Word processing is the buzzword these days, the application for home computers. Are you one of the few who would admit befuddlement as to just what the phrase encompasses? Are you one of the many who are wondering just what kind of word processing you can do with your computer? Read on!
La Program
There is a joke making the rounds about the perfect word processor: readily available, cheap, easy to use—a pencil. A pencil, however, is to a word processor as a butter knife is to a Cuisinart.
Word processing is a little more than getting sentences from your mind to paper—a job for which a pencil is adequate. However, the computer power behind a word processor makes it vastly superior to even the best typewriter. Insertions, deletions, and other corrections are made on-screen, instead of on paper, ensuring perfectly clean hard copy.
You can automatically format text; switch the order of already written words, sentences, and paragraphs; check the text for every occurrence of a certain word or phrase; or do any of a host of other nifty little routines. Multiple copies at the touch of a key and storage of a master text on convenient magnetic media are only some of the additional benefits of a word processing package.
Uses and Limitations
The limitations of the word processing programs developed for the ZX/TS computers are largely due to its limited memory space: the more features included in a program, the less room there is for text.
There are also limited uses for word processing on your ZX/TS computer with the TS2040 or ZX printer. You would not want to use it for writing the great American novel. Besides the lack of memory space, no publisher would accept a 32-column printout, and, of course, the membrane keyboard would probably drive you crazy along about the third chapter.
Despite its limitations, the ZX/TS computer is perfectly adequate for a number of word processing applications, e.g., informal notes, newsletters with perfect 32-character columns, and personal records. All you need to do is choose the program that will best suit your needs.
Figure 1. The Feature Chart.
Columns: (1) Text Capacity (K); (2) Line Length; Entry: (3) Full Screen Text, (4) Word-Wrap; Edit: (5) Full Screen Edit, (6) Block Delete, (7) Global Edit, (8) String Search, (9) Block Move; Format: (10) Tabs, (11) Line-Feed, (12) Justification, (13) Double-Space, (14) New Page.
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) Special Hi Res Word Processor 5 * * * * * * Lower case on screen and to printer; 64-character lines. Text II 6 32 * * * * 64-character lines inverse printing Texter 12 30 Textwriter 1000 9 32 * * * * * * * * block insert TP16 10 32 * VU Write 11 30 * * tab markers Word Sinc II 8 42 * * * * * * * * * * * lower case special characters ZText 8 31 * * * * * * * quickload/page no./YANK entries during printing Z-Wryter 7 30 * * * * * triple space block insert
The Feature Chart
The chart in Figure 1 compares eight of the word processing packages currently available on fourteen features in four basic categories.
Capacity
The line length figures in the chart refer to the maximum number of characters you can place on one line. Many programs allow you to specify shorter text lines. The text capacities are approximations for comparison purposes—ten thousand characters make about 300 lines. All the capacities are based on 16K RAM; most of the programs are easily modified for computers with larger memories.
Text Entry
Most of the programs have full-screen text: everything you type is displayed on the screen, with text disappearing only as the screen is filled.
Word wrap is an important feature. It enables you to continue typing even though you have reached the end of the display line. Without word wrap, anything you key in after the end of the display line will be lost.
Edit
All programs allow you to backspace and correct the current line.
Full-screen edit allows for moving the cursor up and down on the display in order to make corrections. Programs lacking this option require an entire line to be retyped in order to make corrections on any other than the current line.
Block delete lets you designate a specific portion of the text (longer than a line) to be erased from memory.
A global edit tells the computer to replace any designated string every time it occurs with another specified string. The computer can check your text for every occurrence of a particular word or phrase with a string search feature.
A sophisticated feature that I was surprised to find in a ZX/TS package is block move. This lets you shift large portions of the text from one place to another, so you can rearrange sentences or paragraphs without retyping anything.
Format
Being able to set tabs that will automatically advance the cursor position is a basic feature that did not show up very often. Line-feed, which allows you to start a new line on your display/print out, is not needed in the programs that allow you to enter only one line at a time, but it is a handy feature in the programs with word wrap.
Justification aligns the right hand margin of the text. The double space option allows you to choose that format for the final printing. New page is similar to line feed; it usually makes the printer advance a number of lines before continuing with the text.
The Report Card
Figure 2 gives a report card evaluation for each program. Except for the overall grade, the programs were rated for how well they did in different areas, not how many areas they did things in.
Documentation was graded on clarity and thoroughness; neatness did not count, except for subliminal psychological effects. Main and submenus were also judged for clarity, and for ease of use.
Programs with word wrap rated the highest in the ease of entry category; those that require character counting and an ENTER for each line, and/or entry of line numbers, were graded progressively lower.
In regard to the entry speed, most of the programs work in machine code or FAST mode for keying in the characters of the text; some, however, take longer to store each line in memory, or to process changes made during an edit mode.
For the error handling grade, programs were judged both on how they handled “dangerous” commands such as “erase” (Do you have a chance to confirm the command?) and on what happens if the wrong key is pressed—does the program break, is all the text lost, how easily can you get back into the program, etc.
The “over-all” grade takes into account both the marks received on the report card and which features are available in the program.
The Reviews
Text II
Text II has both some of the best and worst features of all the software reviewed.
First, the bad news: entering text requires first entering a program line number, then a REM statement. Although a line number is not necessary for every display line, the documentation suggests you use one for at least every sentence, since editing is done by line number. The program is designed to BREAK in almost every spot you would expect a pause, requiring a RUN or CONT to go on. The main menu does not offer a “type” or “write” option, and it took me almost twenty minutes to get started entering text; that gives you an idea of the documentation. Printing is slow, with a pause between every text line. Despite the fact that there is a machine code program loaded separately, there is not as much room for text in Text II as in the other programs.
The good news is that the machine code routines for inverse printing and program line renumbering are usable with your own programs. In addition to its unique inverse display/printing option, there is another feature that may be Text II’s saving grace: You can set 64-character lines and have the first half of each line printed, then the second half of each line. This gives you two pages that can be taped together onto standard sized paper, with sentences reading right across the page.
Texter
Texter is a basically good program with two small problems. Unfortunately, one affects the ease of entry and one affects the ease of editing; however, they are both easily remedied with a little program change if you are up to it, and the author is busy on a revision.
The current problems are lack of full-screen text and line number prompts. Each line disappears as it is ENTERed, making text entry a little confusing. Editing and continued text entry are done by specifying a line number, but lack of prompts (what was the last line entered?) make it slow going.
Textwriter 1000
The report card just about says it all for Textwriter 1000. Some features you might wish for, especially a global edit, and, to a lesser extent, string search, were given up to make more room for text. Keep an eye out for Fingerle’s TS2068 version, because this one is terrific, and the next should be very special, when he has a little more memory space.
TP16
The main problem TP16 is that after each line is typed, you must enter a number code for it to either be entered into memory or edited. As if that is not enough to break up the typing flow, there is at least a three-second delay for each line to be entered into memory. To make matters worse, if you forget to enter the number code and enter the next line of text instead (a mistake I made repeatedly) the whole program crashes.
Vu-Write
Vu-Write is another that requires a line number entered for each line of text, although just pressing ENTER will print the next line number. Pressing ENTER twice in succession, however, changes the line number without inserting a blank text line, and later editing becomes very confusing. Using a character line of more than 28 also makes editing difficult, because the line numbers will no longer appear on the screen. There are markers to help you align your text by spacing over to the tab mark.
Word Sinc II
I already had a rave review prepared for Word Sinc, when this revision became available: Word Sinc II is extraordinary.
Lower case—yes, lower case—letters from your Sinclair computer to your Sinclair printer, as well as apostrophes, exclamation points, arrows, backslash, and other special characters, all in a 42-character line.
Absolutely flicker-free entry of the text is handled by machine code. Characters repeat at an adjustable speed.
Your display, of course, cannot show lower case or special characters, but symbols have been chosen with special care and common sense. The apostrophe, for instance, is the graphics character often used as the Sinclair default apostrophe; brackets are the upside-down and reversed-L graphics character. The four arrows are entered from the cursor control keys, and so on. As a result of the thought and care that went into the design, confusion has been kept to a minimum.
The documentation could be a little clearer, but the on-screen prompts are fine and, anyway, experimentation is a pleasure with a program like this.
ZText
ZText’s nicest feature is Mindware’s Quickload process. It takes about two minutes to load this program, compared to an average of eight minutes for the others. Although the instructions say that anything over 31 characters on a line will result in the excess being lost, I found that was not the case; perhaps the program was revised and the documentation was not. On the other hand, the string search feature worked only for the line at which the cursor was placed, instead of throughout the text.
Printing is very slow, with about a five second delay between lines, but there are some very nice features. “Yank” pulls the most recently deleted line out of storage and places it at the current cursor position—a limited block move. Variables can be inserted into the text and words entered from the keyboard in their places during the printing process. Other extras include page numbering and setting the depth of top margins.
Z-Wryter
Z-Wryter received a final grade of B because it does not have word wrap, and because it has fewer edit and format options than the highest rated programs. Everything it does, however, it does extremely well. The cursor in the edit mode has repeat movement, and it moves rapidly; pages as well as lines can be inserted and deleted. The documentation and menus are well-written and recovery from a BREAK is simple. It is an excellent program despite its shortcomings.
Hi Res Word Processor
Hi Res Word Processor lacks the fancier features of word processing and has a few small drawbacks; however, its main feature—lower case letters on the screen as well as to the printer—pushes it right up to an A+ rating.
Text entry is flicker-free, and the text cursor is a thin underline. The keyboard defaults to lower case, with capitals accessed by shifting into graphics mode. While editing, you can jump forward or backward a page (screen), and insert or delete entire lines. A print option not included on the review copy of the program that will be available on the final product is the 64-character line feature.
The minor drawbacks involve the arrangement of text into individual lines. Although there is word-wrap, there is no automatic justification available, so you have to be careful not to split words at the end of lines. While you are editing, inserting too many characters means losing the end of a line, and the text does not close up if you delete portions of a line.
Although this is a rather expensive program, it does include the hi-res program that sells separately for twenty dollars, and may be well worth the investment.
Figure 2. The Report Card.
Docu- Menus Entry Entry Edit Error Over- Price
mentation Ease Speed Ease Handling all
Hi Res Word B A A+ A+ A A+ CC: $25.00 +$1 s&h
Processor
Text II D B F B B B C CC: $20.00
Texter B B B A B B C CC: $6.95 List: $2.95
Textwriter 1000 A+ A A+ A A+ A A CC: $11.95 List: $5.95
TP16 B B F C C F D CC: $9.95
VU Write A+ A C A B B B CC: $14.95 +$1 s&h
Word Sinc II B A A A+ A A A+ CC: $20.00
Z Text B A A B B A B CC: $19.95 + s&h
Z-Wryter A A B A A+ A B CC: $12.95 + $1.25 s&h
Suppliers:
Hi Res Word Processor: Nissan Elmaleh, 5100 Highbridge St., 53D Fayetteville, NY 13066.
Text II: Peak Software, PO Box 8005, Suite 23, Bouldor, CO 80306.
Texter: Barlog Software, 401 N. Geyser Rd., Kirkwood, MO 63122.
Textwriter 1000: Robert Fingerle, 39639 Embarcadero Ter., Fremont, CA 94538.
TP16: Marantha, PO Box 759, Mableton, GA 30059.
VU Write: Syncmaster, Rt. #1, Box 122, Oak Ridge, NC 27310.
Word Sinc II: Gesang Associates, PO Box 452, Randallstown, MD 21133.
Z Text: Mindware, 15 Tech Cir., Natick, MA 01760.
Z-Wryter: Robotoc, 59 C St., Perrysburg, OH 43551.