ruslan@uncecs.edu (Robin C. LaPasha) (06/06/90)
My previous posting was a quick summary; here are the gory details of ProWrite 3.0's new features and lack thereof. Bouquets for the new rev: 1. Fonts - The Insert Literal "map" for using high-bit (i.e. alt-key) letters in fonts is a joy for those of us who use "weird" characters. (Yes, it properly grabs the current font.) I wish KeyToy did half as much. The "view" mode in the font requester is helpful too (though my 105 pt. fonts rather overwhelm the size of the viewing area; I see the bottoms of all my letters. ;^)) 2. AREXX - The ARexx-based macros are wonderful. This way we don't have to learn YAML - Yet Another Macro Language; instead, we get to use something across the system. Whew! In addition, I have every intention of running other programs in combination with ProWrite, using the ARexx port as ... a hook for another personal thesaurus, for example. (I can squirt text back and forth via ARexx with the ProWrite "extract" and "type" commands.) I can also build the "missing" case-change keyboard command as an ARexx macro, since almost all of the menu items are ARexxable. (There are only ten "open" spaces, on the shifted function keys, for macros, but you can give your macro a name and call it up from a requester as well.) 3. The new "wait" clock is ugly, but the new "working" spinner-type thing is probably useful. 4. The new screen (display) options are fascinating. You can now open ProWrite in any resolution, with any chosen 2-8 colors, interlace or not, on its own screen or on the WorkBench (or shell.) It's real nice to shrink ProWrite files down into a corner, and not have to Amiga-N (or M, or whatever) to switch screens. Related niceties: You can also tell it to automatically show ALL files rather than just ProWrite files (so you won't have to hold down the ALT key when you select "open" from the File menu.) You can turn off the icon-building for each file. You can set your typing mode to "insert" or "typeover" (an old-fashioned word processing thing that some typists may prefer.) You can stop the d**n insertion point from blinking or slow it down (yay!) These prefs, and pretty much all others now, can be saved with the particular document, or as "ProWrite Prefs." 5. It's fun to be able to jump into a header or footer by double-clicking on it. But that feature is hidden away in the reference area! (Your mouse isn't broken and you haven't opened a new file; you just clicked twice in the header - get back by selecting "edit document"...) 6. After fussing with the snaking style of columns for several days, I've figured them out, and have decided that they're very well done. (The trick to happy formatting is to NOT use a left margin in the column itself; use the "binding width" feature of the new Layout requester instead.) So if your only DTP need is 5 or fewer newspaper-style columns (or if your parallel columns are built on the spot and need to be "matched paragraphs" rather than be separate documents) and your only printing is direct (no PostScript) you may get away with ProWrite alone. 7. As I mentioned before, the new print options are helpful; you can now effectively use your condensed printer fonts with _some_ semblance of WYSIWYG. You can also select various built-in printer fonts IF your Preferences printer driver knows how to set them (they mention the HP LaserJet driver as an example.) In fact, including the 2.5 rev print options, there are a bazillion ways to tweak a print job from ProWrite now. Smoothing and DPI and fixed line height, as well as "print one" (and print merge) and ... a new feature I haven't tried, that lets you print at any size percentage of the original. So, when you're done typing in your (10pt. font, 8.5 by 11") document and are ready to print, you could _theoretically_ switch your font to 100 pt. (if you have one) and set your page size at 85" by 110", and boost your print density, so you can print at 10% of the original size for a really spiff 10 pt. font? I dunno - it might work but I haven't tried. Anyway, there's an appendix that gives some gory details of getting a nice printout. 8. I like the thesaurus. Like the spell checker, it's sometimes stupid about plurals and such, but it can be quite thorough when it does get a match, and you can "go deeper" for more synonyms. (The spell checker has a "learn" command, fortunately. And you can tell it to just "look up" a particular word instead of the whole document, or you can "change dictionaries.") The thesaurus and Main Dictionary (for the spell checker) seem to be encrypted; your "learn" commands to the spell checker create a User Dictionary which is just an ASCII list of the words (one per line, left justified, etc..) On to the brickbats for 3.0: 1. There is an "addendum" page that says that practically nothing in the new ProWrite works with ProScript (the add-on product that turns a ProWrite file into PostScript.) Aaargh! So much for helping in my thesis work. They are planning on an update to ProScript; they need to track down their PostScript jock and get moving on it. So - ProScript cannot handle ProWrite's new features - multiple columns, automatic odd/even pages, "binding width," "space after," "fixed line height," or anything else from the new Layout menu item. Also, ProScript cannot automatically/remotely run from within ProWrite and save to a PS file! I tried to use the new "PostScript" feature in ProWrite (which basically just calls up ProScript) to save to a PS file (which I could later print with PixelScript, a separate product by another company.) It didn't work (built some idiot temp file.) I'm just glad I'd turned my modem off. It wants to send the file right out the serial port to a waiting PostScript laser printer, and there's no way to use the other ProScript option (save to a file.) In fact, I've been having some problems in my ProWrite > ProScript > PixelScript setup. Intermittent, I can't pin anything down yet, but some unhappy PostScript files pop up. Has anyone else with the setup noticed problems? 2. Some of the characteristics of the parallel type of multiple columns were rather a disappointment for me. See, I'd hoped to be able to pour my Russian document "a" into the left column and my English document "b" into the right column, then tweak the lineup so I'd have a side-by-side translation. Unfortunately, the parallel column feature is set so that as soon as you hit a "return" (enter, <cr>, that thing that ends a paragraph) in your document--or as soon as there IS one in your document--the next paragraph is placed in the NEXT COLUMN. Of course, my pre-existing documents have usual things like carriage returns in them. So it's no go; a document is scattered, or split, across the columns. I wish there were an option with ProWrite's parallel columns to bring/import a normal, pre-existing (single-column) document into just ONE column (with separate font, of course,) instead of chopping it between the columns, but for now 3.0 can't do it. 3. Display anomalies - perhaps bugs. I'd ignored the "red dot effect" onscreen that happened on occasion "over" certain words in a font, since it doesn't ever print. (It happened with system-supplied fonts as well as my own, so I know it wasn't some artifact of my font editor.) But now there's a much worse problem, the mysterious disappearing column sections. If you: 1. build a document with columns; then 2. start scrolling through the document, parts of your document (a paragraph or two) will at times disappear, especially going backwards through the document, and especially near the page break. If you then scroll past the "disappeared" part, reverse direction, and scroll over it again, it's back. Now, having chunks of the document-- sometimes it's bottoms or tops of lines of words--"go invisible" erratically is pretty unnerving. It needs fixing. There may also be some glitches in the screen refresh rate. Both in medium res and in high res, we have chunks of text not refreshing correctly when scrolled--if there's another document open on top of it. If the tiny document window on top is deselected, just sitting there, and you - Take the larger document window underneath, and scroll using the scroller arrows (clicking on the scroll-gadget slider doesn't do it,) Then suddenly part of the (underneath, selected) document screen is massively garbled. The only way to get it back to normal is to scroll past it and then come back to it (you can't just click in it.) It's frequently as if the bottom halves of letters get chopped off, and words get pasted onto others slightly out of vertical alignment. Very messy. 4. The use of the NLQ and Draft and Condensed fonts is a bit obscure, though it does work well. And the fonts have a bad case of the uglies onscreen (though they are sort of accurate.) A better description of which "built-in" fonts to use for what printer, and a touchup with a font editor for the screen representations of the printer fonts, would both help. 5. New Horizons had had most every command available via keyboard combinations, but unfortunately many of the new selections are menu-only. In particular, it'd be nice if the new Change Case options were keyable. (Looking at the list of Keyboard ShortCuts, it's possible that they decided that they were out of letters to use for keyboard commands.) 6. Their printer was apparently hungry the day it printed my manual, and it chomped off the outer part of page 111. You may want to check your copy when/if you get the product. In addition, the manual is starting to get a bit disorganized. There are Learning, Using, and Reference sections. Learning is the dummy "first wp" area, Using is normality, and Reference is ... Using with more info and lists of commands. I had trouble finding "display options" in the Reference as mentioned on page 6 in the Introduction; it turns out that "display options" in the intro became "screen options" in the reference. The Index shows "Options" (which lets you do screen colors and some other prefs) but no "display options" or "screen options," though Screen Options do have a page (149) and they have an entry in the Table of Contents. Overlooking that sort of stuff indicates a rush job on the manual. 7. Something weird is happening with ProWrite overriding and/or expecting certain assigns and such. If I start up my system, put all my assigns (fonts, keymaps, etc.) in place, change directory (cd) to "myProWriteDisk:", then start ProWrite, everything is fine. But - if I then pop another shell (a child type, not a parent, so it shouldn't change prior settings) and cd to its directory... all of a sudden my print job stops. Sometimes. Or if I run two "processes" of ProWrite from the WorkBench, I can have the ARexx macros in the first process but not the subsequent ones. Weird. Has anyone else run across this problem? Is it a bug in a shell program, [csh and qmouse in our case] or brought on by the ARP library? (We're not running ARP, but the library is on our disk.) Let me emphasize that it MAY NOT BE PROWRITE'S PROBLEM, but using ProWrite is where I'm noticing it. I haven't completely figured out who's expecting inheritance of which processes and resources yet, so if anyone can shed any light on my problem I'd appreciate it. Here's my continued wish list for future revs of ProWrite etc.; use it as an explanation of what it still DOESN'T have: 1. I'm still waiting for footnotes/endnotes, and preferably some widow/orphan control. Myself I don't need hyphenation, but others might. 2. I'd like to be able to click on a word in the document, and then click on ANOTHER word in the document, while still in the speller or thesaurus. I don't want to either have to start the option again or type the new word in. 3. I'd like a "real" grammar checker from New Horizons in the future. There is a "readability level" feature in PW 3.0, along with an "average word length" (and a lot of other such info.) They should work it into a full add-on or separate product, like they did with ProScript (turns a file into PostScript) and Flow (a nice outline processor, for folks who like that sort of thing.) There's a grammar checker called Reason, put out by a company called The Other Guys, but it's way, way too expensive (something ghastly like $450 list and $250+ mail order.) Try $50-100 or so, the same market as Grammatik on the Mac/PC critters (and comparable to the list prices of ProScript and Flow.) A lot of folks on the net have said they'd buy a product like Grammatik for the Amiga. 4. I'd like a better search/replace, one that can do some text stripping. I do a lot of net stuff, so I'd like to be able to say "strip off all ^Gs in this document and replace them with nothing. The same for ^@ and ^L." I've tried and ProWrite doesn't seem to find control characters when you search for them. At the very least (if there's some reason it can't be done in ProWrite itself) I'd want a new "filtering" option in the Convert utility program that comes with ProWrite, that would strip the file of certain user-specified codes and combos. Or perhaps there's an obvious ARexx macro (or ARexx filter program that I could run before I bring the document into ProWrite) that could do this for me? If anybody whips up a quickie ARexx toy to do this, please tell me. (I haven't figured out to tell ARexx about going through files yet...) 5. Nominally, you can't be working on document B while document A is printing, since ProWrite fades away with it's "printing in progress" icon. Silly. Give me straightforward multitasking. It's not as bad as it sounds, since you can always run another "process" of ProWrite and continue editing there. (Watch your memory, though. And to avoid confusion, I don't recommend editing the SAME document in more than one window or process.) 6. I believe that some editors still require triple spacing of documents; thus it should be made available in ProWrite. The end... for now ;^). -- Robin LaPasha |Keeper of the Amiga ruslan@ecsvax.uncecs.edu |Hypermedia Mailing List