XLENT Software (UK) £29.95
XLENT have been providing 8-bit users with
interesting print related software for a while now, but this marks
their first attempt at a comprehensive word processing package. My
initial impressions are that it's a thoroughly practical piece of
software with some unique features, and is good enough to give the
established favourites like Atariwriter and Paperclip a real run for
their money.
The program comes in the slim A5 size plastic wallet popular with
many companies, and this contains an unprotected program disk plus a
detailed 56 page instruction manual. Unfortunately, the manual isn't
indexed, but otherwise seems well written and organised. The disk
includes DOS 2.5, so the 130XE's ramdisk can be used, if required.
PRACTICAL DESIGN
While the program is by no means completely
'intuitive' in use, the author seems to have tried hard to make it
nice to work with. He's included such features as variable
background and text colours and intensities, choice of flashing
block or underline cursor, selectable insert or overtype mode, and
joystick or keyboard input for cursor movement and scrolling.
The main edit screen is divided into three areas,
these being a tab/ruler line, a twenty line editing window, and a
four line command window. The command window is used for status,
prompt, and error messages from the program's various functions. It
also contains six icons for selecting print, copy, cut, paste,
search and disk utility functions. To use these you simply select
the required icon and then follow the prompts appearing in the
window alongside. It couldn't be easier.
Many of the prompts require a reply through the
keyboard. The most frequently needed reply is already on screen as a
default, so all you need do is hit Return. In the unlikely event of
you getting stuck and not knowing what to do next, pressing the Esc
key once or twice will return you to edit mode. Strangely, you don't
usually return to your original position in the text, and sometimes
find the typing mode has changed too. If you need even more
assistance there are four help screens packed with useful
information available at a push of the Help key.
Editing is very straightforward, with Cursor, Insert,
Backspace, and Delete keys doing just what you'd expect. In fact,
the operation of the Delete key has been augmented somewhat. Shift
Delete brings up a menu in the command window, giving you the choice
of deleting to end of word, line, sentence, or paragraph. Sensibly,
the default is for line – again exactly what you'd expect.
Less frequently used functions are accessed by
pressing Shift Control plus a third key. This permits operations
such as counting words; turning wordwrap on and off; calculating
number of disk sectors required to save the document; marking up to
five distinct positions in the text and then jumping to any of them
as required (VERY useful); changing cursor shape, background and
text colour and intensity; key repeat and joystick response speeds;
and highlighting all the additional spaces shown on the screen
resulting from wordwrap or return characters.
A buffer is used to handle the copy, cut, and paste
functions. It's only 800 bytes long though (one screen), which can
sometimes be a limitation. Unusually, this buffer may be edited, so
you can copy something into it, change it, and then paste the new
version back into a document. You can also create new text in it,
either by keying it directly or loading a file from disk.
HANDLE TWO DOCUMENTS
It's possible to copy, cut, and paste between two
documents by using the program's dual window facility. This divides
memory into two halves, and permits the loading and editing of a
document in each part. The cut and paste buffer is shared between
the two windows, giving the ability to move or copy text from one to
the other.
Rather than having two small windows on the screen simultaneously,
you flip between two full size windows. My only criticism of this is
that the program resets the view to the start of the document each
time you flip windows. It would be far better if it returned you to
the point from which you left it.
The usual selection of disk functions are included,
such as directory, load, save, delete and format. Load options allow
you to append files to the document in memory, or insert them at any
point within it. Save options permit the saving of the whole file or
any selected portion of it. Together, these give you another way of
cutting and pasting between documents.
Yet another unusual feature is the disk to screen
spool function. This allows you to read a file from disk and display
it on the screen WITHOUT having to save the file already in memory.
How many times have you wanted to have a quick look at a disk file
because you've forgotten what's in it? Well now you can, and without
the usual save, load, reload hassle.
The program is well endowed with text formatting
features, implemented via directives. These are control codes placed
on special format lines within the text. Facilities include left,
right, top and bottom margin settings, physical and logical page
size, immediate and conditional page eject, line spacing, centring,
justification, three part headers and footers, normal and hanging
indents, and page numbering. There are some unusual directives too.
For example text blocks can be selectively skipped, output paused at
chosen points, and separator lines printed.
Formatting includes the handling of hard spaces and
soft hyphens. The first is used when you want to link two words
together to prevent them being split across two lines. Soft hyphens
may be put into long words to show where to break and hyphenate them
when they won't fit onto a line. If the word does fit, the hyphens
don't appear. Clever stuff, this!
|
'good enough
to give ... Atariwriter Plus and PaperClip a real run for
their money'
|
 |
80 COLUMN PREVIEW
Output can be directed to printer, screen, or disk in
single or double column format, with double column handled in a
single pass, if required (XL/XE only).
Screen output is used for previewing printout. It's
produced in 80 column mode in a vertical scrolling 14 line window.
The tiny special characters are quite legible (on my TV, anyway) and
are perfectly adequate for preview purposes.
Disk output may be used for transferring formatted
text to other programs, like XLEnt's own Megafont package, or for
bulletin board uploads.
Long documents can be built up from several files –
chained together so they print as a single document. It's also
possible to include external files within the main body of a
document. For instance, you could insert standard paragraphs into a
document from a standard text library. There's also a mailmerge
feature for producing personalised standard letters.
CONTROL THAT PRINTER
Facilities for controlling your printer haven't been
forgotten either. The Atari international character set is supported
and you can embed printer control characters in your text to handle
the printer's special features. You can also load in custom designed
character sets, a sample being provided on the disk.
There's also a printer driver construction set which
allows you to set up your own control toggles for underlining,
boldface, subscripts, and anything else your printer is capable of.
You can even print graphics along with your text, but only on Epson
compatible printers. Uncompressed 62 sector picture files, B/Graph
picture files, or Typesetter (another XLEnt product) icons may be
converted into printable bit image files using a utility provided.
There's just one more feature I must mention,
available only on the 130XE. This is a print spooler — not to be
confused with the disk to screen spooler described earlier. This
enables your Atari to print out a document while you get on with
further editing of the same or another document. I found it slightly
disappointing in that the printer runs slower than normal, and
there's a noticeable slowing of keyboard response when in use. No
input gets lost though, as the program uses a type-ahead buffer.
Using a Star SG10 printer on a Blackthorn interface, I found the
printout occasionally stopped altogether, but could be restarted by
pressing the BREAK key. OK, so it's not 100% successful, but look on
it as an interesting bonus.
GREAT VALUE
What can I say except this XLEnt product really lives up to its
name! It's friendly, reliable (apart from the odd idiosyncrasy), and
chock full of useful features. The only extra items I'd like to see
included are a good spell checker, automatic heading levels and
table of contents generation –perhaps XLEnt will add these later.
And if they wanted to be really innovative they could add an outline
processor and thesaurus, too. Now that WOULD be something to shout
about!
All in
all this product represents great value for money. If you're
considering buying a word processor, make sure you see this one
before you decide. I think you'll like it.
Coming soon ...
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