successfully to make a "True ASCII" copy of a screen-code source file, but my attempt to go from CBM ASCII back to SpeedScript's screen code for another file did not work too well - lower-case letters were handled properly, but upper case letters got translated into punctuation marks! Careful rechecking of my typing revealed no errors, so this little problem remains "under active investigation." * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The "Bottom Line": I expect to use "Fleet System 2" for jobs involving columns of numbers requiring addition as part of document creation and where its capability to display 80 columns (with horizontal scrolling) is important for entering multiple tabbed columns, but for 95 percent of the word processing I expect to do, SpeedScript 3.0 will be my hands-down choice. An additional boon - since there has been no protection of the software via the notorious "bad block" method, (or any other method, for that matter), loading the program does not cause destructive banging of the head against the stops in my 1541 Disk Drive! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * If you are still with me and interested, and if your local resources are lacking, COMPUTE! publishes the following: "The Commodore 64 version of SpeedScript 3.0 may be ordered on disk directly from COMPUTE! Publications. Call TOLL FREE 800-334-0868 (In NC 919-275-9809) to charge your order 8:30 a.m. -7:00 p.m. EST Monday through Friday. Or send check or money order ($12.95 plus $2.00 shipping and handling) to: COMPUTE! Publications, Inc. P.O. Box 5058 Greensboro, NC 27403 USA Readers outside the US and Canada add $3.00 shipping and handling. All orders must be prepaid in US funds. DISCLAIMER: I have no involvement or interest in the magazine or suppliers. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Wally Blake akgua!gcuxc!gccwb May 10, 1985
calway@ecsvax.UUCP (James Calloway) (05/16/85)
x I agree with Wally Blake's praise of SpeedScript (I have an earlier version), with one exception. The cursor's inability to move straight up or down is a big nuisance. Sure, it's nice to be able to move from sentence to sentence, but that function is duplicated (as Blake mentioned) on the f-keys. The only reason I can figure for not allowing straight up-down cursor movement (i.e., staying in the same column or defaulting to the end of the line if it is shorter than the previous line) is that the cursor would have to re-figure the word-wrap, in other words, it was too much trouble to write the code. My version won't store files in ASCII at all, so I hacked in a pair of arrays to convert files as they are loaded and saved. In the process I managed to neutralize most of the printer commands, and I never got around to fixing that, but it works fine for sending files into work, if I can remember to make them sequential files (by putting ,s,w after the name when saving to disk). -- James Calloway The News and Observer Box 191 Raleigh, N.C. 27602 (919) 829-4570 {akgua,decvax}!mcnc!ecsvax!calway