gaspar@stl-08sima.army.mil (Al Gaspar) (11/15/89)
I currently own an Amiga 500 with an extra disk drive and Commodore's expansion to 1 MB. My printer is a Panasonic 1091i. I have a need for a general purpose word processor. I currently own excellence! from Micro-Systems Software and am disappointed. Here are the features that I want: + Ability to produce standard letters, novels, or whatever in NLQ on my printer. + Ability to produce output in various fonts (graphics mode) for forms, greeting cards, or whatever. (I don't know if this is messed up by excellence! or my printer. What happens however is I'll be doing multiple iterations of '=' to draw lines (as an example) and every N iterations the top line of the '=' will disappear. This happens on the horizontal portions of various characters in excellence's normal (graphic) mode). + Automatic page numbering, footnoting, headers, footers, etc. Handling of header changes within a document, widows and orphans, etc. + Ability to output to an ascii file for transfer to the non-Amiga world. + Single, double, or (optionally) triple space in NLQ while performing the above automatic operations. (This is another place where excellence! blows it. It can't seem to double space and do automatic footnoting. + A user interface that is simple to use. All important functions should be accessible from the keyboard. (Excellence's user interface, especially for line spacing, tabs, and margins, is kind of bizarre). + Some reasonable speed. I am a slow typist (< 30wpm, probably), and I still beat out excellence! sometimes. + Spelling checker. (Grammar checker and thesaurus would be optional) + WYSIWYG (some reasonable facsimile, anyway). + Some halfway decent documentation with an index that was at least checked over by someone after the program generated it. I know, dream on... + I'm probably forgetting something, but those should be the important ones. At the moment I am looking at ProWrite 2.5 and WordPerfect. I'm a little confused about ProWrite. They offer a trade-in for $75, but a number of the software mail-order houses offer 2.5 for that or less with no trade-in. New Horizons doesn't seem to be doing anyone any favors... The only discount I know of for WordPerfect is $99 for students (if it is still in effect). Does anyone have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions? I like my Amiga and I would like to have a word processor that lived up to the machine. Thanks-- 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!gaspar
peterson@fsucs.cs.fsu.edu (Eric J. Peterson) (11/17/89)
I have both Pro-Write and WordPerfect. Although I have only tinkered with Pro-Write a little bit, I swear by WordPerfect, and it sounds like that is more than suited for your tasks. In article <4110@nigel.udel.EDU> you write: | | I currently own an Amiga 500 with an extra disk drive and | Commodore's expansion to 1 MB. My printer is a Panasonic 1091i. | I have a need for a general purpose word processor. I currently | own excellence! from Micro-Systems Software and am disappointed. | Here are the features that I want: | | + Ability to produce standard letters, novels, or whatever | in NLQ on my printer. WordPerfect can do this. The length of your document is only bounded by your disk space. Also, WP has excellent printer support, especially for a common printer such as yours. WP's drivers use all of the enhanced and built-in modes of your printer, including sizes, styles, weights, underlining, super/sub-scripting, and so forth. WP exploits all of the commands that come with your printer, and includes a powerful driver editor for creating your own or modifying theirs to suit your needs. | + Ability to produce output in various fonts (graphics mode) | for forms, greeting cards, or whatever. This is a major strike *against* WordPerfect, which I believe that Pro-Write covers. WordPerfect was designed with the printer hardware's purpose in mind -- dot matrix printers generally have drivers that can only use their text modes. Conversely, if you had a laser printer, WordPerfect is more than happy to support graphics modes there. But, WP does make the most out of what is included with your printer, although I'm sure this is not adequate for your needs. | + Automatic page numbering, footnoting, headers, footers, etc. | Handling of header changes within a document, widows and | orphans, etc. All of these are handled automagically and correctly by WordPerfect. I've used such a combination before. | + Ability to output to an ascii file for transfer to the non-Amiga | world. WordPerfect can do this. It can also output to IBM WordPerfect 4.2 format as well, which both WP 4.2 and WP 5.0 can read. | + Single, double, or (optionally) triple space in NLQ while | performing the above automatic operations. (This is another | place where excellence! blows it. It can't seem to double | space and do automatic footnoting. No problem. Any size spacing (or even fractional spacing) is possible with no problems. | + A user interface that is simple to use. All important functions | should be accessible from the keyboard. (Excellence's user | interface, especially for line spacing, tabs, and margins, is | kind of bizarre). There are mixed camps on this issue about WordPerfect. When WordPerfect was designed on Data General computers and later ported to PC's, it was designed with Function Keys in mind as the main source of input to the program. However, WordPerfect has done a good job of implementing the function key menus in the windowed drop-down style of the WorkBench. All of the functions are available from the keyboard, and all of the keyboard functions are available in the menus. In a few instances, the logic is a bit questionable, but not unreasonable. Also, the function key fuctions are virtually the same as the PC version, making it easy to make the transition from home (Amiga) to work (PC). | + Some reasonable speed. I am a slow typist (< 30wpm, probably), | and I still beat out excellence! sometimes. I have outtyped WP in short bursts but it catches up easily when I take a breather (and I can type at 80wpm+ when I get going ... 1.5 years as a Word Processor for the government helped :-). | + Spelling checker. (Grammar checker and thesaurus would be | optional) Spell checking is included with WP. The PC has a thesaurus, but I am not sure about the Amiga (I'll have to check, but someone else may post the answer). Grammar checking is not supported by WP, but there may be a third-party grammar checker that can read the WP format. If not, you should be able to convert it to ASCII and grammar check that. | + WYSIWYG (some reasonable facsimile, anyway). This is a reasonable facsimile. WP uses the Amiga's screen controls to display bold, underlined, and italic characters as bold, underlined and italic characters on the screen. WP also does a good job of portraying proportional fonts on a uniform screen, although it can take some getting used to. | + Some halfway decent documentation with an index that was at | least checked over by someone after the program generated it. | I know, dream on... I learned WordPerfect on the PC's, so I pretty much ignored the Amiga documentation. But the PC documentation was written for either the complete novice (the WordPerfect WorkBook) or the power user (the WordPerfect Reference Manual). Not much in between. Their documentation is better than half-decent, but not much more. | + I'm probably forgetting something, but those should be the | important ones. Powerful formatting, column support, automatic outlining, date and time functions, mail merging, ... all of these and more are in WordPefect. | 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!gaspar Once again, I have but do not use Pro-Write ... sorry I can't help you with a better comparison of the two other than spouting off the virtues of WP. If you've got any more WP questions, send me mail. Eric -- . |~~ _O_] Eric Peterson | peterson@nu.cs.fsu.edu | gatech!nu.cs.fsu.edu!peterson [ V Ada is a registered something or other of someone or other. _< >_ begin loop Get(Msg); Reply; end loop; exception when FLAME => null; end;
LadyHawke@cup.portal.com (Classic - Concepts) (11/17/89)
This might be disappointing news, but the long list of features you
describe is often hard to find in a single package. What a lot of people
do is to find a good word processor or text processor for putting in the
words and doing the spelling checking, etc. (those which handle this well
rarely are WYSIWYG) and then importing the text to a WYSIWYG editor or
desktop publishing program. WYSIWYG with multiple fonts generally slows
down things (that's why you can out-type a lot of them). It's unfortunate
to have to have two pieces of software to do what you want, but ...
Your printer problems might stem from excellence! and the way it
interacts with the printer driver, or ... are you using 1.2 Workbench?
The interaction of drivers/devices and printers was GREATLY improved from
version 1.2 to version 1.3. I've noticed a great improvement in most of
my applications. If you have upgraded to 1.3, then I suspect excellence!
may be the culprit. When you lose the top of the ==, it's because some
pixels (a row every once in a while) are being 'compressed' to fit the
page. Some lines are stretched by being doubled, some will be removed.
I'm assuming you have selected the appropriate printer driver in
Preferences. If you find a solution, you might consider posting it; there
are probably others looking for similar features. Try checking out some
of the programs in buyers' guides, not all the good ones run big ads, I
notice, but they show up in buyers' guides.
Julie (LadyHawke)