[Coco] Re: I said *word* *processors*!!!

[Rogelio Perea]

On 2/14/06, Leon Howell  wrote:

> I don't get it. The CoCo 3 is better than Atari or Commodore. OS-9 Level II
> is better than CP/M, Geos, or SPDX. So why do they all have such great word
> processors, and all we get are lousy text editors???
>
> Maybe I misunderstand just what T/S-Word or Dynastar can do. The ads for FHL
> in Rainbow 1988 said Dynastar had centering, align left/right, page numbering,
> auto page breaks, auto indent, word wrap, etc., all with the Wordstar commands
> I'm already familliar with. But did it really? Or was all that done by a
> seperate program called DynaForm? And would it be shown on screen, or would I
> have to wait and print it to see what I get?
>
> What about T/S-Word? I understand it acts as a graphical main menu for the
> editor, T/S-Spell, and formatting. At least that brings everything into one
> environment, even if it's all done at seperate times. But do I get to see it
> all on screen, or do I have to print it to see anything?
>
> I once heard that Color Scripsit II was pretty much T/S-Word on a cartridge.
> Is T/S-Word really *that* bad?
>
> What does the T/S mean?

Barely used the T/S package, the graphical interface does enhance the
pure text based editor and formatter.

My main experience with CoCo word processors was VIP Writer III and
MAX-10 on the CoCo 3. VIP Writer III i s basically the same
environment as the one available for the CoCo 1 and 2, with the added
perks of using the hardware supported hi res text screen and the extra
memory in the CoCo 3. You enter the text straight into the editor and
for the fancy output the printer codes need to be set withing the
text; there's a preview function that lets you see how the text will
come out on the printed page, but only as far as the physical layout,
there was no showing of bold, italic, super/subscript and related,
just a plain text representation. The printer codes needed to be setup
in the config option of VIP Writer, and would be more or less standard
among the different dot matrix printers available at the time (bold
on/off, underline on/off, etc), once configured you woudl use them as
control codes while entering text. I used VIP Writer III extensively
while in school, never had a problem with it and really no complaints
beyond having the lack of a more friendly print preview. I believe
Word Power (Microcom?) had better ways to do a print preview using
color coding on the text to show bold, italics and had actual
undelining (hardware supported).

Now, the elite WYSIWYG word processor for the CoCo 3 was/is
definetively Max-10. While the text buffer is not that great because
of the resources needed for the graphical interface, it still manages
well for most mid sized jobs... an absolute must to use this with 512k
RAM. Also used extensively for those final reports at school, my only
gripe with Max-10 was that while being a full graphically based
environment, special characters like spanish accented, the tilded N
and open question and exclamation marks were nowhere to be found, and
there was no way to program them in (as far as I know).

VIP Writer III did not support these extended ASCII characters right
out of the box, but by programming custom control codes there was an
easy way to enter them; and while they would show up on screen
(remember, this was the text screen) in an apparent meaningless way
and alternate characters would show up on the preview screen, the
printer would recognize and print the appropiate ones on paper.

My $0.02 on word processors for the CoCo.


-=[ Rogelio ]=-