jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) (12/31/89)
I have an Amiga 2000 with 3 meg and a 40 meg hard disk. I've been using it for research on data structures for spatial data. However, once I've run the experiments and collected the numbers, I've used a -- ahem -- Macintosh for writing up the results. I would like to use my Amiga for the writing. My needs are as follows: - Capabilities comparable to Microsoft word: wysiwyg, variety of fonts, user-defined styles, page preview, ... - Keep up with my typing speed. - Ability to incorporate pictures (line drawings and graphs). - Prepare output for a variety of laser printers, (and postscript would be nice but not essential.) What are the recommendations? Amiga World recently recommended Excellence as a good system, but I've heard that it's not all that fast. Is this true, or is this a rumor earned during an early release? I also need recommendations for graphing packages that can create graphs that can be incorporated into the document. Thanks Jack Orenstein This is not a disclaimer.
UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (12/31/89)
In article <1989Dec30.165414.3269@odi.com>, jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) says: > I would like to use >my Amiga for the writing. > Nearly WYSIWYG, and very powerful, is AmigaTeX. TeX is normally a command driven formatter, where you use the editor of your choice and create files containing stuff like $\int_a:b e:x \dx$ and get back gloriously formatted, auto-hyphenated, de-orphaned and -widowed text. Last time I looked, Addison-Wesley was using it for their books. Your stuff can look just as good. ON THE AMIGA!!! TeX is very user friendly, since you can run the editor, TeX itself, and the screen previewer simultaneously. This makes it easy to see how what you are typing $$\vbox{\halign{ ... }}$$ will look in the final printout. In fact, the AmigaTeX system even speaks REXX. Give it a look. PS No. I don't got nuthin' to do with Radical Eye, the maker of AmigaTeX (and NeXT TeX, too??).
dfrancis@dsoft.UUCP (Dennis Heffernan) (01/01/90)
In article <1989Dec30.165414.3269@odi.com> jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) writes: >I would like to use my Amiga for the writing. My needs are as follows: > >- Capabilities comparable to Microsoft word: wysiwyg, variety of > fonts, user-defined styles, page preview, ... >- Keep up with my typing speed. >- Ability to incorporate pictures (line drawings and graphs). >- Prepare output for a variety of laser printers, (and postscript > would be nice but not essential.) > Pen Pal is faster than excellence!, and does much better with graphic output. It also has simple drawing tools, which I've found to be a big help. It does a MUCH better job with importing pictures; from what I've heard about excellence!, that one cuts down the number of colors in the final printout to eight or so. Pen Pal will let you include HAM's, though it will *display* them in eight colors. B U T .... Pen Pal does not have heavy-duty word processing features. No footnotes; no multiple columns; none of the really good stuff. It does have the usual- cut&paste, spell checker, multiple docs, et cetera. It also does not have PostScript output, which excellence! has. I've never used Word, either on the Amiga or the Mac, but I strongly suspect that excellence! will come closer to it than Pen Pal. The author of Pen Pal has been pretty aggressive in updating it, and maybe someday it will have all those features...but not today. --dfh ....uunet!tronsbox!dsoft!dfrancis "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Albert Einstein
gaspar@STL-08SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Al Gaspar) (01/02/90)
Jack,
I own Excelence! (I got it a year ago; I don't know of any updates).
I wish I didn't. For some things it is adequate; however, for a number
of others it is not. It is a little slow (though I could live with
that). What I had real trouble with was printing. I had a short paper
that required some ordinary footnotes. I could never get the footnotes
to come out properly at the bottom of the page. Part of it was solved
by switching to a different size font, but I never resolved its mangling
the horizontal line that should appear at the bottom of the page above
footnotes. I was trying to print on a relatively simple Epson
compatible. I understand that if I had postscript facilities, I
wouldn't have had these problems. I have heard good things about
WordPerfect and ProWrite. Good luck.
Cheers--
Al
--
Al Gaspar <gaspar@stl-08sima.army.mil>
(used to be <gaspar@almsa-1.arpa>)
USAMC SIMA, ATTN: AMXSI-TTC, Box 1578, St. Louis, MO 63188-1578
COMMERCIAL: (314) 263-5646 AUTOVON: 693-5646
uunet.uu.net!stl-08sima.army.mil!gasparjack@odi.com (01/02/90)
Thanks for the information. I was hoping that Excellence would be, because the others are so expensive, but I guess not.
vinsci@ra.abo.fi (Leonard Norrgard) (01/03/90)
What about Pen Pal? Has anybody examined it any closer? -- Leonard Norrgard, vinsci@ra.abo.fi, vinsci@finabo.bitnet, +358-21-6375762, EET.
liberato@drivax.UUCP (Jimmy Liberato) (01/06/90)
dfrancis@dsoft.UUCP (Dennis Heffernan) writes: > Pen Pal is faster than excellence!, and does much better with graphic >output. It also has simple drawing tools, which I've found to be a big help. >It does a MUCH better job with importing pictures; from what I've heard about >excellence!, that one cuts down the number of colors in the final printout to >eight or so. Pen Pal will let you include HAM's, though it will *display* >them in eight colors. An interesting thing about excellence! is that it actually does support 16 colors, you just can't choose 16 from excellence!'s preferences menu. It also slows things down to a crawl. The best thing to do is to use 2 or 4 colors for entering text, save your document, quit, reenter in 16 color mode to insert your IFF graphics. They are then mapped to 16 colors. This is very impressive! A few other good points about excellence! is that it handles the most radical overscan I can throw at it and, though it is a chip memory hog, it is very good about releasing memory when not needed. It also uses the clipboard. Lest I be accused of being an apologist for it, there is one glaring and serious flaw: it is annoyingly slow at updating the screen when typing or editing a large document. Even someone like me who took typing in high school only for the "scenery" can easily outpace it. It doesn't lose anything but you do have to wait for it to catch up once in a while. For memos and letters it is great but for big stuff it might be better to import from an ASCII text editor and then simply format with excellence!. On an accelerated Amiga its performance should be acceptable. Oh, to amplify on my previous comments about its Postscript support: the original release did indeed have a flakey preamble (I think they call it prologue) but version 1.4 works great. I have not had the privelege of trying any of the other Amiga wordprocessors so I can not offer any comparisons. -- Jimmy Liberato ...!amdahl!drivax!liberato "Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence." -Henrik Tikkanen