CompuServe Thread

I haven't had any problems importing any IFF format image in to excellence!, however, I doubt I've tried many different formats… most of my graphic/DTP stuff is done in PageStream. excellence! treats a graphic as if it were a big charachter… it can be inserted at any point in a document that you can place the insertion point (cursor). Text around graphics… well sort of… if you insert the image as part of the text line, text will appear above the highest point of the graphic and on the baseline before and after where the graphic is inserted. If you want more traditional text flow around the image, then you would have to format the text to leave the space available where you will place the graphic… a bit cumbersome, but not difficult. All graphics can be sized and/or cropped… but keep in mind, this is a word processor, not an image manipulation program <g>. Because excellence! is a graphic oriented word processor, printing can be slow (because text is treated like graphic bitmaps)… one of the nice options that excellence! offers is the ability to use a printers internal fonts for speed, and still print the graphics. – Whapp!ng from the North Coast Michael

Version 2.0d of excellence! (the latest) is quite a bit faster than 1.x, and has lots of neat little features, like contents indexing, literal characters (put a copyright symbol in your text) and Postscript output. The ONLY thing it really doesn't do is let you snake text around an IFF graphic. You can have only one line of text next to an imported graphic, so essentially the image (if it's less than a page wide) has white space to one side or the other. Something that should be improved in the next edition. Graphics can be sized, however. The grammar checker/thesaurus/speller functions are quite good. It'll also handle math functions within text, do very nice headers, footers and footnotes, hyphenate automatically, and let you keep "glossaries" (style sheets) of often reused forms, a la Microsoft Word. It will work with HP printers. Postscript fonts can be created for on-screen reference. Utilities such as the speller, thesaurus can be moved into RAM for fast look-up in real time. Print merge is powerful and the print preview window is straight out of Wordperfect for MS-DOS. What's really nice is that you can print in draft to a dot matrix, or use the printer's internal font, or use a near letter quality mode with graphics, or use a complete graphics mode with all the font creation coming from excellence! (not what's aboard the printer). Gadgets let you lead out lines, do hanging indents, etc. It is Clipboard-aware, handles multiple columns, can print sideways, etc. And if you look carefully you can find it for $99. >> Ron Legro / Milwaukee via WHAP!

In an earlier note I mentioned WordPerfect. I forgot to mention that it also has a thesaurus and a large and user expandable spelling checker, but alas, no graphics. – via Whap!

"…they decided they knew better than CBM recopmmended coding conventions" Wayne: agreed. They do some weird stuff. I did qualify everything I said as being from the experience of a _casual_ user of excellence!, not a 'power user'. I'm sure that you've had quite a bit more experience with excellence! than I, and I urge Danny to take your comments to heart. – Whapp!ng from the North Coast Michael

Danny, You can set ProWrite to open in either interlace or noninterlace depending on your preferences. It's a fine program and I really like it a lot. New Horizons updates the program on a regular basis and you can get support here online in the New Horizons section on AmigaVendor. Roger

It really depends upon what you use WordPerfect for. I used it to develop a manual on REXX (not ARexx) and the company who used the material simply imported my WP V4 into their WP V5, did any necessary clean up, and then ran it through their DTP program for printing. While it would have been helpful if WP had upgraded the Amiga version so I could have included the extra V5 features into my document, it was still useful and beneficial. I see that WP 'tested the Amiga waters' and found them too cold to their liking, and so far have decided to not upgrade their Amiga product (even after I wrote them and asked them to, WELL!). Still, WP is a very useful product and not as clumsy as some WSYWIG'ers I have seen – but, there are pros and cons to everything, right ? One other thing about WP – it 'rolled well' into V2.04 since they were smart enough to not use special routines/functions that would croak under the new DOS. I was also able to easily reconfigure WP to use the entire overscan area which I use under V2.04, whereas many other products designed under V1.3 can't make that change or don't provide the ability to select it. It is really unfortunate that WP requires mega-buck returns before they make any investments. Their WP-Library package is really nice, though their calendar progam has one known snafu, but it is easy to deal with that. So, despite its lack of graphics capabilities, and its lack of more advanced features (it; kerning), V4 is a viable product. One just has to weigh all of the pros and cons and go on from there. – via Whap! (from Southern Illinois)

You CAN get support for WordPerfect. They're not dropping the support line. They're also going to continue to bug-fixes for the current version. They just uploaded a whole slew of new Amiga WP printer drivers to their support area on another network.

Danny, I don't think that WordPerfect Corp. has quit supporting products they all ready have. They just indicate that they will no longer develope for the Amiga. They do profess to support all their products. Not that I'm infavor of supporting a company that doesn't support it's customers with timely and useful upgrades. When and if New Horizons writes a IBM WP importer into ProWrite, they will become the #1 (undisputed IMHO) word processor on the market. – via Whap!