The TechWriter Family


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I started off with , and said that it takes time to learn. It undeniably produces excellent quality output once mastered, partly because it takes away a lot of the user's responsibility to set things out. I have to admit that its fonts look very good in the printed output, and the longer I'm exposed to it, the more I like what it does. Producing that output is another matter though! Personally, I find it very tedious to deal with, although the extra speed of the StrongARM is very welcome in letting you see what you've done. Using TechWriter Professional to create the file is an absolute delight. I keep looking at the output and thinking "did I really do that?". The two illustrations below should serve to show you some of the differences. First, part of the first article in the series using the TechWriter "Save as Draw" option (with my choice of fonts):

and the same thing using the option to save the file as :

If you look closely, you'll see that the fonts have been changed to the standard ones; in particular, the sections that were in Corpus look very different. It is possible to modify the font mapping, but I haven't got into that yet. The equations have transferred beautifully, and I think they look even better than in my originals. The layout on the page is rearranged as wants it to be, and no pictures are dealt with; both of which seem fairly faithful implementations! For me, there's no competition as to the preferred way of getting to this! It has to be TechWriter Professional.

Other Points
Amongst the many other features is an amazing range of multi-lingual support. By that I don't just mean that dictionaries are available in different languages (which they are), but that there is built-in support for languages such as Hebrew, where the letters are entered from right to left, but numbers run from left to right. I'm not aware of any other package that can cope with this as easily as TechWriter does. All that is necessary is to set up two different styles in the appropriate fonts, and it is ready for anyone to use by pressing the appropriate key combination.

The spell checker is the most intelligent I've come across. As evidence of that, it bleeped at me at the start of the previous sentence to tell me I'd left my finger on the <Shift> key too long, typing "THe" instead of "The" - a common failing of mine! Despite the fact that it ignores words where the first letter is capitalized, it also has the words "TechWriter" and "EasiWriter" in its dictionary: presumably Icon Technology expect people to write about it, or perhaps they're left over from writing the manual!

Criticisms
Well there have to be some!

I suppose I'd also add a personal feeling that the TechWriter family is not as well-known as it ought to be. When I started on this quest for the best way to enter equations into documents, I asked several people for their thoughts, and was told that TechWriter is supposed to be the best way, but not many had any further knowledge of it. The only review I'd seen was the one by Brian Cowan in Archive a couple of years ago, and I hadn't seen any advertisements to help me decide which version I should get. However Icon Technology have a free demo disk (the contents of which are also on the StrongARM CD) which will help you to understand things better.

Conclusions
It's great! At the risk of writing advertising copy for Icon Technology, no piece of software on any platform has made me grin with delight as I discover new features as much as TechWriter has. The ease of creating, and degree of control over, bulleted lists is an utter joy; doing the same in Fireworkz and Lotus WordPro has driven me to distraction; and being able to automatically number them in different ways is gorgeous! Little things like saving an area as a Draw file are such a boon. The power, flexibility and simplicity of TechWriter are superb, and the ability to buy the features you want, when you want them is unparalleled. The table below shows the pricing:

Product Price (exc. VAT)
EasiWriter £89·00
EasiWriter Professional £129·00
TechWriter £149·00
TechWriter Professional £199·00

Those prices don't include P&P at £3 + VAT either, but you should remember the healthy 50% discount for full-time or part-time students. Upgrades from one version to another just cost the difference, so deciding which one to buy isn't that much of a problem as you only really pay the extra post and packing compared to starting with the higher priced product. When I started this series, my desire was to find the best solution to producing technical documents on an Acorn. I think I've covered the field now, and the summary at the end of the previous article gives my thoughts. For myself, I'll use Formulix to add equations into something I've already started in Ovation Pro, especially if I need to deal with a lot of frames, but for anything else, it has to be TechWriter Professional. The only thing I regret is that it took me so long to find that out! Now if only TechWriter could OLE its output into Ovation Pro, that really would be the best of both worlds!

Recent Improvements
I've been using several versions of TechWriter Professional during the course of this series of articles. One of the most eagerly awaited and significant new features to arrive in the last couple of years is the addition of import and export filters for MSWord v6 and v7 documents. Once again we have Acorn to thank for this, as they commissioned it for the version of EasiWriter included in the NC, and have allowed TechWriter Professional users to benefit from it. Given that the MSWord viewer distributed free by Microsoft takes up 2·5Mb of hard disc space, and crashes every single time I've used it on three different machines; building Word support into TechWriter Professional is very handy. It has already helped me out in reading a file emailed to me at work that Lotus WordPro couldn't cope with despite its MSWord import filter! One superb aspect of this is the use of ImageFS2 with TechWriter Professional to allow the graphics in MSWord documents to be displayed (provided that you have ImageFS2 loaded and it can handle the appropriate graphics format). I've reviewed that in another article, and it makes an ideal companion to TechWriter.
The HTML export also uses Peter Hartley's InterGif to process the images, allowing interlaced GIFs to be produced automatically. I now create material for this site with TechWriter, and tweak the output in R-Comp's HTMLEdit.
The newest version (4·10) now has better handling and entering of HTML links, which has resulted in a new button appearing on the button bar.

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There's support for PNG graphics, and other improvements include better processing of "fast saved" MSWord files (including reading MSWord 8 files) and several more features described in the Release Notes section of Icon Technology's Web site.

Hints & Tips
I have to plug Jim Lesurf's excellent Web site of TechWriter Tips and other information on using the TechWriter and EasiWriter family. He has produced a splendid summary of the differences between the members of the family, and some handy hints on customising the packages. I think you'll find his pages well-worth a look.


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