DISPATCH@NCSUVM.BITNET (10/20/89)
I have heard that Perfect Writer was a subset of EMACS. is this true? If so, how much of EMACS is in PW?
rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander) (10/23/89)
DISPATCH@NCSUVM.BITNET writes: >I have heard that Perfect Writer was a subset of EMACS. is this true? >If so, how much of EMACS is in PW? Yes, it was. It was about 75% of something like micro-Emacs, i.e., the main stuff, horizontally split windows, and so on, but no meta-X, lisp, or command completeion features. Just what would be useful and fit in a CP/M environment. As I understand it, perfect writer was a sort of bare-bones implementation of scribe. Ross
catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu (Tony Catone) (11/13/89)
In article <1188@atha.AthabascaU.CA> rwa@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Ross Alexander) writes: >DISPATCH@NCSUVM.BITNET writes: > >>I have heard that Perfect Writer was a subset of EMACS. is this true? >>If so, how much of EMACS is in PW? > >Yes, it was. It was about 75% of something like micro-Emacs, i.e., >the main stuff, horizontally split windows, and so on, but no meta-X, >lisp, or command completeion features. Just what would be useful and >fit in a CP/M environment. As I understand it, perfect writer was a sort >of bare-bones implementation of scribe. Perfect Writer was a descendent of MINCE (Mince Is Not Complete Emacs) and SCRIBBLE. The code was sold for one (low) lump sum to the company that marketed Perfect Writer. Once Perfect Writer took off, the authors decided that the prodcut was worth pursuing, and evolved the code into FinalWord. The last version, FinalWord II version 2.10, was very Emacs-like; it had a builtin macro language that included recursion, a completely redefinable user interface (all menus, commands, and keys could be redefined) and a very full Scribe-compatible markup language. The product was sold to Borland, and formed the basis for Borland's SPRINT: The Professional Word Processor, as is noted in the SPRINT doc. Sprint understands all the old FinalWord II @ commands, and has added and extended many more @ commands. This is all poorly documented in their manuals, since they assume most people will want to use their menu interface to accomplish formatting. One of these days, I'll write the great Sprint for Emacs & Scribe Users book, and things will be wonderful :-) Til then, Sprint is really worth looking into. It has a soft user interface which can be fully redefined, and you can load different interfaces on the fly. They push their WordPerfect and MS Word interfaces (these come predefined, source code provided) but they still have the FinalWord II and Emacs interfaces FinalWord Corp. used to use. If anyone wants more information, feel free to drop me a line. - Tony catone@dsl.cis.upenn.edu catone@wharton.upenn.edu
hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (11/14/89)
I've played with Sprint a bit, trying to get Scribe compatibility. You can certainly see that it is based on technology similar to Scribe's. However it has diverged for a number of years. User level stuff tends to be fairly similar. However document descriptions (i.e. format files) use rather different facilities for Scribe and Sprint. If you put @modify commands at the beginning of your files, they will typically be different for Scribe and Sprint. Experienced Scribe users will find it fairly easy to move to Sprint, but maintaining a document that can be compiled with either one is a bit hairy. I've done it, but it requires a lot of work in setting up a format that works identically on both systems. Even then if users need to be able to adjust formats on the fly, e.g @begin(description, indent -10) you're going to run into differences in the way things work that will be visible at the user level.