Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!amdahl!drivax!liberato From: liberato@drivax.UUCP (Jimmy Liberato) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Word-processing recommendations Keywords: word processors Message-ID: Date: 6 Jan 90 05:18:16 GMT References: <1989Dec30.165414.3269@odi.com> <422@dsoft.UUCP> Reply-To: liberato@drivax.UUCP (Jimmy Liberato) Organization: Digital Research, Inc., Monterey, California Lines: 42 dfrancis@dsoft.UUCP (Dennis Heffernan) writes: > Pen Pal is faster than excellence!, and does much better with graphic >output. It also has simple drawing tools, which I've found to be a big help. >It does a MUCH better job with importing pictures; from what I've heard about >excellence!, that one cuts down the number of colors in the final printout to >eight or so. Pen Pal will let you include HAM's, though it will *display* >them in eight colors. An interesting thing about excellence! is that it actually does support 16 colors, you just can't choose 16 from excellence!'s preferences menu. It also slows things down to a crawl. The best thing to do is to use 2 or 4 colors for entering text, save your document, quit, reenter in 16 color mode to insert your IFF graphics. They are then mapped to 16 colors. This is very impressive! A few other good points about excellence! is that it handles the most radical overscan I can throw at it and, though it is a chip memory hog, it is very good about releasing memory when not needed. It also uses the clipboard. Lest I be accused of being an apologist for it, there is one glaring and serious flaw: it is annoyingly slow at updating the screen when typing or editing a large document. Even someone like me who took typing in high school only for the "scenery" can easily outpace it. It doesn't lose anything but you do have to wait for it to catch up once in a while. For memos and letters it is great but for big stuff it might be better to import from an ASCII text editor and then simply format with excellence!. On an accelerated Amiga its performance should be acceptable. Oh, to amplify on my previous comments about its Postscript support: the original release did indeed have a flakey preamble (I think they call it prologue) but version 1.4 works great. I have not had the privelege of trying any of the other Amiga wordprocessors so I can not offer any comparisons. -- Jimmy Liberato ...!amdahl!drivax!liberato "Truly great madness can not be achieved without significant intelligence." -Henrik Tikkanen