17 Bit Software 3: The Continuation/17-Bit_The_Continuation_Disc.iso/files/nz18.dms/nz18.adf/Causers.Newsletter/TC-Plus.EE

Text File | 1993-12-03 | 10KB | 265 lines

GADGET.Electronic Edition                          SEPTEMBER 1987



                  Copyright 1987 by Ray Radlein

This  file  may  be  freely   distributed   to  public   computer
bulletin boards  provided  this  notice  is included intact,  but
may not be used  or  published  in  any  other form without prior
consent of the author.



                  TEXTCRAFT PLUS : A First look

                         by RAY RADLEIN



I write this accompanied by the sound of flying donkeys. Outside,
the skies are rent asunder,  Hell  is busy freezing over, and the
Cubs are about to win the pennant.  Okay, well maybe the Cubs are
in fourth place; but the  donkeys  are  for real. TextCraft Plus,
the  most  infamous  piece   of   Vapor  since  the  Amiga  Live!
frame-grabber, is here. What next,  one wonders; the long-rumored
Transformer upgrade?  Workbench  1.3?  A  version of Word Perfect
that works?

Of course, even though it's  out,  no one's quite sure how to get
it, unless you own a Commodore 64.  At the moment, TextCraft Plus
is only available under  Commodore's  enlightened "Let's Stick It
to All  Our  Loyal  A1000  Owners  and  Dealers"  Great  Software
Give-Away Program. But never  fear!  On the off chance that it is
ever actually sold (and perish  the  thought of an Upgrade Policy
for  old  TextCraft  owners!),  I  am  prepared  to  give you the
Bird's-Eye Low-Down (whatever that means) on TextCraft Plus.

First off, let's pretend TextCraft  never existed (I know lots of
people who are still trying to do that). How would TextCraft Plus
stack up as a Word Processor in its  own right? Well, it has most
of the features that you would  want  in an Amiga Word Processor;
it features WYSIWYG ("What You  See  Is  What You Get") on-screen
display  of   Bolding,   Underlining,   Italicizing,   Sub-   and
Super-Scripting, as well  as  any  combinations  thereof. This is
something, it must be  noted,  that  Scribble!  does not do, that
Word Perfect does not do, and  that  LPD  Writer does not do (Pro
Write, I believe is the only  other  Amiga WP with this feature -
but Pro Write almost seems aimed more  at Desktop Publishing than
at Word Processing). In my opinion, it is a feature so central to
the Amiga Philosophy as to  constitute  a  major flaw in any Word
Processor not posessing it.

TextCraft Plus also  features  full  control  over  Justification
(Right, Left, Center,  and  Full)  and  margins, as well as Merge












Printing capabilities, and a "Find  and Replace" feature for text
editing. However, its Find and  Replace  feature is not nearly as
powerful as those of  Word  Perfect  or  Scribble!, both of which
allow you to search for such  things  as Carriage Returns - which
comes in extraordinarily  handy  when  importing  ASCII files. In
addition, TC Plus does not have  a  spelling  checker, which is a
major flaw in its own right.  Not  surprisingly, it also does not
have a Thesaurus, like Word Perfect does, but you certainly can't
expect to  have  everything  in  an  under-$100  Word  Processing
package. It also does not allow you  to choose between continuous
and  non-continuous   underlining,  and  does  not  support  such
additional niceties as  double-underlining  or expanded print. It
does,  however,  take  full   advantage   of  the  Amiga's  extra
characters (such as , , , , , ,  ,  , , , , and, of course, ); in
fact, they can also be represented  in Boldface, Italics, etc. (,
, ). Whether your printer or  PageSetter  can  handle them is, of
course, problematical (my Epson JX-80  succeeded on 5 of the 12 I
tried with it); nevertheless, the capability is there.

Not surprisingly, it lacks many  of  Word Perfect's more powerful
features, such as  automatic  renumbering  of  footnotes (or, for
that matter, true footnoting at  all,  as  opposed to endnoting),
widow and orphan control  (widows  are  first lines of paragraphs
left alone at the bottom of a  page,  and  orphans are last lines
left at the tops of pages), and my personal favorite, the ability
to type on a given page in newspaper-style  side-by-side columns.
It also  lacks  Scribble!'s  plethora  of  dot  commands,  which,
depending on your point of view, may be a blessing or a curse.

What it does posess is the heart of a good, basic Word Processing
program, easy to use and  easy  to  learn,  with large amounts of
available help (in the person  of  those  famous "Tutorials") for
the novice - which pretty much describes the original TextCraft.
Ah, yes! The  original  TextCraft!  Our  faithful friend from the
days of Workbench 1.0! Those of  you  who  are still using TC may
well wonder how TC Plus compares to  the old standby. What is the
same, and what has changed?

Lots. Of both. Among the more notable changes is the fact that TC
Plus actually multitasks (without  having to be forced to do so);
it has front/back and  resizing  gadgets,  and  they really work!
Also, the familiar  Push-button  menu  icons  are  gone - no more
Paste Jar, Paint  Brush,  Camera,  and  Scissors. Instead, all of
those are active at once, in  effect;  you highlight a section of
text, and then go to the  menu  bar  (if  you  don't remember the
keyboard shortcut, that is) and select  what you want to do to it
- cut, paste, italicize, whatever. Much more logical than the old
"Coke Machine" interface. In fact, it is kind of like Microsoft's
Word in that repect, only without  the idiotic "Tab-and-Spacebar"
menus.  Also,  using  what   they  refer  to  as  the  "Noun-Verb
Interface," you can, say, italicize an entire document with three
keystrokes.

In addition, the Tutorials are  no  longer accessible from within












the program - a decision which  makes  absolutley no sense to me.
Of  course,   since   TC   Plus   now   multitasks,   you  could,
theoretically, pop out to your TC  Plus Program Disk and activate
the Tutorials, but I am unsure  of  whether you would have enough
memory to do so on a 512K Amiga. Perhaps that has something to do
with them not being accessible from within the program.

Another major addition is the existence  of settable tabs. When I
first  purchased  TextCraft,  back  in  January  of  '86,  I  was
absolutely amazed that  it  could  not,  would  not, set tabs - a
thing that any $25 typewriter could do. More than just being able
to set tabs, TC Plus  now  allows  the  use  of decimal tabs, for
lining up columns of  numbers  correctly.  Another  of the little
mysteries of TextCraft was the fact  that it provided no apparent
way of importing ASCII files. Well, the days of icon-stealing are
over, as TC Plus will gladly  load  ASCII  files; in addition, it
now saves files in IFF format,  which  TextCraft never did (mainy
because  it  predated  IFF).  Also,   TC  Plus  finally  supports
Directories and full AmigaDOS pathnames.

In other words, almost two years after it and the Amiga came out,
TextCraft (as TextCraft Plus) is finally a true Amiga program. It
multitasks, lives in a  resizeable  window,  understands AmigaDOS
file structures, and is compatible with the IFF standard. Hurrah.
The bad news is that they got rid of the flying bird.

Well, that's not all of the bad news,  of course. If you are used
to the keyboard commands from  TextCraft,  your fingers are going
to be in for a rude shock or two.  First off, they have abandoned
entirely the Left-Amiga key.  Boldface  is now Right-Amiga-B, for
example. But the worst part of those  keys is that they no longer
toggle the respective features (this is also true from the menu).
In the original TextCraft, if you  wanted to turn Boldfacing off,
another Left-Amiga B  was  all  that  was  required.  If  you had
several features to turn off, a  Left-Amiga-P  (for  Plain) would
clear them all at once.  Under  TextCraft  Plus,  however, if you
want to turn off Boldfacing, you have to use Right-Amiga-P, which
still stands for  Plain,  and  which  still  turns  off any other
special features - whether or not  you want them turned off. Want
to go from Superscripted,  Underlined,  Boldface, Italicized text
to  Supersctripted,   Boldface,   Italicized   text  which  isn't
Underlined, you're in for a lot of work.

They also changed all of the  keystrokes  for  paging up and down
through the document, freeing up the  numeric keypad and adding a
"Goto Page N" feature, which is  nice.  And,  last but not least,
they introduced an "Undo"  feature  that  is, at best, worse than
useless; and at worst, it is an excellent  way of destroying your
document, several lines at a  time.  But  the thought was nice, I
guess.

So what's the  verdict?  TextCraft  Plus  is a fundamentally good
Word Processor, albeit  not  a  perfect  one:  It  really needs a
Spelling Checker, for instance;  and  an  Undo feature that undid












your mistakes, and  not  your  text  (instead  of  the  other way
around) would certainly be  welcome.  However, it is a worthwhile
successor to TextCraft, and,  with  any  luck, may someday become
available  as  such.  Of  course,  that  might  be  contingent on
Commodore  getting  a  Marketing  Department,  and  firing  their
current PR man, Ollie  North,  who  has  obviously  been sworn to
secrecy about all Amiga  products.  Or  maybe Commodore is afraid
that someone  may  actually   decide  to  buy  it,  thus mortally
offending  the  Scribble!  people  or  the  folks at Word Perfect
Corporation. I guess  if  you  really  want  TextCraft  Plus, you
should go out and join  your  local  Commodore  64  Club; me, I'm
trying to get together some  people  to go up to West Chester and
slap Irving Gould around some.