krantz@csed-1.IDA.ORG (Alan Krantz) (07/01/88)
Howdy, I could use some advice about word processors. Specifically, has anyone heard much about sprint? Specifically, is it good for law briefs? (Lines have to be numbered). Does it have any quirks or annoying bugs (features)? What's the going price for this product? How does it stand up against products such as word perfect, MS words, PcWrite and so forth in terms of price/performance ratio? I would find any comments useful ... Alan Krantz
paul@cgh.UUCP (Paul Homchick) (07/05/88)
In article <398@csed-1.IDA.ORG> krantz@csed-1.IDA.ORG (Alan Krantz) writes: >Specifically, has anyone heard much about sprint? ... is it good for law >briefs? (Lines have to be numbered). What's the going price for this product? >product? How does it stand up against products such as word perfect, >MS word[.], >PcWrite ... in terms of price/performance ratio? As has been mentioned before, Borland's Sprint is really Mark of the Unicorn's Final Word II with some (significant) Borland improvements. The most important thing to note about the product is its family tree: EMACS SCRIBE (unix & dec) | | MINCE SCRIBBLE (cp/m) +--------+ | Final Word + FinalWordFormatter (ms-dos) | SPRINT (turbo-land) This product started out as a very powerful extensible programmer's editor coupled with a very nice document formatting language. It has stayed that way. Can you say WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)? Good: that isn't SPRINT. SPRINT is a multi-buffer, multi-window, highly configurable, macro editor. It's sort of the word processing equivalent of the Brief programmer's editor. With enough time, you could write a macro to make it behave almost any way you want. In fact that is how Borland has managed to make the 'user interface' changeable. They simply wrote a series of macros. It can look like WordStar, Multimate, Word Perfect, or Word. (And probably others, that is all I remember). But it is not an integrated editor/printing environment. You don't get on-screen formatting, or dimensioning in picas, or preview using a bit-mapped mode, or anything like that. If you want something to be centered you put a @=() around it. If you want an indented list, you say @begin(list) at the beginning, and @end(list) at the end. If you want numbered lines you probably say @style(legal) (I'm making this one up, guys) at the beginning of the document. Personally, I don't find a thing wrong with this approach, but to some folks this is apt to seem a might strange. Sprint (a.k.a Final Word) is absolutely GREAT for producing large, structured documents with footnotes, a table of contents, chapter headings, cross-references, and an index. It interfaces to a jillion printers, and it does a fantastic job with a postscript device. And if you have any SCRIBE documents laying about, just feed them to the formatter, and out they will come, just like the real $megabuck$ SCRIBE. I have used FW II for years, and I have a copy of Sprint on order. The list price is $199, so I would expect the street price to be about $140. Borland has an introductory offer to Borland customers where you can get a copy for $99. If you are looking for a cheap clone of Ventura Publisher, don't look here. But if you are looking for a powerful, programmable document preparation system that can easily handle monster manuals, then Sprint is a steal at the asking price. (It makes a pretty good programmer's editor, too). -- Paul Homchick {allegra | rutgers | uunet} !cbmvax!cgh!paul Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Inc.; One Radnor Station, Suite 300; Radnor, PA 19087
Devin_E_Ben-Hur@cup.portal.com (07/06/88)
Paul Homchick writes (about SPRINT formerly FinalWord II): > You don't get on-screen formatting, or dimensioning in picas, or preview > using a bit-mapped mode, or anything like that. If you want something > to be centered you put a @=() around it. If you want an indented list, > you say @begin(list) at the beginning, and @end(list) at the end. It's not quite this bad. One of the improvements Borland made was to add significant (though not spectacular) support for text-mode WYSIKLWYG (What You See Is Kinda Like What You Get). You still get the very powerful macro formatting language. You also get a lot of direct editor specification and display for common formatting stuff like indentation, centering, justification, page breaks, and font changes (using color & intensity). Yes, it's not Ventura Publisher, but it handles many of the formatting needs of memos, letters, and short papers without requiring you to muck about learning the formatting langugue and imbedding cryptic commands in your text. Disclaimer: I'm a former Borland employee and this information is based on early alpha versions from last summer and my knowledge of the Sprint product plans. I've not seen the actual shipping version of Sprint.
ddb@ns.ns.com (David Dyer-Bennet) (07/07/88)
I picked up sprint at egghead this weekend ($150). It's the first wp
package I've looked at that I can tolerate (I'm from the edit / format
school). It doesn't do on-screen preview, but it shows line breaks
and indents and such on screen. It does not show multiple columns
(but it supports multiple columns, up to 6). The set of user interfaces
supplied with it is sufficiently complete that it includes an emacs
interface (which surprised me by containing incremental search!).
I used Finalword on cp/m for a while and couldn't tolerate it, but I
like sprint a lot so far.
The previous posting describing how you enter all these formatting commands
is incomplete; you can do it that way, but you can also do it from the set
of menus, or you can do it by "shortcut keys" that you define (or are
predefined). They show up on screen sometimes as obscure codes, but
usually they show up as reverse-video blocks with a meaningful phrase
in them.
The DEC la100 printer driver doesn't work at all on my la100; I'm in
the process of fixing it. And I can't get it to drive a qms Kiss laser
printer properly with proportional fonts yet. If these can't be resolved
there's a problem, but I imagine they can be.
--
-- David Dyer-Bennet
ddb@viper.Lynx.MN.Org, ...{amdahl,hpda}!bungia!viper!ddb
Fidonet 1:282/341.0, (612) 721-8967 hst/2400/1200/300munck@linus.UUCP (Robert Munck) (07/08/88)
In article <741@cgh.UUCP> paul@cgh.UUCP (Paul Homchick) writes: (much about its ancestry, non-WYSIWYG-ness, etc.) >... But if you are looking for a powerful, >programmable document preparation system that can easily handle monster >manuals, then Sprint is a steal at the asking price. (It makes a pretty >good programmer's editor, too). FW is definitely a "cult editor." Only the real "in crowd" has ever heard about it, and they all love it. Amazingly, though, no one says much about what a great editor of programs you can make it, and the many advantages of that. For instance, I program mostly in Pascal, Modula-2, and Ada; I've written FW macros to help with the typing and indenting of each. The three languages are just similar enough that the differences could make me crazy, but I've managed to hide most of them in the editor interface. Comment delimiters are different in all three, but I just hit "'" (single-quote) and I get the delimiters for the language I'm currently editing. It also switches me to continuous spelling checker (beeps immediately after a mistake) and line-wrap (generates additional delimiters when wrapping as needed) and (my preference) right-justifies the comment against the right margin. Likewise FOR, IF, CASE, etc. statements have slightly different syntax, but the FW macros just generate the right skeleton and prompt me to fill in non-terminals. Other goodies: the macros know the format of the error-message output of the compilers I use, and can display each error message in turn in one window and position the cursor to the appropriate place in the code in the other. Just hit <numeric-pad-5> to jump to the next error. Another key will find the declaration of the identifier under the cursor and put it in a window. The real joy, of course, is that I use the same editor to type documents, with as many keys as possible having identical or analogous functions. As my brain gets older, it switches context more and more reluctantly, and FW is a great help. -- Bob Munck, MITRE -- Munck@MITRE-Bedford.ARPA, ...!linus!munck
ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) (12/15/88)
I've found one place where Borland's Sprint word-processor works BETTER than
documented: Shf-Alt-X (Utilities/Macros/Enter). This function is documented
as allowing you to invoke any macro by name. In fact, it will let you execute
anything you could put on a single 80-character line in a .SPM macro file,
except defining a new macro.
About 20 minutes ago, I wanted to shorten the divider lines in the interrupt
list by five dashes (that saves a full 4.5K....). Knowing the above feature,
I simply went to the top of the file and typed Shf-Alt-X followed by
while !isend { if (0 search "-------"){toeol r(del del del del del)}}
and 30 seconds later I had 900 shortened divider lines. [Yeah, it helps
to have been hacking .SPM files recently :-)]
--
{harvard,uunet,ucbvax}!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!ralf -=-=- AT&T: (412)268-3053 (school)
ARPA: RALF@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU |"Tolerance means excusing the mistakes others make.
FIDO: Ralf Brown at 129/31 | Tact means not noticing them." --Arthur Schnitzler
BITnet: RALF%B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU@CMUCCVMA -=-=- DISCLAIMER? I claimed something?
-- funkstr@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (-=/ Larry Hastings /=-) (12/15/88)
+-In article <3878@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, ralf@b.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Ralf Brown) wrote:- +---------- | | I've found one place where Borland's Sprint word-processor works BETTER than | documented: Shf-Alt-X (Utilities/Macros/Enter). This function is documented | as allowing you to invoke any macro by name. In fact, it will let you execute | anything you could put on a single 80-character line in a .SPM macro file, | except defining a new macro. | |{harvard,uunet,ucbvax}!b.gp.cs.cmu.edu!ralf -=-=- AT&T: (412)268-3053 (school) +---------- Yep. I believe you can't use the fake preprocessor functions either (i.e. #define or #include)... it would only make sense. You can also type out silly little macros on the [U]tilities/[M]acro/[E]nter line, and EVEN assign them to a key for ever and ever. Just for grins, here's three tips for Sprint: 1) On any menu, if you type Ctrl-Enter (instead of Enter) to select something off a menu, you can assign that function to a key (Sprint will ask you for the key to assign, rather than performing the function). From then on, that key will perform that function... even if what you selected was another menu. 2) Take a look at [U]tilities/[G]lossary. It's very overlooked, and very useful. Dan Klaussen of Sprint Tech Support calls this menu "one of the 'hidden' features of Sprint" (not an exact quote...). 3) Except for a few special cases (^F, ^L, ^K, and others), control-character environments (the ones that change the color/attributes of the text on the screen) just invoke the one-letter environment that they are the control character of. (My, how obtuse!) For instance, ^Bbold text^N works because @B(bold text) makes it bold, not because of magic fairy dust. For the same reason, ^Eitalic text^N calls @E(italic text), and so on. This means that all the other control characters that fell through the cracks -- ^R, ^T, ^P -- will ALSO work, making the text default, typewriter, and bold/italic respectively. (Note that these are pretty much unsupported, as ^R and ^T are mentioned only ONCE in the Sprint manuals (under Control Codes in the Sprint Reference Guide.. page 34 or so, in the chart) and ^P is NEVER mentioned. I would advise pretty much to NOT use ^P... @P is currently defined as bold/italic only for compatibility with Final Word II, and that both @P and the current behaviour of ^P may change in the future...) This also means that you can _change_around_ what the control-character environments DO... for instance, I never use word underline, so I redefined @W to do the same thing that @Word() does. As for this last one, I'll be posting some SPM files that let you take advantage of this more readily to SIMTEL20, maybe this weekend (it's finals right now, folks). The new SPM (pronounced "spam"... ahAHaAHaH) files will include macros to change your Typefaces menu and your [C]ustomize/[C]olors menu so that they both include R, T, and P. -- /|\ /|\ .. . . . . . . . . . . | |\| |\| .. . . . . . . . . . . |/|\|/|\|/|| _ _ _ _ |_| _ _ |_ -__ _ _ARPA: funkstr@ucscb.ucsc.EDU | |/| |/|L_ (_\( ( (_/ | |(_\_) (_ || )(_)_)UUCP: *!ucbvax!ucscb!funkstr \|/ \|/ larry / hastings _/ WORK: sun!acad!metaware!funkster MetaWare Incorporated Disclaimer: It was a bad day. "If any of your OSF force are caught or killed, the Secretary will deny any knowlege of your activities." --from the new Mission: Impractical