Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!ut-sally!husc6!linus!sdl From: sdl@linus.UUCP (Steven D. Litvintchouk) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: ProWrite -- a review Message-ID: <2386@linus.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Apr-87 23:15:29 EST Article-I.D.: linus.2386 Posted: Wed Apr 8 23:15:29 1987 Date-Received: Mon, 13-Apr-87 03:48:43 EST Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA Lines: 91 Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.40.1 of Fri Mar 20 1987 on linus (berkeley-unix) As you all probably know from the ads in AmigaWorld: ProWrite (New Horizons Software, Inc.) is a multifont, multicolor, WYSIWYG word processor with up to 8 windows. I've owned ProWrite for less than a week, but I thought I would let you know what I've experienced so far: 1. ProWrite seems to be consciously patterned after MacWrite; similar menus, ruler, etc. Both horizontal and vertical scrollbars are available. However, ProWrite lacks such sophisticated features as spelling correction. Also, the documentation doesn't explain whether it's possible to read files from a hard disk or RAM: disk, if you already have two floppy drives; the filename requester seems to just let you toggle between the floppy drives. 2. ProWrite really can use all the fonts in the fonts: directory. It also comes with 3 new 15-point fonts: Granite (a ripoff of Macintosh Geneva?), Marble, and Serpentine. I added Zuma fonts to the fonts: directory and they work well too. 3. ProWrite uses the Amiga 640x400 interlace mode exclusively. So what about interlace flicker? ProWrite has a Shift-Help option that dims the screen colors, reducing flicker. Also, the documentation recommends Jitter-Rid or a high-persistence monitor. Actually, I find that lowering the contrast and brightness on the monitor work reasonably well. My major gripe is that ProWrite uses a lot of thin parallel horizontal lines in their requesters, scroll bars, etc., that exacerbate flicker unnecessarily. Oh well, I expected I'd be buying a high-persistence monitor eventually.... 4. I have been pleasantly surprised by the output from ProWrite on my Okimate 20 printer (especially given the poor quality of output from Notepad). ProWrite's default font (Diamond 12) looks very good, and most of the Amiga's other built in fonts seem at least fair. Ironically, ProWrite's own Granite font looks awful, because the Okimate 20 seems to print the 1-pixel-wide vertical lines of Granite characters so thin they cannot be easily seen. (This problem also occurs with Aegis Impact!, so I assume it's the printer driver's fault, not ProWrite's.) New Horizons recommends the Apple Imagewriter II for use with ProWrite. 5. The color palette is a fixed 8 colors. 6. You can insert IFF pictures (created by other programs) into your documents. This isn't as convenient as in the Mac, however, because you must read the IFF picture from a disk file. Also, due to ProWrite's limited color range (8 colors), the color range of 32-color IFF pictures will be greatly reduced. ProWrite offers "shading" (color smoothing) options that alleviate this problem somewhat. Note also that the pictures will be made to fit a hi-res screen. Example: for a lo-res 320x200 picture developed in Deluxe Paint, the picture will end up in a ProWrite document as only half as wide and half as high. 7. ProWrite can read in text created by other word processors and editors. 8. ProWrite is not copy protected. 9. ProWrite won't win prizes for speed. I am a fast typist and I can get ahead of ProWrite. But typeahead works OK. 10. ProWrite is 147K in size, and documents seem similarly large-sized (especially with embedded IFF pictures). New Horizons recommends at least 1 Meg of RAM, and I agree (I have an extra 1 meg sitting in my Xpander II). 11. ProWrite appears well-behaved. It runs in its own hi-res screen and multitasks with other Amiga programs (like the VT100 emulator I'm using now). ProWrite uses Preferences to find out paper size, paper type, and graphic shading (black/white vs. color). ProWrite appears fairly stable. I have been able to crash it only by going into Preferences and changing printer options while ProWrite was sending output to my Okimate 20. All in all, I am quite satisfied with ProWrite. It is the first Amiga word processor to be comparable with MacWrite in support for fonts and embedded pictures. You can produce some great results with multicolored text and IFF pictures. And (finally!) I can put Textcraft out to pasture. Steven Litvintchouk MITRE Corporation Burlington Road Bedford, MA 01730 Fone: (617)271-7753 ARPA: sdl@mitre-bedford UUCP: ...{cbosgd,decvax,genrad,ll-xn,philabs,security,utzoo}!linus!sdl