doug@edge.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (10/15/88)
Title: Cut and Paste
Description: Word Processor
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Price: $10 discount
Overall Grade: B-
Cut and Paste is a basic but usable word processor.
It was specifically designed for people like me who only use their word
processors every now and again on relatively minor items like letter writing,
and who would rather have simple, predictable operation than a laundry list
of fancy bells and whistles.
I was surprised, however, that it does *not* include right-justification of
the printed text. Although I never use that feature myself, I'd always
thought that it was perceived by the public as the most "gee-whiz" feature of
word processors.
Other limitations:
It does not provide global search, much less search and replace. In fact,
they're rather proud that they don't provide this feature, claiming that it
is a hold-over from program editors and that for people who're working with
natural language text it's just a booby trap. I'm not sure I agree...
Cut and Paste does not allow you to embed control characters or escape
sequences to control your printer. And like every Electronic Arts program
I've ever seen, you can't get out of Cut and Paste once you've booted it
except by turning off the computer, so you must remember to send any "set-up"
data to your printer *before* you boot Cut and Paste. And without embedded
control characters you can't have underlining, italics, bold face,
subscripts, etc. Booooo!
A couple of features seem over-simplified to me. If you want to get to the
beginning of the line, there's no "confusing" keystoke to do it -- you "just"
hold down the cursor-left key (actually SHIFT/CRSR on the C-64) and wait for
the cursor to get to the left side of the screen. Same for the right side,
top, and bottom of the screen. There are, however, commands to page forward
and backward (CTRL-F and CTRL-B, think you can remember those?) and to go to
the start and end of the text.
Given that the program is -- by design -- limited, it hurts that they used
a non-standard disk format. You can't read nor write the data disk with the
standard CBM DOS operations. On the "up" side, their disk format allows
files to be stored back under the same name without using the infamous "save
and replace" misfeature of the 1541. Cut and Paste provides both formatting
and full-disk backup commands for its data disk format.
Something else I don't like: the colors are forced to white on blue. At
least on my TV set monitor, the picture is not very stable when the C-64 is
generating a blue screen. This is hard on my eyes.
Overview of main features:
Good features: can copy/move text within a file or between files, even across
disks. Word-wrap works continuously during editing, keeping things looking
neat even when inserting and deleting text. You can force a new-page during
printout.
Unusual features: Cut and Paste actually provides a data disk in the package.
The printout routines make special allowances at unforced page breaks to keep
from having a single line of a paragraph on one page and the rest on another.
Slightly limiting feature: there is only one set of margins for the entire
document; but you can, in effect, adjust the left margin because each
paragraph can be indented by any multiple of five spaces.
Mangled but usable feature: tab stops are permanently set at intervals of
five spaces. The "tab" key is CTRL-I, which only makes sense from an ASCII
point of view. The tab key simply inserts enough spaces to move the cursor
to the next tab stop; no tab characters are stored.
Main misfeature: the manual. Considering that Cut and Paste was designed to
be easy for a numbskull to use, they really botched the manual. I would
recommend that if you buy Cut and Paste, just boot it and run it by the seat
of your pants.
Overall, a usable word processor if you don't need anything fancy. But I
wonder how Electronic Arts justified their original $50 price tag for it?
--
Doug Pardee, Edgcore Technology (formerly Edge Computer), Scottsdale, AZ
{ames,hplabs,sun,amdahl,allegra}!oliveb!edge!doug uunet!ism780c!edge!doug