Amiga MA Magazine 1998 #6/amigamamagazinepolishissue1998.iso/www/cucug/amiga/amiinfo/reviews/protextv6.53.txt

Internet Message Format | 1997-11-07 | 25KB

Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett
From: [e-mail] (Eyal Teler)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Protext version 6.53
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 16 Jan 1995 06:11:01 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 536
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Reply-To: [e-mail] (Eyal Teler)
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Keywords: word processor, commercial
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PRODUCT NAME

    Protext version 6.53


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    A classic word processor - not graphic, but with a lot of control
over text and printout.  Complicated but powerful.


AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:           Arnor Ltd.
    Address:        611 Lincoln Road
            Peterborough
            PE1 3HA
            England

    Telephone:      [phone] (in the UK. Outside use +44 1733...)
    FAX:            01733 67299

    E-mail:         There is a conference on cix.compulink.co.uk.


LIST PRICE

    Protext costs UKP 74.95, including postage in the UK, plus UKP 5 for
postage in Europe, UKP 10 elsewhere. Upgrades from previous versions are also
available, plus an educational discount, if you ask nicely.  Amiga Shopper
offered a UKP 5 discount on Protext in it's January issue, which was valid
until the 31st of December 1994. I don't have next month's issue yet, so I
can't tell if the offer continues.

    I ordered Protext directly from Arnor, for UKP 71.29, including
airmail postage, as they gave me a student's discount.  The original
discounted price was higher, but Protext had been reduced in price massively
over the past months, which is probably why the eventual discount wasn't that
great (but still there).


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        1MB RAM. 2MB recommended by Arnor.
        Hard disk recommended.
        Good printer recommended.

    SOFTWARE

        AmigaDOS 2.1 or higher required. Floppy users can make do
        with the cut down Workbench which comes on the Protext boot
        disk.


COPY PROTECTION

    Practically none.  The program does require the registration number
to be typed the first time it is run, but it will accept almost any number,
and this number is saved in a separate file, so copying Protext is not a
problem.


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

    A500
    2MB Fast RAM (0.5MB of which taken by Kickstart image), 1MB Chip RAM.
    Fujitsu 100MB SCSI hard disk in A590 case.
    1 internal floppy drive.
    A1084 Monitor.
    Canon BJ-200 printer.
    AmigaDOS 2.1, using Kickstart 2.0 image and the Workbench which came
    with the program. (And ran on a Kickstart 1.2 machine.)


NOTE

    At first, I used Protext from diskette. Most of this review tells
about my experience when working in this way. I later made a boot disk which
bound my A590 drive to Workbench, so I installed Protext on my hard disk, and
I now use it from there. A separate part at the end of the review tells about
the difference when working from hard disk.


INSTALLATION

    Because I had only the Kickstart image, but no Workbench other than
the one given with the program, I tried Protext from diskette.  I did plan on
doing the review on my new A1200, but I'm getting tired of not being able to
get one, and I plan on moving to a PC (boo hiss) with OS/2.  The manual just
says to backup the original disks, and use these backups for work.

    This might sound simple, but it's not.  In fact, a lot of work must
be done before Protext is usable on a single floppy machine.  It basically
has to do with shrinking the number of diskettes used. I used PowerPacker to
shrink Protext by about 200K, which gave me enough space to put Config and
Convert on the Protext disk. The setup creates a driver on the Protext disk,
so after all this is done, you don't really need the Printers disk, unless
you want to use FSort.

    I'm currently using the Dictionary disk for documents. It has enough
space if you delete one of the large dictionaries (you only need to choose
one). So I boot from the Protext disk, and then, after running Protext, I
move to the Dictionary disk, which enables me to do spell-checking easily.

    All in all, it's quite difficult to set Protext up to run
effectively, especially as the manual just tells you that single floppy users
need no installation.

    (See also below about running Protext with the dictionary in RAM.)


REVIEW

    I will not give a full overview of Protext, but I will discuss some
special features. A full review may or may not follow in the future ('not'
being the likely outcome).

    Okay, once the installation procedure is over, it's off to write
some text. I opted for full spell checking and auto-correction while typing.
Auto-correction just uses a small dictionary to change one word to another
as you type, thus changing 'teh' to 'the' (it just did this as I type 'teh'
before - you should press the right arrow instead of space to move if you
don't want this to happen), 'csa' to 'comp.sys.amiga', or 'C=3D' to
'Commodore (RIP)'. You can also have it auto capitalise the first letter in
a sentence. Auto-correction doesn't cause any disk activity, unless you
choose to have capitalisation of proper nouns, which has Protext accessing
the dictionary.  Any word stored in the dictionary with a capital letter is
considered a proper noun.

    Spell checking while writing does cause disk accesses during writing,
and will beep you whenever it doesn't know a word you've just written.  You
can then fix it, or get an list of corrections by pressing Ctrl-Q, possibly
adding the word to the user dictionary.

    Spell checking while writing can sometimes cause words to appear
slowly on the screen, as Protext is searching for them in the dictionary.
This doesn't happen for every word - common words are held in memory - so
it's not too bad.  Even when a word is searched, the keyboard buffer will
keep the next words you type, so you can continue typing even if you can't
see what you type for a second or two.

    The manual tells you that those with enough memory can copy the
dictionary into RAM: (or another RAM drive), to speed things up.
Unfortunately, this involves putting 'Copy' commands in S/Startup-Sequence.
Hell, even I know that these should be in User-Startup on WB2 and higher, if
anything.  Besides, what if you don't boot from the Protext disk? Would you
want the dictionary taking valuable memory even when not running Protext?

    In general, I'd rate spell checking while typing as helpful and
usable even from diskette.  One note, though: if you try to activate a
program such as Config, Protext will want to reopen the dictionary file
afterwards, which could take some time.

    Protext comes with a help file that can be activated by the Help key
or from the File/Help menu option.  The help is organised by subjects.  You
can select a subject, which will display either text about the subject, or
another list.  There are some hypertext links, but they are seen as normal
text. When necessary, the text tells you about them. You have to
double-click on subjects, something I dislike - single-clicking is certainly
enough. I'd rather have AmigaGuide.

    The Help function is also strange in that it's very un-Protext-like -
it is nearly completely mouse activated, so you can't select a subject using
the keyboard, nor scroll the help text without the mouse.  Again AmigaGuide
wins big here.

    Another dislike about the help system is the fact that it's modal -
i.e., you can't continue to write while it's in action.  I would have liked to
see an explanation and be able to try what it says at the same time.  This
is also a problem with other requesters you'd like to have hanging around,
such as the 'Choose Character' requester, which lets you insert characters
you can't write from the keyboard. [That's classic for a Commodity, isn't
it?]

    Protext is not WYSIWYG, but on the other hand it does try to give you
hints on how things will look.  This can become confusing, and even annoying,
when Protext tries to show the right number of characters per line, no matter
which style (more about styles later) is used.  You can get more than a
hundred characters per line easily, even if only using a proportional printer
font.  This causes annoying scrolling.  Unless you have considerably more
than 80 characters per line (by either using a wider screen or a smaller
font), it's perhaps best to use the default style for writing, and only
switch to the style of your choosing before printing - this is simple if
there are no style changes in the document.

    One of the best things about Protext is the amount of printer control
it has.  At last, I'm able to use a Roman proportional font on my BJ-200 -
this font is very common in letters, and does look quite nice, unlike the
non-proportional version.  I also used a small version of this, using
superscript and in two columns, and it looks very nice.  This degree of
control means that with a good printer you can print a good looking document
without the slowness and memory problems caused by programs that print text as
graphics.


USER INTERFACE

    That's probably the worst part of Protext.  It's just not at all
intuitive to use, and it doesn't pay too much attention to Commodore's (RIP)
guidelines (not that I know them that well myself).

    A good example to start with is the Convert program, simply because
it was quite annoying.  When run, the Convert program asks for a file name to
convert.  File requester?  Never heard of it.  I happened to want to convert
a file which had about 20 characters in its name, and I didn't remember the
name exactly, and I was quite annoyed.  The Config program, another of the
external programs you can call from Protext, is a "great" example of how you
can give an MSDOS look to an Amiga program.

    Menu options also gave me a bit of a headache.  Document settings
include Page Size, Page Orientation, Margins, etc.: things I would like to
see close to the printing option.  In fact, that's where I imagined they
would be, and it took me some time to find where they really are. Another
example would be the Auto-Correct database, which I would have like to see
with the spell checking options, instead of on the 'Option' menu.

    I can't say that there's anything disastrous about the menus, but
they just aren't that intuitive.  You do get used to them after some time,
though.  You get to remember the menu options, or, better yet, the keyboard
shortcuts.  Yet rarely used options could be a bit difficult to find.

    There's one thing I miss in this word processor, which is available
in most editors and words processors - the scroll bar at the side, to enable
easy movement over the document.  While Protext has quite powerful movement
options (using strange keys), this is one option I really miss, as I usually
remember approximately where things are in a document, and I like the ability
to get there easily.

    Command mode is something quite special to Protext, and is similar to
a shell in many respects.  You can perform file operations from it, for
example.  Unfortunately it's also has some PC aspect, with 'del' used instead
of 'delete', for example.

    Block commands seem very strange to me.  I'm used to Cut, Copy and
Paste.  Protext gives Delete (Amiga-X), which deletes the block like Cut
would normally do.  On the other hand, to paste it back you need to use
Amiga-Z (Undelete).  Amiga-V is Move, which moves a block (which hasn't been
deleted) to a new place, and Amiga-C creates a Copy of a marked block at a
new place.  Someone give me a Style Guide!  (Take two Style Guides, and call
me in the morning.)


DOCUMENTATION

    Protext comes with two manuals: the User Manual, which is Amiga
specific, and the Reference Manual, which is for all Protext versions (PC,
ST, Archimedes and Amiga).  The manuals I got were for version 6, and the
updates for version 6.5 are available in a README file, and in the Help
option from Protext.  Also included is a Protext 6.5 Quick-Start leaflet,
which tells you about the major changes from version 6.

    The User Manual includes a Guided Tour section, to get you into using
Protext.  This gives quite a good overview of Protext.  It's also recommended
to read the rest of the manual, or at least the sections pertaining to
features you're likely to use.  Because I've had a lot of time before I could
use Protext, I've read both manuals.  Unfortunately by the time I got Protext
working (i.e. got Kickstart 2), I forgot what I had read.

    The only thing I really found missing in the manual is the codes that
you need to occasionally write in order to get some printing effects, as the
usual controls don't always work (for example for choosing a style in a
header).  While it's not that difficult to find out what the code is (you see
it on the screen when you select the menu option during normal work), it
would have been nice to see a reference to this in the manual.

    Also, I didn't find the file 'Tokens' on the disks. This file is
supposed to contain the codes for all the different characters and control
codes, which allow customisation of Protext.

    In short, the documentation is quite adequate, even if not great (but
then, I can't remember any program I know which really has great
documentation, especially when it comes to referencing).


LIKES

    I really like the solid, stable look of Protext (see COMPARISON TO
OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS).  It doesn't seem to have any really serious bugs.
It's also quite quick.

    I also like the printer support.  This was one main reason I bought
Protext, as it's a pity having a good printer like the BJ-200, and using only
a very small percent of its features.

    Spell-checking while typing, and auto-correction are also useful
features, and I'm sure they will help me a lot in capitalising words
correctly, which I often forget to do (i.e., I write Protext without a capital
'P').

    File support is also nice, specifically the ASCII save, which allowed
me to write this in Protext as a normal document, and then save it as ASCII,
with line feed characters at the end of each line.


DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS

    One major dislike is the PC feel, like the 'del' in Command Mode.  In
fact, that whole Command Mode, as well as the "File/Catalog Files..." option,
don't seem that necessary.  Protext was designed as a complete working
environment, which lets you do all file handling chores you need, but on the
Amiga, with its multitasking environment, it's not that necessary, especially
with WB2, which does a good job at handling files.  I'm sure that Protext
could have been made leaner by removing some of these less-than-necessary
features.

    Not being WYSIWYG perhaps makes things a bit difficult, but I can't
fault Protext for this.  You can't have everything, after all, and I see
speed as more important.  The amount of special styles in my work is not that
great anyway, and adding the style only at the end is OK (or, assuming that
I use more than one style, changing the style definitions at the end).  So
while I put it under 'dislikes', my suggestion to Arnor would be not to
change a thing, unless they can give proportional fonts on screen without
hurting speed.  Still, a swifter change between editing and printing styles
could be nice.

    I'd also like to see a User menu.  Protext is extremely flexible in
the control it gives the user.  You can run programs from Command Mode, so
why not attach them to a menu item, and run them from there?  Or simply give
a macro a name and a menu item, which is the same thing (or perhaps even more
powerful).  This way you get not only the power, but also a bit of extra
friendliness.

    I also find that the spell checker sometimes doesn't propose the
right alternative. I'd expect, for example, that 'debris' would be suggested
for 'debree', and it isn't. And it's not as if the dictionary doesn't contain
the word 'debris'. It may be perhaps a bit too much to ask (tell me of one
word processor which does this correctly), but this word did cause me
problems.

    Another unreasonable thing I'd like a spell checker to do is suggest
'bound' when I write 'binded', for example. But again, I can't fault Protext
on that account, because there's probably no word processor which does this.

    In short, I'm grasping at straws here.


COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

    My word processor until now has been Kindwords 2.  It's a very old
one, and Amiga Computing has even given Kindwords 3 on its coverdisk -
unfortunately it didn't arrive with my subscription copy of the issue, and I
still don't have it (it was on the April 94 issue, if I remember correctly).

    When compared to Kindwords 2, the first good impression Protext makes
is that it looks stable.  Kindwords 2 is incredibly buggy, from the wrong
screen updates to the occasional crash.  While I haven't worked that much
with Protext, the amount of work I have done with it would have been enough
to show quite a lot of annoying bugs (or the same bug several times) in
Kindwords, if not a crash.

    On the other hand, Kindwords 2 is the kind of small and friendly
program, which is really easy to use.  For example, the first time you use
the dictionary or thesaurus, it will ask you if you want to load it into RAM,
and it will remove them from RAM when you exit the program.  The ability to
determine the indentation of the first line of a paragraph is also something
I find strangely missing from Protext (although I easily got used to typing a
tab at the beginning of each paragraph - I'm used to that from writing Usenet
reviews using a text editor).

    One thing I missed in Kindwords 2 was the document statistics, mainly
word count.  This can be quite useful, especially for a professional writer.
I cannot claim that I'm a professional writer, but from my (as yet
unsuccessful) article/story submissions I know that magazines are certainly
interested in the word count.  So it's a good thing that Protext has good
document statistics.

    Another great advantage of Protext is the ability to open several
documents at the same time, and switch between them, or even view two of them
on a split screen.  I ALWAYS work on more than one file at a time, and in
Kindwords I've had a lot of unnecessary work done reloading each file as I
needed it.  With Protext I can work as I've always wanted to.

    I haven't really tried Protext as an editor, so I can't currently
comment on that aspect of Protext.  There's one problem I can envision,
though, and that's the large size of Protext.  Loading about 600K of an
editor seems a bit much when all you want to do is change your
Startup-Sequence.  Then again, this might not matter for people with a hard
disk and lots of memory, especially those who have tried Emacs.


BUGS

    One bug (or annoying feature) of Protext is that it clings lovingly
to the diskette you 'cd'ed in Command Mode.  For example, after doing "cd
df0:" when the thesaurus disk was inside, Protext asked for that disk every
time I accessed the Help.

    When printing from the top of the page (without any top margin),
Protext can display a line of text above the page image in Preview mode.
Luckily this does not affect the printing itself.

    I tried printing using a Roman Proportional Condensed Superscript
font, great for those times when you need to print something very long just
so you have a printed copy (but not so great if you actually want to read
that printed copy later). [ In fact, this review fits on just a bit more than
one page in this mode. ]  Protext goofed on this, and didn't use the full
width of the paper.  It's as if it didn't take into consideration the extra
condensing.  And there I was, thinking that printer support is great and all.
How could Protext fail on such a common style? ;-)  (With a width of 11.8"
for the page it did print the full page.  Unfortunately, The page is supposed
to be just 8.28" in width.) It also failed miserably when I tried it again,
this time with right justification.

    Another printing problem involves images.  I was hoping that Protext
would allow the printing of images in columns, but it doesn't.  It just
prints all the images in the first column, and then prints the text columns
below (at least that's what it did in my simple test).  The images themselves
do print nicely, but the Workbench driver for the BJ-200 (from the classic
CanonDisk) has a feature which can eliminate banding, and unfortunately
Protext doesn't have this feature.

    There's also an error in the index of the manuals (at least the
reference manual), which causes words which appear at the beginning of a page
to be put in the index with the page number of the previous page (for
example, the Page Length option on page 84). I put this under BUGS, because
the manual was written using Protext.

    Very annoying: for some reason ';' has a different meaning in 'del'
than it has in 'list'.  I had a file with ';' in its name.  "list #?;#?"
listed this one file.  So I wrote "del #?;#?" to delete it.  I got an
innocent looking question asking me if I was sure.  I answered 'yes', and
voila, all my directory got erased.  Oh, the joy!  It was quite a bit of work
undeleting all the files.  It seems that ';' has a special meaning for 'del'
(as does ','), though I can't understand why, because the manual doesn't
mention any special parameters or syntax for this command.  If you put them
in quotation marks the command works fine, though.


HARD DISK USE

    Just a few notes on using Protext from a hard disk, as opposed to
diskette:

    Everything is much faster, of course. Spell checking while typing
really doesn't cause any slowdown, and, well, it's like, you know, working
from a hard disk.

    Installation is also simpler, as the Commodore (RIP) installer is
used.


VENDOR SUPPORT

    Arnor currently gives only 2 months of support for Protext.  Since it
took me more than 2 months just to get Kickstart 2, I didn't have much time
to asked them anything.

    Extended Support costs =A330+VAT per year, and includes a technical
support help line (working 3 hours per day), like in the two free months,
plus free updates on bug fixes or new printer drivers.

    There's also a Protext magazine, called Exfile (after the command
file which is executed when Protext is run), which costs =A316 for 6 issues.
It includes articles by Protext programmers, hints, tips, and answers, as
well as programs and macros.  I haven't seen this magazine (I only read about
it in an Arnor ad in Amiga Shopper, an ad which also mentioned a new book,
"The Protext Companion", which costs =A315.95).

    I wrote to Mark Tilley (of Arnor) and asked some questions;
here are the answers:

(1)    Does Arnor plan to release updates on Aminet or other on-line
    location?

    >No, as only a minority of our customers would be interested.

(2)    Will Arnor continue its Amiga support even though the buyout of
    Commodore is taking so long?

    >Yes, that is the present plan.

(3)    And for those of us who might decide to move to a PC with OS/2, like
    some Amiga users already did (and I'm contemplating this option
    myself):  does Arnor offer an "upgrade" service (special price) from
    one machine to another? Also, do you happen to know if Protext runs
    well under OS/2 Warp (I suppose that it'll run in a DOS window)?
    Will the 32-bit version work, or would there be need to use the
    16-bit version in this case?

    >Yes there is an upgrade price. I'm sure Protext will work under
    >Warp - I haven't tried it but it does work under Windows NT and
    >Windows 3.1. The 32 bit version would work.

(4)    I couldn't find the 'tokens' file (mentioned in the Help) on the
    Protext disks. Where can I find it (or get it?).

    >Sorry that was omitted from some disks. I shall send it to you by
    >separate E-Mail.


WARRANTY

    Can't find anything about it in the documentation.


CONCLUSIONS

    Protext is powerful, but not very friendly.  It also lacks most of
the graphical features available with other Amiga word processors.  Still,
it's quite good for word bashing, especially if you want speed - both when
typing and when printing.

    I imagine that after a month of work, and after doing a lot of
configuration, defining macros, and so on, you can get quite a powerful and
relatively (to normal Protext) easy to use working environment.  After a few
days of work, I'm getting quite used to it myself. Since its speed makes it
quite productive, Protext is probably the best choice of a word processor for
someone who really needs to do a lot of typing without any fancy stuff.  It
can also double as a text editor (it has auto indenting, for example), which
is another bonus.

    I'll give Protext 4 out of 5.  I find it quite productive (apart from
the rather long searches for some options, something which I'll learn with
time), and the printed results look good - in fact, they look much better
than before, just because of the font. And they're printed quite quickly
(unless I really go overboard with the style, as the printer can sometimes be
a bit slow, which is not the fault of Protext).

        And I still miss that scroll bar.


COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    Copyright 1994 Eyal Teler.  All rights reserved.


---

   Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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