Final Writer

                       A review by John Varcoe



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    This is the new word publishing program from SoftWood who brought
  you Final Copy.  The first thing that must be said is that I believe
  that Final Writer should have been Final Copy III.  I understand
  that the Australian distributors - Tupsoft are offering an upgrade
  path for those people who have purchased Final Copy II.

    I've used this program for a couple of months now, and this review
  is very much from a user's point of view.  It is not intended as a
  list of endless features/benefits of the product.  By now I am sure
  that you will have all seen their advertising which features all the
  wonderful things it can do.  (Which it can).  The more I use the
  program the better I get to grips with it.  It is an extremely well
  featured program.  Some of my comments that follow are critical of
  the program, but let's face it who has ever used a piece of software
  that has been perfect?  However what I find annoying about the
  program, to someone else will seem inconsequential.

Features- a brief overview
    Based on Final Copy II.  The manual is very similar to Final Copy
  II.  Those of you with Final Copy II you will feel very much at
  home.  The main screens are compara ble with the addition of an
  extra row of icons on top.  These are programmable and you click on
  them to cause an action, ie print a doc, open a doc, insert a bullet
  point etc.  In the expanded Preferences menu you will find "User
  Button Strip",  where you can setup the buttons to do what
  you what.  You can have up to 8 separate button strips if you so
  wish.  Programming them is not hard except that the manual never
  gives you any examples of how to do it.  You will need to know the
  difference between a Menu Command, String Command, Text Clip or
  AREXX script.  I don't!  This is one of my biggest complaints of
  both the Final Copy and Final Writer manuals.  They are excellently
  detailed and tell you about each feature, but they never explain why
  that feature is there or discuss what you can achieve with it.
  Being a very recent program it allows you the choice of what screen
  you wish to open on and in how many colours.

Fonts- 
    Final Writer persists with NimbusQ fonts as they say that these
  fonts give excellent output on non-Postscript printers, which they
  do.  In addition the program allows use of Type 1 fonts and
  Compugraphic fonts.  So you should be able to find the font you
  want.  The program comes with over 100 NimbusQ fonts, and hundreds
  of other fonts can be obtained from Megadisc.

Graphics-
    Final Writer moves even closer towards being a DTP program with
  the ability to import EPS (encapsulated Postscript) graphics as
  well as IFF graphics.  This gives the user a huge bank of graphic
  images to draw from, as there is a mass of EPS clip art around.
  However like most things it appears that there are different types
  of EPS and some will not show you the image, it remains a crossed
  box.  They will print out though.  You are able to expand or shrink
  EPS images without jaggies.  In addition you can print them using a
  non-Postscript printer.  They have also added the ability to use
  what they call "Text Clips", similar to PageStream's Text Boxes.
  In Final Writer you call up a menu and type the text you want.  Then
  this is imported onto the page in its own box.  You are able to move
  it wherever you want.  A text box can only be one line, but you can
  use any font or attribute you wish.  I wish they would allow you to
  put your page numbering in this box, and so make headers and footers
  so much easier to use.  Perhaps in their first upgrade??  The
  program also allows you to rotate any object created by Final
  Writer, this in cludes Text Clips, and boxes, circles, lines etc.
  For some reason you cannot rotate imported graphics, which is a
  shame.  As per Final Copy you have a range of drawing tools lines,
  boxes, circles etc.  from which to draw from, and you can run text
  around these, or set the background to transparent and let the text
  flow around the graphic.  One drawback is that you can only flow
  text around one side of a graphic.  So the graphic has to sit either
  on the left or right of a page.  You have a choice of left or right
  master page and unfortunately as per Final Copy if you want to set a
  footer, you still have to press the return key continuously until
  you reach the bottom of the page, where you can then type in the
  details you want.

    Screen updates are faster with Final Writer than Final Copy.  This
  is just my gut feeling.

Wordprocessing- 
    On the word processing side the features have been expanded
  considerably.  For the first time on any Amiga wordprocessor that I
  have seen, they have added the ability to have a sectionised
  document.  For example you can have an outline, title page, preface,
  table of contents, table of illustrations, different main sections,
  index, end notes and bibliography.  These can all be set up as
  different sections of the document with different page sizes, fonts,
  graphics etc.  You can then have running page numbering or page
  numbering for each section.  It really is the most comprehensive
  document builder I have ever seen.  It seems quite complex to set
  up, but that is probably because I haven't used all the features
  yet.  I have started to, as I am putting together a Club Manual that
  I do each year.  Last year I used PageStream, but this year I will
  use Final Writer as it is easier and most of the manual is text any
  way.  The other main feature that has persuaded me is that Final
  Writer allows you to add crop marks to your page output, so I can
  either output on my Postscript printer, or have it output at my
  local imagesetter.

Customising the program- 
    Final Writer allows you to change it around the way you want, it's
  really up to you, and this is a great feature of it.  One down side
  that I have found is that there appears to be no way that you can
  set the main untitled page to the edit sizes that you want.  In
  Final Copy I set my top margin edit to 6cms to allow for our company
  letterhead.  No problems.  With Final Writer you set the same thing
  and click on save, but when you open a new untitled page the default
  has gone back to 2.5cm.  Very frustrating.  I wonder if in fact it a
  bug and it should save it how you want it.  You can of course set up
  a page call it "Default" and call this up each time, but that's a
  bit of a hassle and you shouldn't have to do that.
  
Styles-
    The style feature has been expanded and you can set up how you
  want a font to ap pear on the page.  This can be for a section of
  your document or for just a headline or subhead.  General- The
  beauty about this program is that you can use it at whatever level
  you wish, so it can grow with you as your needs expand.  I have used
  it at work on a stock standard 2000 linked to a postscript laser and
  at home on my 1200 linked to an old Star 9 pin printer.  I do find
  that the extra zip of the 1200 is very welcome as Final Writer is a
  large program, and being WYSIWYG the screen updates are a little
  slow on my 2000.  Output wise even on my old 9 pin dot matrix
  printer, the quality is excellent.  It's gut feeling but I think
  Final Writer's screen updates are faster than Final Copy II.

    If I had any wishes for this program I would like to be able to
  choose to have visible or invisible carriage returns etc.  It just
  makes it easier to see where you are with the document.  The other
  feature would be allowing you to import structured clipart, as there
  is so much of it about now.  Finally I would like the program to use
  the conven tion of allowing you to page up and down by using the
  shift or alt keys.  Plus having the Amiga conventions of allowing
  you to highlight sections by clicking on one area and then clicking
  further down the page and the whole of that section being high
  lighted.

    In all a great program and if you are looking for the ultimate in
  a word processor but want features of a DTP program then Final
  Writer is for you.

PS-
    As my 1200 is very new I have only just got hold of a 256 colour
  IFF file.  Set Final Writer to 256 colours and import the graphic.
  Hey presto it appears in a flash.  Looks fantastic.

    As Final Writer is such a recent program, it really is up to date
  with AGA.  This makes an interesting contrast to ProWrite 3.3.2
  which tells you it can import 256 colours, but when tried on my 1200
  proceeded to fall over.  Excellence!  version 3.0 still only allows
  you to import 16 colours.  The other word processing programs I
  haven't tried.
  
John Varcoe Perth.


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