PPage & Transwrite
I have had a chance to take a look at Gold Disk's ProPage companion program
-Transwrite-. I thought I'd post some of my reactions.
-Transwrite- is the -ProPage- 2.0 replacement for the package called
-Transcript-. PPage and Transwrite are meant to work in concert, but it is
possible to buy either one individually.
The idea is to provide PPage a dedicated editor that may be reached via a
PPage hot key. Since PPage is very slow to redraw the screen, editing text
is time consuming, and awkward. Transcript is a very fast editor. It will
accept files in text, WordPerect and ProWrite formats, allow you to edit
these file (including addition of boldface, italics and underline
attributes) and dump them directly into PPage boxes.
From the PPage side, it is possible to highlight boxes of text, or
highlight all the linked boxes invloved in the text of a given file, snap
into Transwrite (with an easy Amiga-/) edit and snap back to PPage.
This process works. It is pretty easy, though to Guru the machine doing
so. I was working on a 2000HD/00 with 3Meg of ram (including a fatter
Angnus) running PPage 1.3. Part of the trouble was probably unfamiliarity
with Transwrite-PPage linking, but every new user will be in the same
situation. Inexperience users in general will probably have difficulty
learning what they can and cannot do.
The manual is fairly good. There is an extremely brief tutorial which
addresses no more than input, blocking, and moving. There is reletively
little in the manual concerning the concurrent use of PPage and Transwrite.
Which do I bring up first? Can I add Transwrite to the icon for PPage, so
they both execute when I double-click on my PPage Icon? How do I set TW up
to load in Interlace mode? These are things I didn't find in the manual.
The lexicon used for TW has some fairly esoteric words represented.
Philanthropic was one I didn't expect it to find. Ditto augury and
paleolithic.
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