Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cca!mirror!rayssd!raybed2!linus!dee
From: dee@linus.UUCP (David E. Emery)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Borland's SPRINT
Message-ID: <34525@linus.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jun 88 14:05:16 GMT
References: <5170@nsc.nsc.com>
Organization: The MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA
Lines: 31
In-reply-to: andrew@nsc.nsc.com's message of 14 Jun 88 23:30:02 GMT

If SPRINT is Borland's version of Final Word, (I think it is), then I
can very highly recommend it.  I've been using Final Word for 4 years
now, and am a very satisfied customer.  FW's approach is basically
that of a very strong text editor with a document compiler.  

The editor closely resembles EMACS (and was done by the same people
who did MINCE a long time ago), and has a macro programming language.
There is (was) a lot of public domain stuff for the macro language,
including things like 'electric c mode', etc.

The formatter is very similar to Scribe.  In fact, I've 'ported' very
large Scribe documents (Mil-Std 'B' Specification for Software...)
almost without modification.  If you've used Scribe, you'll love
having it on your PC.  It supports Scribe's inheritance model, which
is still my favorite model for word processing, in terms of building
large scale documents.  The formatter also supports laser printers and
has a facility for including 'embedded postscript'.  

FW's greatest strength is large, structured documents.  I've developed
FW templates for doing Army Operations Orders (a very strangly
structured document) for my Guard unit.  

The last good thing about FW is that it's very portable.  I run it on
a TI Professional, which is as un-Clone as a MS-DOS machine can be.
FW supported defining your own printer and display setups, so you
could run it on just about anything that can conceivably run MS-DOS
and any printer that MS-DOS can send bytes to...  The documentation is
very good (comprehensive), and looks nice, too.  

				dave emery
				emery@mitre-bedford.arpa