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protextv6.53
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1995-01-16
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Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett
From: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (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
Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3fd2ll$itr@kernighan.cs.umass.edu>
Reply-To: teler@cs.huji.ac.il (Eyal Teler)
NNTP-Posting-Host: astro
Keywords: word processor, commercial
Originator: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu
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: 01733 68909 (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 i