Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: kennys@terapin.COM Subject: COMPARISON: excellence! and Final Copy word processors Message-ID: <1992Sep11.014359.23914@menudo.uh.edu> Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Keywords: word processor, commercial Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Nntp-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Reply-To: kennys@terapin.COM Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 01:43:59 GMT [Moderator's note: When Ken says one product is better than the other in a certain area, he uses the phrase "Edge to..." to indicate the winner. For example, if Final Copy has better graphics, he says "Graphics: Edge to Final Copy." I explain this because some of our non-USA readers might not know this American slang phrase. -- Dan] PRODUCT NAMES excellence! version 3.0 Final Copy version 1.3.2 BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a review and comparison of two commercial Amiga word processors. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION excellence!: Name: Micro-Systems Software Address: 12798 Forest Hill Blvd. Suite 202 West Palm Beach, FL. 33414 Telephone: (407) 790-0770 FAX: (407) 790-1341 Mail Order Price $107.95 Final Copy: Name: SoftWood Incorporated Address: P.O. Box 50178 Phoenix, Arizona 85076 Telephone: (602) 431-9151 LIST PRICE excellence!: List price not given Mail order price $107.95 Final Copy: List Price $99.00 Mail Order Price $59.95 COPY PROTECTION None. Both install on hard drive. PRELIMINARIES Let's take care of the preliminaries. The computer system used to test and review both programs was a Amiga 2000 equipped with Commodore's 2620 accelerator card, 5 megabytes of system RAM, and a 120 megabyte hard drive. The printer used was a Hewlett Packard Deskjet 500. AmigaDos 2.0 and 1.3 were used in evaluating the two programs. I toggled between 68020 and 68000 to ensure compatibility and performance. Note: excellence! does not capitalize the first letter of its name and adds the exclamation point at the end. I'm by no means emphasizing "excellence!." Throughout the review, I will spell excellence! this way. SPECIAL HARDWARE/SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS Both programs require that your Amiga have at least 1 megabyte of RAM. If your computer only has 512k, look elsewhere. Both programs will run under AmigaDos 2.0 or 1.3, but excellence! supports certain functions available only under AmigaDos 2.0. They are: Appicon and Appmenu support. Final Copy will not work properly under AmigaDos 1.2, or below. Micro-Systems claims excellence! will work under 1.2, but I was unable to verify this. excellence! has been available for the Amiga Since AmigaDos 1.2 (in earlier versions), so it is possible excellence! 3.0 is compatible with 1.2. Both programs can be set up to run from floppy (you need two floppy drives) or hard drive based Amigas. To run these programs as they where designed, it's recommended that you have a hard drive and AmigaDos 2.0. While quite functional under 1.3, they just run, look, and feel better under 2.0. INSTALLATION Both programs come shipped on 3 non copy-protected disks and install easily to a hard drive. Final Copy uses the Installer utility from Commodore. excellence! uses its own installer utility. Final Copy installed on the hard drive flawlessly the first try. Final Copy needs 2 megabytes of free hard drive space; of those 2 megabytes, 1 megabyte is for the proportional fonts. Final Copy does not need an Assign statement to operate. Overall, the installation was very intuitive. To use Final Copy from a floppy based system, you need two floppy drives and to supply your own Workbench Disk. excellence! installed on the hard drive the first try, but took slightly more work. excellence! needs a Assign statement, but the Installer utility handles the process for you. All you need to do is supply the correct path to your startup-sequence, or wherever you keep your Assign statements. You need 2.1 free megabytes of hard drive space to install the full program. Like Final Copy, excellence! needs two floppy drives and a copy of Workbench to run on a floppy based system. There are a few more things you need to do to install excellence!, but it's all handled within the Installer program. Both installer utilities made the hard drive installation as painless as possible, so it was difficult to choose a clear winner. Final Copy's installation was a touch easier than excellence!. Once the programs were installed, they were ready to run. Installation: a tie SETUP While you could just double-click on the program icons and they would run, there is some setup that needs to be done to get the full benefit of the programs. When Final Copy first boots up, you are shown a startup requester. This gives you the opportunity to choose your screen type. Once you are running the program, you can set your screen preference so this requester does not appear on startup. excellence! boots directly into a Workbench screen (640x200). You can change your screen size through Preferences settings. excellence! handles preference settings through one requester. The main requester branches off into other requesters as you choose your different settings. The main requester handles screen display, error signals, cursor control, control over auto-save, file paths, the measuring system, virtual memory and font selection on startup. The other requesters handle such duties and Grammar Checking Control, Screen Colors, Palette Control, and Speech Control. All the requesters have hotkeys to make them easy to navigate. Final Copy uses a modular approach to preferences, with 5 separate modules. The modules include display, ASCII file input/output, startup, speller, and hyphenation. All the requesters are intuitive. Each approach gets the job done. I do prefer the approach that excellence! takes towards preferences, I'd rather choose one requester and then work from there. Final Copy's approach is not atrocious; it just takes a little more work. By working with the preference settings of both programs, you can customize your work environment to meet your personal needs. Setup: Edge to excellence! PAGE SETUP This is the part of the program that defines your working page. Both programs have page setup requesters to handle this function. Each program comes with a default setup which a new document will use when you first run the program. You can customize the page of any document. Once you save a document, all page setup information is saved as well. Each program has a few different features, but the requesters are similar in operation. You can access the Final Copy requester through a menu item or a the hotkey. Once the requester is opened, it's very easy to follow. Final Copy has predefined Page types which include US Letter, US Legal, A4, A5 and custom. If you choose custom you must enter the page size dimensions in a height and width gadget. Within the requester, there are gadgets to define footers, headers, number of columns (6 columns per page), and whether your document uses the title page in the numbering process. Final Copy's page setup requester also contains functions for setting the printing and editing area of a page. Printers cannot print to the whole area of the paper, so with the requester you set the correct dimensions of the print area of your printer. The documentation contains examples of setting the print area of three types of printers. The edit area defines the area where text will appear on the page, this is where you would setup your margins. The default settings are for a Hewlett Packard LaserJet printer. Page Setup in Final Copy is very intuitive. The excellence! approach is very similar: you choose the page setup requester from the menu. It has no keyboard equivalent. Once the requester is open, you have many setting to control such as page width, height, auto numbering, headers, footers, footnotes, multiple columns (8) and margins. There are no predefined page types, so you must enter you page dimensions through the gadgets. excellence! does have other settings: pitch control and a facing page gadget. The requester contains hotkeys for every function. All that's missing are some predefined page types. Page Setup: Edge to Final Copy FONTS We all know fonts and font support are very important parts of a word processor. Each program take its separate routes when it comes to implementing fonts within the program. Final Copy takes the proportional font route only. These fonts are proprietary, so Final Copy is the only program that can address them. Final Copy does not have the ability to access the Amiga's bitmapped or Compugraphic outline fonts. The fonts Final Copy does supply are of very good quality. To choose a font, you open the font requester and select the font. Once loaded, the font is kept in a submenu for later access. If you need to change styles or point sizes, you must make another menu selection. It has a requester that allows you to set the point size if the predefined sizes do not suit your needs. Final Copy supports font sizes from 4-200 points. (One point = 1/72 of an inch.) Other options include leading (spacing between lines of type), subscript, superscript, text width, and case. It takes some work to setup your font, but the quality is consistent and good. The only downfall to the proprietary font system is that you are at the mercy of the developer for new fonts. I doubt that 3rd parties would supply fonts for Final Copy. If Softwood somehow allowed access to Compugraphic fonts, it would enhance this package considerably. Final Copy comes with 8 fonts (35 if you want to count the different styles) which are plenty to get you going. Softwood has extra font disks for sale. excellence! supports the Amiga's bitmapped and Compugraphic fonts. (Compugraphic support is for OS versions 2.0 or higher.) Early versions of excellence! had font menus which limited your font access. Under excellence! 3.0, a new font requester replaces the font menu. The font requester is very similar in operation to the font requester of Deluxe Paint 4. You can choose a font and size, and then use the preview window to view your selection. excellence! can scale the Amiga's bitmapped fonts to any size you like (up to a point size of 99); just enter the number in the size window, and the font is automatically scaled. Of course, the bitmapped fonts when scaled do not look nearly as good as the Compugraphic fonts, but with the proper font and experimentation you can get some OK results. excellence! handles Compugraphic fonts the same way as the bitmapped fonts, by selecting the font and choosing one of the predefined sizes or entering your own size. The Compugraphic fonts when scaled look very good. Like the bitmapped fonts, they are limited to a point size of 99. excellence! also includes some Postscript fonts which you can copy to your font directory. They contain metric information for scaling when printing, so some setup is required to get any use out of these fonts. If you have Professional Page you can also use the fonts included with that package by using the MetricConvert Utility; again some setup is required. Its hard to choose a clear winner in this category. Final Copy's fonts are outstanding and offer more sizes and look very good. However, excellence! fonts are easily assessable, more versatile, and easier to manipulate. If I were to judge on font quality alone I would give the edge to Final Copy. However, there is more to fonts than just looks. Fonts: Edge to excellence! FEATURES Most Amiga users tend to be feature creatures, so I will do my best to reveal both of the programs' best features. If I miss a certain feature, it will not be intentional. Final Copy's main features and strengths are its use of proportional fonts and high quality printing. Final Copy has the basic editing functions cut, copy, and paste, and it supports the Amiga's clipboard. It has a clear function which allows you select any portion of text and clear it from the document quickly. The clear function does not support the clipboard, so if you clear some text it's gone for good. Final Copy comes with a spell checker, thesaurus, and hyphenation system. The automatic hyphenation system is very good; it's transparent to the user. All you need to do it is set the hotzone and let Final Copy do the work. You can toggle the hyphenation system on and off. The spell checker has options to check just one word or the entire document. One unique feature of the spell checker is the built in corrector. The corrector will flag certain errors like capitalization and repeating word errors; however, it is not a grammar checker, but helpful. The thesaurus is good. It provides a definition of the word selected and a list of synonyms. You can replace any word in the document with a word from the list. You can get additional lists of words buy selecting a word from the list and using the Find button. You can keep doing this until you find a word of your inclination. Final Copy has a document statistics feature that gives you basic document information like size, words, lines, sentences, paragraphs, and number of pages. Final Copy has several predefined page sizes. You can set up custom page sizes with a set of gadgets if the predefined pages do not suit your needs. Final Copy includes support for multiple columns (6), multiple page views (25%-400%), first page as title page, insert date, inset time, and page numbering. Page numbering can be set either has numeric, roman numeral, or Alphabetic. Final Copy has Macro support but only through ARexx. You can assign 10 macros to the function keys. Any other macros must be ARexx scripts accessed through a requester. With the Ruler Bar, you can make global changes to your document. In Final Copy, with the paragraph requester you can give each paragraph its own set of unique attributes such as line spacing, text alignment, indents, and hyphenation. One feature of Final Copy is its ability to load documents from different word processors and retain the formatting. The word processors supported are Word Perfect, Pen Pal, and ProWrite. Final Copy contains a substantial list of features for a word processor in this price range. excellence! does not suffer in the feature department. Some of the features are auto-save, support for Workbench 2.0 screen modes, speaking capabilities, ARexx, Foreign Language support (German and French), Bookmark, clipboard support, AppIcon and AppMenu support, cursor rate control, virtual memory, built in grammar checker, math support, multiple column support (8), footnotes, headers, footers, auto numbering, postscript support, mail merge, spell checker, thesaurus, Table of Contents and Index generator, undo typing, color support, and macro language. The auto-save function is a welcomed feature, and excellence! handles this well. By making a few entries in Preferences requester, you are set. You can also set it to warn you when a save is coming. To abort a auto-save, press the Esc key. The speaking capabilities of excellence! use the Amiga's narrator device. Just highlight any portion of your document, select Vocalize, and the Amiga will speak the contents to you. excellence! also allows you to set the error signals to use the narrator device. I find this feature more annoying than useful, but this would be a welcome feature for beginners or the vision-impaired. The Bookmark function allows you to place bookmarks throughout your document. Once the bookmarks are set, you to jump to different parts of your document that you specified with the bookmarks. This is a helpful feature if you work with large documents. excellence! allows the use of virtual memory. You set up a swap file in the Preferences requester, and the VM is transparent to the user. excellence! defaults to a 1mb swap file. With tool types, you can increase or decrease the swap file. The math function in excellence! is easy and simple to use. Just type in your formula, highlight it, and choose the Math function from the Edit Menu. The results will be stored in the clipboard. Use the paste function to place the results into your document. The math function supports the basic math operators and exponents. The Spell Checker will check the entire document or will check as you type. The Thesaurus is excellent: it gives you a definition of the word plus synonyms, antonyms, related, comparable, or contrasting. Each of these can be toggled off through checkboxes. You can also step through the list of words like Final Copy allows. The built in Grammar Checker is also very good. It has a multitude of configuration checkboxes that you set through the Preference requester. The Grammar Checker allows you save your document errors to a file. This enables you to load in a document, run the Grammar Checker, and leave. When you come back you can scan the errors file and make your adjustments. excellence! also supports Hyphenation. You can hyphenate a selected word or the entire document. While not quite as eloquent as Final Copy, it works. excellence! has a Document Summary function which is the equivalent to the Document Statistics feature of Final Copy. The Index and Table of Contents generators operate the same. You mark your entries with the appropriate command. When you're done, use the generate function, and your Table of Contents or Index will be stored in the clipboard. Then just paste the contents into the appropriate place in your document. excellence! does not support different view modes. It does have a Print Preview which will give you a full page preview of your document. You cannot do any editing in the Print Preview mode. excellence! supports Mail Merging and you can have more than one record per page. You can also sort paragraphs in ascending or descending order. One unique feature of excellence! is Insert Literal. This allows you to bring up a requester which contains the entire 256 character set. You can scroll through the list, choose the character, and it's automatically inserted into your document. This is great for finding that mysterious copyright character. Macro support in excellence! is the most powerful feature of the program. It's handled through what Micro-Systems calls the Document Glossary. The Document Glossary is a program module that controls and makes your macros, hotkeys, and ARexx scripts. With the Document Glossary, you can gain control over the program by customizing to your individual word processing needs. For example, you can create and launch ARexx scripts directly or assign them to an Amiga Key. You can also create macros, select menu items, load text, IFF pictures, store Letterheads or style sheets, and all can be assigned to any combination of Amiga keys. The Document Glossary is very versatile, and its power is easily accessible by the average user. Features: Edge to excellence! INTERFACE Both programs shine in this area. Both have the new 3D look throughout the program. Even under Workbench 1.3 the new look is retained. If you use 1.3, some color adjustment maybe necessary. With the new interface, the programs gain a polished look. excellence! is a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor, so what you see on the screen is generally close to what your output going to be. excellence! makes use of proportional fonts in the requesters and menus, keeping them readable no matter what screen resolution you choose. A important part of any program's interface is the file requester, and the file requester in excellence! is outstanding. It supports the main features plus some powerful others like pattern matching and hotkeys. The file requester supports the all the normal Amiga wildcards, including the new ones of Workbench 2.0. It also tells you how much free space is available in your current path. When using Amiga word processors, it is best to use an interlaced screen to display as much of the page as possible. Of course, if you don't have a de-interlacer, this means suffering the dreaded interlace "flicker!" excellence! helps diminish this problem very effectively by providing a nice selection of contrasting colors. You can adjust the colors that will work best with to your particular monitor. excellence! supports a 2-16 color interface and supports Workbench 2.0 enhanced modes. Keyboard support is OK with most of the major menu items accessible through hotkeys. The excellence! interface is consistent throughout with emphasis on Workbench 2.0, with support for radio buttons, cycle gadgets, push-buttons, checkboxes and slider gadgets. One of the better interface features is the hotkey support within the program requesters. For example, if you had the preference requester open and choose the hotkey Right-Amiga-C, you would be get the Colors requester allowing you adjust your screen colors. All the excellence! requesters operate in this manner. The excellence! screen layout is similar to early versions of the program with cosmetic changes and some new additions. excellence! has the usual Ruler bar, tab markers, justification gadgets, and spacing gadgets. The new additions are the font, font size, and style gadgets. The new font and style gadgets make it very easy to change a documents fonts and style types just by highlighting the text and clicking the appropriate gadget. (This is very similar to how the smart icons of AmiPro work. Note: AmiPro is a Word Processor for PC clones.) excellence! has a gadget on the bottom right of the screen that keeps track of your document page number and total pages. If you click on the gadget, a requester will appear giving you some information about the document length and the ability to jump to a specific page number. Final Copy is also a WYSIWYG word processor. Final Copy's interface supports the new 3D look and is very slick and clean. The file requester is not as robust as the one in excellence!, but it's quite functional. It does have a button you select for saving ASCII or Final Copy format documents. Final Copy can use up to a 16 color Workbench. It has no provision for adjusting pallets or colors within the program like excellence!. It must be done through Workbench preferences. Final Copy supports up to a hi-res interlace screen. The interlace screen looks good, but screen flicker is more noticeable than in excellence!. All the requesters throughout the program are well designed and easy to read and use. Final Copy's document window has the standard Ruler bar, justification, tab selectors and margin makers. It also has a hyphenation selector and hot zone which make hyphenation a snap and automatic. If you have Workbench 2.0 or later, it supports the zoom gadget, which helps when working with multiple documents. You can keep track of your page number by looking at a small window at the bottom left of the screen. Final Copy has excellent hotkey support. Both interfaces were easy to navigate. More Amiga programs should follow these examples. Interface: Edge to Excellence! GRAPHICS excellence! has graphic support, but it's limited. It will load any standard IFF mode except HAM and 24 bit IFF. When you load a picture into excellence! it remaps the image to match the excellence! display. For example, if load a 32 color image, and are using a 4 color excellence! screen display, the program will match the image the best it can with those 4 screen colors. Once loaded into excellence!, a image cannot be interactively moved with the mouse. The only way you can move it is with the cursor. Careful planing is a must when placing graphics. excellence! does treat images like text, so you can cut, copy, and paste images. excellence! can re-size and crop images; however, you cannot flow text around a image, which is a major limitation. excellence! does not contain any drawing tools or functions. One area I guess would be graphics related is that you can change the foreground and background colors of your text. You must have a color printer to take advantage of this feature. Final Copy's graphic support is excellent. You can load any IFF image including 24 bit. Final Copy does not display the image in color but remaps the picture to a grey scale. There was a color option in the preferences settings, but no matter what I picked, it always mapped the image to a grey scale representation. Final Copy does retains all color information for printing. Final Copy has much more control over graphics than excellence!. You can set the image to be transparent so your text can flow nicely around any image, and Final Copy can draw borders around your image in various point sizes to enhance the look. Once inserted, an image can moved, sized and cropped. Like excellence!, Final Copy does not have any drawing tools. The graphics features of excellence! just don't measure up against Final Copy. Graphics: Edge Final Copy OUTPUT You've heard the old saying "what good is a word processor without good output?" (I think that's how it went?) Both do it very well with Final Copy getting the edge in print quality. Both programs support Postscript. excellence! uses the system's bitmapped and Compugraphic outline fonts. It also includes a set of Postscript fonts (Times, Courier, Helvetica and a symbol font): not a complete set, but a enough to get you by until you find a source for more. The ProPage DTP package is a good source for more fonts. excellence! has four printing modes: draft, NLQ, graphics and Postscript. Draft mode will print text only. NLQ mode will let you control print density and the other setting through the AmigaDos Printer preferences. In NLQ mode you can print text and graphics. Graphic print mode does a screen dump of your document. With the proper setup you can get some very good results. Graphic Printing mode, however, is very slow. Postscript mode allows you print to the serial and parallel port, or you can send it to a file you specify. If your printer driver supports it, excellence! will allow you to use your printer's internal fonts. excellence! does a good job of printing and gives you a few different avenues to choose from. It will take some experimentation to find what works best for you. Final Copy's output is very good and the better of the two. It offers the same types or printing modes as excellence!: draft, NLQ, Postscript and graphic. Final Copy's print requester is very good, and all the settings can be made from Final Copy so you don't have to go Workbench Preferences to make changes when printing graphics. Final Copy has a option to send color information to a Postscript printer and comes with a Postscript driver. You can send Postscript output to the serial or parallel ports, or to a file. Overall, the output quality is very good and consistent and easier to setup than excellence!. Output: Edge to Final Copy AREXX Both programs support ARexx. You must have AmigaDos 2.0 or a copy of the ARexx language to have access ARexx facilities of each program. excellence! can run ARexx programs two ways: you can use the Document Glossary keyword to run a external ARexx script, or load the actual script into the glossary a run it as a normal macro. With the Glossary and ARexx you're not limited to the function keys for your macros. You can use any combination of Amiga keys. excellence! seems to have a OK command set to communicate with outside programs and comes with some sample scripts you can study to help you understand how excelence! uses ARexx. The ARexx documentation could be better. Final Copy's ARexx design seems more adapted to be a interactive macro language than to communicate with external programs. You can just about automate every menu function with ARexx in Final Copy. You can only assign 10 ARexx Macros in Final Copy to the function keys. Any other ARexx scripts must be executed from a menu command called "other." Final Copy comes with no ARexx examples so beginnerss are going to have trouble making macros. Final Copy's ARexx communication with outside programs is weak. ARexx: Edge to excellence! DOCUMENTATION The excellence! manual is large: over 300 pages, though I did notice there was quite a bit of white space. It comes in a 3 ring binder similar to the AmigaDos 2.0 manual, but you can at least lift this one without going to the gym. Each chapter has physical divider tabs which aids in using the documentation. The 2nd chapter is a tutorial that steps through the various functions of the program. The more advanced features of the program are explained in later chapters. There are a fair amount of screenshots that help you along. The Table of Contents, Glossary and Index are good and easy to use. The supplemental manual for people upgrading needs some work. It just does not cover the new features of the program that well. The Final Copy documentation is spiral bound and the layout is easy on the eyes. One nice touch is the mini Table of Contents for each chapter. The manual is full of screen shots which are much better than the ones in excellence. The tutorial covers all the major parts of the program and is easy to follow. I did find that in some areas the documentation just did not go far enough in explaining features or functions. The manual has a Table of Contents, Glossary and Index. The Index needs work: it's really light. The documentation of both programs is good, but not great. I would like to see Amiga manuals that cover these types of programs to do a better job of explaining features. Experimenting with a program is fine, but there is no excuse for not explaining a program's features. On-line help would help would be a nice touch. Documentation: Edge to Final Copy SUGGESTIONS/COMPLAINTS I would like to see Final Copy somehow get access to Compugraphic Fonts. I hate being locked into that proprietary font route. Support for the AmigaDos ASL file requester would be a plus. ARexx support needs revamping and there are no ARexx examples anywhere in documentation or program disks; this is going to hurt beginners. The documentation could be more complete. The biggest gripe I have about the program is the way you have to access the fonts, making all those menu selections for simple changes, gets tiresome after a while. I would also like the ability to toggle the Ruler Bar on and off. One major feature missing is a mail merge function. excellence! needs to improve its graphics support. It can't load certain IFF modes, and once you do get the graphics into the program, there's not much you can do with it. It's hard to believe that a word processor of this caliber lacks the ability to flow text around graphics. Hotkey support could be better. I would also like to see the program offer different page views for editing and allow for point sizes larger than 99. OVERALL While working with these programs, I never once had a system crash. This does not mean they are bug-free, but both programs were very stable. excellence! is decidedly the better word processor of the two, it just offers more power to user than Final Copy. It would be good a good choice for long documents or book projects. The interface is good, the program is easy to use, and the macro system is one of the better ones I seen in a Amiga program. If you just want one word processor for your Amiga excellence! would be a good choice. Final Copy is a very good program. Its graphics support is good, the output quality is great, and the program is cheap. This program would be great for smaller projects or whipping out letters, but it lacks several features needed for serious projects. If your needs are light, mainly for letters and memos, Final Copy would be a excellent choice. Copyright 1992 <> All rights reserved Send mail, flames, suggestions, and grammar flames to: kennys@terapin.com (Internet) --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu