Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!odi!jack From: jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Amiga word processors Message-ID: <1990Jan15.143614.516@odi.com> Date: 15 Jan 90 14:36:14 GMT References: <90008.165456JKT100@PSUVM.BITNET> <2932@mibte.UUCP> Reply-To: jack@odi.com (Jack Orenstein) Organization: Object Design Inc., Burlington, MA Lines: 69 In article <2932@mibte.UUCP> jbh@mibte.UUCP (James Harvey) writes: >I have Pen Pal and my wife has been doing freshman level college >work with it. > [bunch of problems with Pen Pal. A while ago I requested information on Amiga word processors. A few people asked me for a summary. Since there seems to be interest, I thought I'd post what I found. The mail I received mentioned Excellence, Professional Page, Pen Pal and Pro Write. The opinions on Excellence were negative, and everyone mentioned typing speed as a problem. The posting quoted above, and the mail I saw mentioned reliability problems with Pen Pal. I went to my local Amiga dealer (The Memory Location in Wellesely, MA - a GREAT Amiga dealer; they sell nothing but Commodore products and add-ons) and tried out what I could find. Basically, I confirmed what I learned from email. Excellence couldn't keep up with me, even on a 2500/30 machine! Most of the time it did OK, but every so often, it fell behind for a few seconds. This is a matter of taste, but I thought that Excellence had, by far, the best-looking interface. Pen Pal seemed extremely flaky to me. I tried to load an 80K ascii file. On my first attempt, I gave up after about 5 minutes. It loaded on the second try in a reasonable amount of time. However, within about two minutes of playing with it, I got a message about a paragraph being too long. A reboot was required to get things unstuck. Pro Write worked fine in the few minutes I tried it out. I didn't get to try Professional Page, but the one piece of mail I received was favorable, though warning that the wp functions weren't very good. I am EXTREMELY disappointed with the state of Amiga WP. I have a 2000 at home, with a 40 meg disk and 3 meg. Great hardware, but the software just isn't there. When I have writing to do, I've been lugging a Mac home so that I could use Word. Looks like I'll have to continue with this. I was hoping to find something comparable for the Amiga. Excellence and Pen Pal were unusable due to speed and reliability problems, respectively. All three packages lack the ability to store "styles" as is possible in Word. A style is a combination of formatting choices (margins, font, size, spacing, etc.) that can be applied to paragraphs or groups of paragraphs as a whole. When the style is changed, all paragraphs in that style are automatically reformatted. I rely on this feature heavily, as there are often strict requirements on font size, margins, etc. for the places I send my papers. Without this capability, I'd have to apply each formatting choice to each paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs) individually. This just isn't practical. In Word, styles can be arranged into an inheritance hierarchy. Nice feature, but not essential for me. I'll be very happy if someone responds and points out that I've overlooked some other way to do the same thing. This is not a good situation. If Commodore is listening: LOTS OF PEOPLE WILL NOT TAKE THE AMIGA SERIOUSLY UNTIL THERE IS SOME DECENT WP SOFTWARE!!! I like the Amiga. I do all my real work on it. I refer to the Mac that I borrow for WP as a "typewriter". I don't think it's good for much else. But it IS a very good typewriter. The Amiga could be a much better one, but not until the software improves. Jack Orenstein This is not a disclaimer.