The TechWriter Family


Introduction
I've covered a lot of ground in the first and second articles, and hopefully given a flavour of the possibilities for anyone wanting to produce technical documents on an Acorn. I'll devote this article to Icon Technology's TechWriter, which is the only WYSIWYG word processor we have that is capable on its own of producing the sort of documents I've been talking about. Actually, I have to admit that the whole series has been written on TechWriter Professional. That includes the versions you're reading now, because it will now read and write HTML files. The HTML output is an absolutely exquisite feature, saving out the illustrations as GIF files in sub-directories, including all the equations! I'd been wanting to put these articles on the Web for a while, and the conversion of existing documents is now so easy, and the code produced is 100% valid HTML 3·2!

TechWriter Background
TechWriter, EasiWriter, and their Professional versions, make up a range of related word processing programs. When I opened up the TechWriter Professional box I got very confused by the presence of manuals for both TechWriter and EasiWriter. As I started to work through them, I realised that EasiWriter is TechWriter without the equation entry and editing capabilities, and that the Professional versions of each include extra features such as a wide range of import and export options. This modular approach allows you to pick exactly the combination you want, and pay only for those features. Although Icon Technology write and support the programs, Acorn originally commissioned them to do it, based on their background in producing MacAuthor (a word processor) and Formulator (an add-on equation editor) for the Apple Macintosh. It was the experience gained in these Mac projects that convinced the team at Icon to go for the integrated approach to putting equations in documents, rather than produce a separate equation editor. The result of this was EasiWriter (without the equations), and then TechWriter (with the equation capability built in). The "Professional" versions appeared later, and include the following:

  1. Index & contents generation.
  2. Bookmarks.
  3. Automatic numbering of lists (even in Roman numerals or Dingbats).
  4. Crop marks.
  5. Pamphlet printing.

and a few other improvements, including the addition of some very significant file import and/or export formats:

  1. Save as .
  2. Save as Postscript.
  3. Import and export in MSWord v6 and v7 format.
  4. Read and write HTML and RTF.

I'm using version 4·10, and am staggered at the simplicity and power of it.

Getting Started

What you get is the two manuals I mentioned above, a series of notes explaining what has changed recently, and a couple of floppies. Installation consists of copying the main application onto hard disc or floppy (so it will work on an A3000), installing the MathPhys font and the tutorial and example files. That takes just over a Megabyte of my hard disc for a full installation. The amount of RAM taken varies during use depending on how much you have spare, and how much of the file is kept in memory, but it will still work on a 2Mb machine. Although TechWriter is very powerful, it is also very easy to use, and if you don't want to use any of the maths features, you don't have to. They only become apparent if you explore the "Maths" option you get by pressing "menu" on the main window, or click on the "Greek" button.

At that point, two new palettes appear: an equation one on the left of the main window, and a symbol one just above the text. The main window then looks like this:

Pic7.gif - 72Kb

The symbol palette scrolls sideways when you move the mouse pointer to either end of it, allowing access to all the characters it contains.

Pic8.gif - 8Kb

These are purely a way of entering the characters, like having an integrated Chars window (but not as ugly!) available. If you want to treat them as part of an equation, you need to use the equation palette itself.

Tempting as it is to dive in and play with equations, that really isn't the way to get into TechWriter. Start with the tutorials in the EasiWriter book and work through them first, then move onto the TechWriter tutorials. It is helpful if you've used another word processor before: not that TechWriter is like any other program I've used, but if you've got some experience in structuring a document, then that does help in coming to terms with the way TechWriter works. It isn't that it is difficult to learn or use (quite the opposite, in fact), just that it is different to any other package I've used. The terminology and operation, especially in the concept of structures and styles, are different; so much so that when I first loaded it up and typed optimistically, I felt very lost indeed as things didn't do what I expected them to. That seems a long way off now, and I've settled very comfortably into using TechWriter. The tutorials are very easy to follow through, and once you've done so, you feel more confident in launching into things. I wouldn't recommend trying to create a table or enter some equations without doing the tutorials first. I did try exactly that and came a cropper. Of course that was purely as an experiment, you understand; I normally read manuals from cover to cover before using anything(!).

Entering Equations
This is very easy once you get used to it. Most actions can be done from the menu, by keystrokes and from the equation palette. The first thing is to enter the equation mode. If you want the equation to be on the same line as the rest of the text, then pressing <Control> <[> will do that, otherwise the "Equation" button on the button bar automatically starts a new line and puts the maths cursor (a green one) in the centre of the line. Using the keyboard characters and those on the symbol palette, you can build up the expression you want, until you get to an operator. Then the equation palette comes into use, as it allows easy entry of the most common symbols (integral, product, summation, powers, fractions, etc.). Less common ones (such as closed line, area, and volume integrals) have to be entered from the menu. That seems fair enough, although I do rather like the Formulix approach of clicking "Adjust" over a button to get a choice of operators. There are some short-cuts you can use: pressing <Control> <I> at any point (even in the middle of a sentence) will enter Maths mode and insert an integral sign with the cursor positioned for you to enter the limits. A summation needs <Control> <W> unfortunately, since <Control> <S> enters superscript mode, but most of the shortcuts make sense. I suppose even that one does, as a W looks a bit like an upper case sigma on its side! The "UnDo" button comes in very handy in all of this, as there's a bit of trial and error until you know what you're doing, but the whole process is reassuringly straightforward. Naturally, brackets and other such characters can extend vertically to enclose multi-line expressions, and other characters can grow horizontally.

Pic5.gif - 6Kb

Accents are entered from the symbol palette, just next to the extensible characters region and cover circumflex, tilde, dot, double dot, horizontal line, arrow, asterisk and cross-out (a diagonal slash).

These are genuine accents, allowing you to enter them directly above the character to the left of the caret as in the following examples:

equation

There are some other things you can do in equations, which help in the more unusual arrangements of characters that sometimes have to be dealt with. For example, if you want another character to extend vertically, then type <Control> <E> followed by the character. That turns it into an "elastic character", which can be very useful in bracketing several equations together, or building large fractions such as:

equation

Here the large diagonal slash is the "elastic character", but it can also be the "cross-out" character from the accents region of the symbol palette, which can be padded with spaces to look a little neater:

equation

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