jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) (01/15/90)
In article <2932@mibte.UUCP> jbh@mibte.UUCP (James Harvey) writes: >I have Pen Pal and my wife has been doing freshman level college >work with it. > [bunch of problems with Pen Pal. A while ago I requested information on Amiga word processors. A few people asked me for a summary. Since there seems to be interest, I thought I'd post what I found. The mail I received mentioned Excellence, Professional Page, Pen Pal and Pro Write. The opinions on Excellence were negative, and everyone mentioned typing speed as a problem. The posting quoted above, and the mail I saw mentioned reliability problems with Pen Pal. I went to my local Amiga dealer (The Memory Location in Wellesely, MA - a GREAT Amiga dealer; they sell nothing but Commodore products and add-ons) and tried out what I could find. Basically, I confirmed what I learned from email. Excellence couldn't keep up with me, even on a 2500/30 machine! Most of the time it did OK, but every so often, it fell behind for a few seconds. This is a matter of taste, but I thought that Excellence had, by far, the best-looking interface. Pen Pal seemed extremely flaky to me. I tried to load an 80K ascii file. On my first attempt, I gave up after about 5 minutes. It loaded on the second try in a reasonable amount of time. However, within about two minutes of playing with it, I got a message about a paragraph being too long. A reboot was required to get things unstuck. Pro Write worked fine in the few minutes I tried it out. I didn't get to try Professional Page, but the one piece of mail I received was favorable, though warning that the wp functions weren't very good. I am EXTREMELY disappointed with the state of Amiga WP. I have a 2000 at home, with a 40 meg disk and 3 meg. Great hardware, but the software just isn't there. When I have writing to do, I've been lugging a Mac home so that I could use Word. Looks like I'll have to continue with this. I was hoping to find something comparable for the Amiga. Excellence and Pen Pal were unusable due to speed and reliability problems, respectively. All three packages lack the ability to store "styles" as is possible in Word. A style is a combination of formatting choices (margins, font, size, spacing, etc.) that can be applied to paragraphs or groups of paragraphs as a whole. When the style is changed, all paragraphs in that style are automatically reformatted. I rely on this feature heavily, as there are often strict requirements on font size, margins, etc. for the places I send my papers. Without this capability, I'd have to apply each formatting choice to each paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs) individually. This just isn't practical. In Word, styles can be arranged into an inheritance hierarchy. Nice feature, but not essential for me. I'll be very happy if someone responds and points out that I've overlooked some other way to do the same thing. This is not a good situation. If Commodore is listening: LOTS OF PEOPLE WILL NOT TAKE THE AMIGA SERIOUSLY UNTIL THERE IS SOME DECENT WP SOFTWARE!!! I like the Amiga. I do all my real work on it. I refer to the Mac that I borrow for WP as a "typewriter". I don't think it's good for much else. But it IS a very good typewriter. The Amiga could be a much better one, but not until the software improves. Jack Orenstein This is not a disclaimer.
FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) (01/17/90)
I noticed you neglected to mention WordPerfect. I have WP and it is a solid program. The latest version is 4.11 and the 'street' price has come down to the reasonable level. Now this is a port from the IBM so it doesn't have all the fancy gadgetry that some of the Amiga produced programs have. But then you want a word processor not a graphics program, right? I have used word 4.00 on an IBM-XT and I am not impressed with it. It isn't super and my Amiga version of WordPerfect is similar in performance. For really big jobs and for elaborate sord smithing, I use Memacs and Proff anyway since Memacs has better text handling and proff allows me to format the text *my* way. Plus Memacs is very fast with large files (how about 5 seconds to do a global search/replace of 1 character on each of 1800 lines?). So if you want a solid wordprocessor for your Amiga, WordPerfect is a good way to go. It doesn't have anything to prove since it is number one in the IBM market. Dana Bourgeois @ cup.portal.com
mikef@hpspdra.HP.COM (Mike Fischer) (01/18/90)
Thanks for the summary. The lack of a really attractive word processor for Amy has kept me from buying one also. I had thought that Word Perfect would be the answer, but my current front runner is ProWrite. Instead of buying a word processor, I've been learning more and more about the editor--formatter approach. I recall one good book titled something like _Text in Unix_ that has a quote, "WYSIWIG usually means that 'what you see is ALL you get'", making the point that word processors are more limited than formatters. For an editor, just give me most any flavor of EMACS or a derivative, like Qed on HotMix103 from the First Amiga Users Group (Si Valley, CA). The formatter area is where it really gets interesting. The most recently updated is nro. One of the oldest is proff from Fish 9. I have looked at the documentation for nro v1.5 from Fish 197 and in a cursory (probably unfair) comparison with proff I get: nro proff --- ----- Startup Options 6 8 Commands 45 50 Translations 10 0 I should admit that I couldn't figure out how the translations in nro would be of use to me. Things in proff that are missing from nro are: table of contents generation, variable setting, interactive variable setting, redefinition of special characters, save current formatter context on a push-down stack, redefinition of commands (separate from the macros), autoparagraph, send special printer codes transparently, and two sets of canned macros: both mm and ms. All this led me to infer that proff was actually closer to the nroff/troff on mainframes than nro. A question that makes me suspicious of my assumptions is, "If proff is better than nro, then why are people still working on nro and releasing updated versions?" Does anyone have any insights on this? From lots I've heard I think I'll be standardizing on AmigaTeX/LaTeX at home and LaTeX at work eventually, and I'm using the *roff experience as a stepping stone. -- Mike Fischer mikef@hpspd.hp.com (415) 857-6444 HP Stanford Park R&D
gmb@iclswe.UUCP (Grahame Budd) (01/18/90)
The following are worth a look if you want non graphics WP and do not intend to use the documents in DTP systems: Word Perfect - Very compatable and fairly good. (Now available on the Amiga.) ProText - Very good non graphics WP. Excelent macro facilities. If you want a WP system to complement a DTP system remember that the DTP system overrides the WP layout. In this case speed and transparency are more important than facilities so the simplest WP system is probably the best.
FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) (01/20/90)
I just gotta add my heat to the proff fire. See I routinely use Memacs from Workbench1.3 and proff. I wrote a 105 page paper for my wife using memacs and proff. I like proff. But it doesn't have the convenience of a wysiwyg word processor so there is a place for WordPerfect in my box of floppies. By the way, I recently used Microsoft Word 4.0 on an old I*M-XT machine (4.7MHz) and the screen updates were so slow that scrolling was literally a line per second! And this is a top-rated package. WordPerfect on the Amiga is not second-rate word processing. It may not be your favorite. You might prefer ProWrite or Excellence! or some other package. That doesn't mean that the Amiga makes a poor word processing platform. Dana Bourgeois @ cup.portal.com
zama@ellis.uchicago.edu (iftikhar uz zaman) (10/19/90)
Hi folks. I have an Amiga500 that I don't know very well and have decided
to get a 3000--but my reasons would be considered heretical on this group:
half of my work is on PC's and half on Macs. Amiga is the chameleon that
can be both...
So I am interested in the Amiga for it's ability to be something *other*
than an Amiga--but I AM willing to learn. So here's a practical question:
My dissertation requires lots of geneological-tree type charts. I use
MORE on the Mac to generate these. I need to be able to sort this
stuff out, do searches, check out numbers of occurences of certain
names etc: i.e. a simple database...I use PC-files on the PC for this
[This last probably is because I started off as a PC owner, and that's
all I had and have at home...there's probably a Mac program for this
simple database stuff]. Then I write my text which, of course,
requires footnotes etc. But MS-Word on the Mac lets me generate
tables of contents, flip back and forth with a ctrl-u between the
outline of my dissertation and the text, insert the diagrams that MORE
creates into the text of the dissertation with no hassle (simply copy
to the system "clipboard" in MORE with a ctrl-c, and paste in MS-Word
with a ctrl-v), insert multi-column tables in my text with ease.
I was thinking that I would do this on an Amiga relying on AMAX and
bridgeboards. My question: can we come up with a few Amiga programs
which could do all this--i.e. currently my state of knowledge is that
I have to make my "smart" Amiga act like a Stupid Mac and a Stupid XT
to get my work done. Can someone show me that I don't *have* to do
this and that my Amiga is quite capable of doing all this?
I think this is the stuff I am looking for:
(1) Word Processor: generate tables of contents, indices, ability to
insert graphics from some Amiga-graphic program, multi-column tables.
(2) A "draw" program: which would allow me to draw simple boxes with
text in them and lines going from one to the other a la flowchart.
(3) (Desirable but not necessary) A MORE-like program: which would allow
me to input text into an "outline" and then would convert the outline
into a flowchart type diagram which my "draw" program could read and
edit.
(4) A text-base type program which could allow me to search occurences
and frequencies of various names?
I am not a programmer so I do not know how to make any of this stuff.
And, hey, if this stuff isn't available I'll do things the kludgy way and
buy the Amiga anyway--it seems to be a better machine. But, if some of
this stuff is available, I certainly would love to hear about it.
[PS I know this is not comp.sys.compare--the spirit of this article is
not comparision but a desire to know the capabilities of my Amiga better]
Iftikhar
--
La yajrimannakum shan'anu qawmin `ala an-ta`dilu; i`dilu huwa aqrubu li
al-taqwa...
zama@ellis.uchicago.edu xpszama@uchimvs1.uchicago.edu