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The word processor market's hotting up, with three major releases this month. Can the latest version of Protext still deliver the goods?
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A long time ago, a fledgling company called Arnor released Protext into a computing world devoid of any decent word processors. In no time at all, Protext established itself as a standard in word processors, making its way on both 8- and 16-bit formats. ST users, needing a way to write their Christmas "Thank You" letters in a way befitting a 16-bit user, lapped it up, pushing Arnor's powerful, versatile, yet down-to-earth package into the lead.
In a classic "hasn't time flown" kind of way, Arnor recently celebrated their tenth birthday, marking the occasion with a new version of the old favorite, aptly named Protext 6.5. The package now comes with more features than ever before, while still retaining the air of respect that a no-frills, vaguely techie word processor deserves.
I love Protext (nothing like a bit of first-person to trash that atmosphere). Not having experienced anything other than the original release version to any great extent, I was looking forward to seeing what the package had become. Having started with a simple command-line setup, there is a wide range of paths a softie developer could follow on the route to user-friendliness. Arnor chose a series of pull-down menus, making what is an otherwise daunting package easier to use.
Exactly what's changed? Version 6 was really as close to perfect as Protext could ever get (except for the fact that it didn't offer WYSIWYG viewing), and Arnor have still found things to update and improve.
The majority of changes concern automatic options, such as expansion and correction. Protext 6.5 happily sits and waits for you to type predefined abbreviations, then expands them into the full text (which you set before you start).
Automatic spelling and type correction are two functions that work together. For example, when typing, if you start a sentence with a lower case letter, it'll be corrected; the same applies if you make a spelling mistake.
Fortunately, the function only butchers words you tell it to, storing a library of words you regularly misspell and replacing them with the equivalents you've set. Problems start when you're an incredibly bad typist — unless you predefine every permutation of every word you mess up, you'd be wasting your time turning the spell-checker on. It's obvious why it's been done this way, though — a function that replaced all unrecognized words automatically would be a death wish.
In his subscribers' editorial this month, our illustrious editor talked briefly about the problems with three word processors being released in the same month. This isn't just a problem for users, though — Protext 6.5, wonderful though it is, would still have problems coming up against packages like Papyrus. Though everything you'd want in a word processor is supported, Arnor's baby is nowhere near as user-friendly as the almost effusively friendly Papyrus (reviewed on page 46). The mouse-driven text selection system still needs work and doesn't seem to have been fully incorporated into the interface — you can highlight text for copying or moving, but there's no drag-and-drop, no type-over, nor any of the other functions you'd expect from a package that's had more upgrades than Cher.
Hmm, yes. The thing about Protext is that, because it's not WYSIWYG or comprehensive or anything sensible like that, it doesn't exactly support huge amounts of extra fonts. This might seem like a bit of a bummer, but in fact things like type styles are handled in the same way as Protext handles everything else through control codes and technical thingies. This means that with a bit of jiggery-pokery and a table of Epson codes, you can get your printer to handle as many fonts as you need, communicating font changes via even more control codes. You'll need tenacity, intelligence, vision and patience to do it, but we've got faith in you.
We could sit here and find fault with Protext for not being user-friendly enough till the cows come home, and in comparison to the other packages reviewed this month, its support for new users is poor. But Protext was never designed to be overtly friendly. Protext isn't for people who want to write a nice letter to their grannies. Protext isn't for people who type at three words per minute. Protext is for people who know exactly what they want from their word processor and are determined to get it. Protext is for power users, who don't want a smooth package in which pretty boxes are substituted for total control.
As far as complex and innovative document processing goes, Protext is definitely in the lead. As long as you're prepared to spend a few hours getting to grips with the slightly strange way of working (pop-up menu bars that, themselves, pop up and odd functions giving access to your Desktop) and the complete lack of guidance as to what the mysterious letter combinations in the status border mean, you'll find a deep, complex package. Under all the layers of unfathomable keypresses and in-document control codes, that is.
The main fault with previous versions of Protext has been its lack of WYSIWYG representation. Unlike other recent word processors, control codes, new rules and other formatting operations and parameters are all entered into the normal document. They then sit around, ruining all ideas as to what the final printout will look like. Text styles like italics and enlargements aren't displayed on screen in their final form, and instead are displayed as control codes before and after the affected case. A page break is signified with the in-document command '>PAGE', as are rulers and graphics.
And WYSIWYG is important to many WP users. Knowing what your final printout will look like is important for presentation purposes — otherwise, you can't get an accurate idea of how a page is spaced or weighted (where the body of text sits on the page).
This system of unrepresentative editing is unfortunately still used in Protext, though a graphical page preview has been added, enabling you to view pages from a long way off, but there's still no way of looking at a page in any decent resolution.