#WPCorp & Amiga
I'm very disappointed to learn WP won't do a full 5.0 release for Amiga.
However, I'll continue to use WP where it makes the most sense, primarily in
academic work requiring footnotes, indexes, table of contents, thesaurus,
etc.–things no Desktop Publishing program supports. WP is the only word
processor on the Amiga at present that does all this with full freedom of page
formatting (i.e., intermixing multiple column formats on a page or in a
document). I don't particularly care about picture support–I'm not using your
program for artwork preparation. However, I do care about WYSIWYG (the reason
WP was first invented), color, and font support. Here's why:
1) I use excellence! (another word processor) to prepare 35mm slides. With
color and fonts, it's much faster than Aegis' Video Titler, and uses a fraction
of the disk space. With color and font support, I could use WP instead. Yes,
I would prefer a single program that does all the text things I want to do,
instead of having to remember options from multiple programs.
2) For general writing, I set up a page that is one screen in size, two
columns wide, and using a font I designed to get maximum information on a
single screen. WP and TOPAZ-80 won't let me get as much data on screen at a
time. That's important–otherwise we'd all still be using 40-column TV-format
screens.
I've put off purchasing a DTP program–I was hoping WP would come out with
a version that would combine its excellent document features with fonts.
Desktop publishing programs can make pretty output–but can they intersperse
automatically-numbered footnotes at the bottom of each page and produce a
correctly-numbered index and table of contents at the same time? I don't know
of any. I'm going to miss having WP 5.0. I thought WP was dedicated enough to
its product to make it work on EVERY machine, and I thought that Amiga passing
the 1,000,000 production mark would insure we'd be included. I guess not, and I
suspect WP will begin to lose market share as a result. Anyway, thanks for
being honest with us.