shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson) (02/15/89)
Thanx to all who responded to my request for suggestions for a simple word processor. Of the eight responses I got, six recomended ProWrite with little reservation. Well, not being one to ignore advice like that, I bounded over to my neighborhood software store and twiddled with it. It looked like it fit the bill, so I bought it and I've been very happy so far. I paid $95 for it, which was $20 more than KindWords, but it seems to have been well worth it. It's simple. Not simplistic, but straightforward and obvious. Things work more or less exactly how I expect them to. I even discovered once I got it home that it had features that I was wishing for! It works well with my printer, which is just a daisy-wheel type, and I can "print to a file" using the 1.3 "CMD" command and the "generic" printer driver. It has the strange habit of leaving the program running when all the windows have been closed, but I can live with having to close the window and then choose "Quit" from the menu to exit. Also, it opens a new window every time I choose "Open" even when there is an empty, untitled window that it could usurp. The spell checker isn't quite as nice as the one with KindWords, but it does the job. KindWords has an additional problem which I found while playing with it. I like to put two spaces between sentences, but if the sentence break was right at the end of the line, the second space could wrap around to the head of the next line, causing an unsightly indent in the middle of a paragraph. This is a bug in KindWords as far as I'm concerned and was a factor in my _not_ buying it. In summary, six people recomended ProWrite. I got one vote for UEdit, and one vote each for CygnusEd Professional with Proff and AmigaTeX. One person gave a neutral recomendation of TxEd, and one gave a negative review of WordPerfect. Here's some selected excerpts: | From: Kevin Dooley <dooley@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> | | [...] WordPerfect is rather expensive. I have an additional | caution against WordPerfect: it's horrible! It's a kludgey port | from MS-DOS and it doesn't multitask worth a damn. It also does | not have good graphics or font support. Avoid at all costs! [...] | ProWrite is my choice for a WYSYG word processor. It has good | graphics support and is very flexible and Amigaish. The menues | are well layed out and easy to understand, and it has a good | spell checker. [...] I'm happy with ProWrite. | From: sun!portal!cup.portal.com!Bruce_Eric_Bowers | | [...] look at Prowrite. | I have it, and love it. It is extremely intuitive to use: everything | works the way you think it ought to work, and [...] Everything can be | done via mouse (of course, there are keyboard shortcuts). | It also allows you to imbed IFF graphics, and any fonts you want. | On the bad side, the spelling checker is pretty slow | [...] Also, there is no way to do stuff | like automatically build a table of contents and index. | Bruce Bowers | From: Robin C. LaPasha <cogsci!ecsvax.uncecs.edu!ruslan> | | I think ProWrite would suit your purposes. Nice, basic | stuff. Handles fonts and keymaps. Goes through Preferences | for drivers. Has a NLQ mode for Topaz 11. Has a draft mode | for ASCII text. Otherwise does graphics. | ~$75 mail order (got mine from GO AMIGO.) | From: cogsci!ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU!decvax!nicmad!madnix.ARPA!perry | | May I suggest CygnusEd Professional which comes with Proff. | The editor is simple, fast, and powerful. Proff is simple, | fast, and powerful as well. | Perry Kivolowitz, ASDG Inc. | From: Kenneth Herron <cogsci!engr.uky.edu!agollum> | | Take a look at ProWrite. It uses the Amiga interface very well; you can | move through the document with scroll bars, you set tabs & margins with the | mouse, and there's a menu option for everything (with keyboard shortcuts). | Very simple to use. | It keeps up with typing just fine. It is slow at scrolling [but] | Version 2.0 (the new one) is probably faster at this. (Seemed fine to me.) | You can give any block of text its own left, paragraph, & right margins as | well as tab stops [...] justification | and spacing (single or double) and possibly other stuff. | [...] It does bold, underline, italics, and eight different colors of text | Prowrite has a very clean interface. It gives you the standard project items, | it ghosts unselectable items, it lets you edit multiple documents in | separate, resizeable windows, etc. | From: Ronald G Minnich <uunet!super!metropolis!rminnich> | | [...] I went through the same search for my | brother and ended up at ProWrite. It is really pretty good. | If you are willing to go non-wp, there is always amigatex ... I love it. | From: Harry Muttart <hplabs!hpda!hcmutt> | | 1. First I tried using TxEd, which is a fast, clean editor. After [a | while] I found that its lack of paragraph margins was just | too time consuming. [...] It did have simple commands, runs | comfortably on a minimal machine, and allows editing of multiple documents | 2. ProWrite 2.0 is pretty good. It does lag a tiny bit, but has the nicest | interface of any editor that I've used (easy selection of word(s) for cut | paste, deletion and replacement). [...] It has footers, headers, very | nice paragraph formatting (margin/indent), and copying of paragraph | formats. | Because the text "flows" as you type, there is sometimes a little lag, | but this does not bother me ... | The spelling checking seems pretty slow to me. It is also frustrating | because it will not check an entire document while you do something else | ...ALL decision points require an interactive response! | The other frustration for me is the relatively poor support for "draft | mode" page breaks. [...] the computed page breaks are often | wrong. I spend a fair amount of time inserting manual page breaks... (I didn't notice the problem on my daisy wheel, but I haven't used it much. There is a "6 lines per inch" setting which should make the computed page breaks correct. Did you try this, or is this only in 2.0?) | From: cogsci!sugar.uu.net!ssd (Scott Denham) | | If you don't mind doing some configuration work, the sharware | editor UEdit by Rick Stiles can be configured to do just about everything | you asked for. [...] It's NOT a WYSIWYG editor | [...] He also offers a spell checker | that's pretty good and integrates will with Uedit, and he supports an | ARexx port if you want to get REALLY tricky. Thanks again to all who responded. -- Stuart Ferguson (shf@well.UUCP) Action by HAVOC
u-jmolse%sunset.utah.edu@wasatch.UUCP (John M. Olsen) (02/17/89)
In article <10715@well.UUCP> shf@well.UUCP (Stuart H. Ferguson) writes: >Here's some selected excerpts: > >| From: Kevin Dooley <dooley@helios.physics.utoronto.ca> >| >| [...] WordPerfect is rather expensive. I have an additional >| caution against WordPerfect: it's horrible! It's a kludgey port >| from MS-DOS and it doesn't multitask worth a damn. It also does >| not have good graphics or font support. Avoid at all costs! WordPerfect is not a simple word processor. It is exceedingly complex. But, the Amiga version is actually much easier to use for a non-WP-wizard because everything is in menus as well as shift-alt-control-headstand- scratch-n-spit sequences. Just for the record, it's not a port, but was rewritten from scratch. It uses a WorkBench window, and is nice for those who already know how to make WordPerfect do song-n-dance routines. It's got more features than anything else in any home computer market. It has some problems with handling low memory situations, but I've never had a problem with it multitasking. It multitasks it with itself, since the print command is a separate process. It has *no* graphics support until a faintly rumored future release, and supports only those fonts your printer knows how to generate. WP supports dozens more printers than the Amiga has drivers for, because they supply their own drivers. It's not WYSIWYG, but has a preview mode which I never use. It's spell checker is fairly fast, even from floppy, and it knows how to spell pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. :^) Really! I bought it, and I like it. I got it for about $100 on their student purchase program, which is really nice, and comparable with the cost of other word processors. If you don't need graphics or Amiga fonts, I would recommend it. (Grains of salt applied liberally, please) /\/\ /| | /||| /\| | John M. Olsen, 1547 Jamestown Drive /\/\ \/\/ \|()|\|\_ |||.\/|/)@|\_ | Salt Lake City, UT 84121-2051 \/\/ /\/\ | u-jmolse%ug@cs.utah.edu or ...!utah-cs!utah-ug!u-jmolse /\/\ \/\/ "A full mailbox is a happy mailbox" \/\/