February-March 1987 AMIGAZINE! ProWrite Preview By Matthew Leeds (c)1987 The Amiga promises solutions to a remarkable range of complicated, often expensive problems. Paint programs, audio and video digitizing, business graphics, and now desktop publishing. A whole host of applications are arriving on the market, integrating text and graphics in a document production system. Some are designed as page makeup programs, with limited text handling potential. Others like ProWrite appear as more traditional word processing programs, with added functionality. ProWrite is a word processor that can handle any Amiga system font, IFF color graphics and text, and operates in a 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) fashion. It also runs in 640X400 mode, giving you a high-res display that enhances the on-screen looks of your document. ProWrite provides some very powerful features. The ability to use any Amiga font in color allows for some very creative documents. You are limited to seven colors, the primaries and their complements plus black. This was done because most printers only support these colors, and to allow more would require quite a bit more memory. Remember, ProWrite is running in hi-res mode, and this alone takes up a lot of memory. Using more than three bit planes eats up too much memory. Fonts can be styled in bold, italics, and underline. Text can also be super and sub-scripted. I would have liked to have seen the ability to access multiple font libraries, but ProWrite seems to be limited to the font directory assigned during boot. The ability to add IFF graphics is a first for an Amiga word processor. Graphics are displayed in their own window. You can then drag it around, cut and paste it out of it's window and add it to your document. Graphics with more than eight colors are converted down to eight colors, or you can turn a graphic into a half-tone. You may also specify the amount of half-toning. The user has full control of margins, tabs, justifications, line spacing, indents, and the other paraphenalia of contemporary word processing. Nice additions include the ability to copy and paste one paragraph's formatting onto another; left, right, and decimal tabs; keyboard equivalents of menu functions; ruler display in inches or centimeters; and the ability to edit headers and footers separately. Search and replace works as you would expect, and lets you decide if the search will be case sensitive, a good option. Page numbering offers several options on style, including scientific notation. If you save to disk often, as I do, while working on a document, the Revert command may come in handy. It calls up the last version you've saved to disk. This is useful if you are unhappy with your last set of edits. Speaking of saving, ProWrite uses an unusual file requester. You cannot type in a volume or device name directly. Instead, there is a button called Disk you click on. It cycles through the logical storage devices installed on the system. If you want to get to a particular device you must go through the cycle to find it. Nor can you type in a sub-directory or file name. Everything must be displayed in the file requester window before you can access it. This may be in the guise of user-friendliness, but I prefer more direct access to the system. In many ways ProWrite is similar to MacWrite on that other machine. It has the added advantage of color and the Amiga's multi-tasking capability. It is the only word processor I've seen to date that runs in interlaced mode. The flicker is sometimes difficult to deal with. Pressing the Shift-Help combination dims the screen, and this lessens the flicker. You can also purchase a screen like Jitter-Rid that fits over your monitor that cuts the flicker. I've also seen ProWrite running on a long persistence monitor, and it looked fine there. I've not covered every small detail of ProWrite's functionality. There are some clever ideas and kludgey ones as well. I'd prefer to see a toggle to turn off interlace (as in TV*TEXT), and a better file requester system. I would have also liked to have the ability to open text files created with other editors inside of ProWrite to then enhance them. ProWrite's file requester will not recognize non-ProWrite files (except Flow files). ProWrite documents can be saved as text only, and you can then run a spelling checker on them if you wish. ProWrite can also read Flow files directly, eliminating the need to save them as text only first. I think there will be a market for ProWrite. Those who do not want to learn to use a page makeup program, or just need to add a few graphics to a document will find ProWrite simple to master. It does not have all the bells and whistles of a full featured word processor, but the addition of color, fonts, and graphics gives this program a leg up on the competition. I have included a sample picture of combined color text and graphics with ProWrite. Just double-click the ProWritePic icon in the Features drawer to view it. To exit, click once in the upper-left corner of the screen. ProWrite, $124.95 New Horizons Software P.O. Box 43167 Austin, Tx 78745 (512) 329-6215