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From: cbenson@computer-science.strathclyde.ac.uk (Calum Benson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Final Copy II (UK version)
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 18 Dec 1992 17:19:52 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
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Reply-To: cbenson@computer-science.strathclyde.ac.uk (Calum Benson)
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Keywords: word processor, graphics, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Final Copy II, Release 1 (UK VERSION)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
Final Copy II ("FCII") is a "document publisher"; in other words, a
"what-you-see-is-what-you-get" (WYSIWYG) word processor with some
graphical facilities.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
Name: SoftWood Inc.
Address: PO Box 50178
Phoenix, Arizona 85076
USA
Telephone: (602) 431-9151
DISTRIBUTED IN UK BY:
Gordon Harwood Computers
New Street
Alfreton
Derbyshire DE55 7BP
Telephone: (0773) 836781
LIST PRICE
99.95 UK sterling (or as little as 59.99 mail-order).
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
Requires 1Mb (or 1.5Mb on an A600HD).
I recommend at least another half megabyte of RAM
Two disk drives or a hard drive are also needed.
SOFTWARE
Runs on any Amiga running Workbench 1.3.3 or higher.
COPY PROTECTION
None. Hard-drive installation program provided, with
three levels of automation -- novice, intermediate and
expert.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
Amiga 500+
2MB Chip RAM, no fast RAM
Workbench 2.04
REVIEW
FCII is billed as "the final word in word processing with perfect
printing." It is a WYSIWYG word-processor that will print outline fonts on
any Workbench-supported printer connected to any Amiga (including WB 1.3.3)
at its highest resolution, as well as provide structured drawing tools and
facilities for importing IFF, HAM and 24-bit graphics into your documents.
It certainly sounds an attractive proposition... but is it really the "final
word," or is it stuck somewhere nearer the "middle of the page?"
The first task FCII performs on invocation (it can be run from
Workbench or CLI, incidentally) is to ask what sort of screen you want it to
run on -- Workbench or Custom, interlace or hi-res, and with 2, 4, 8 or 16
colours. Once you have to decided, you can either save your preference or
have FCII ask you every time it is run. Unfortunately, you can't change
screen formats once you've opened a document; you have to save your work and
restart the program.
Text Editing
============
Each document you edit (and there can be more than one
simultaneously, memory permitting) occupies its own window. Along the top
of each one is an array of gadgets for specifying text justification, tab
stops, hyphenation, line spacing, master/body pages (more about these later),
ruler formats, page number selection and the various graphics tools
available to you. These gadgets are reasonably clear, but on an interlace
screen they are a little too small; it's not the first time I've either
clicked on the wrong one or missed altogether! The justification gadgets
(left, right, centre and full) also tend to look a bit similar to each
other: the latter two in particular.
Horizontal and vertical rulers are available, with measurements in
inches, centimetres or picas. Either or both rulers can be switched off,
but you'll need the horizontal one if you're planning to set your own tab
stops. Horizontal and vertical scroll bars are provided for panning through
your document. The rest of FCII's features are accessed from the customary
menu strip along the top of the screen.
So, let's start typing. Text initially appears in the default
"SoftSans" font, which is pleasant enough but a little too informal for
business letters and the like. SoftSans isn't a recognised PostScript font
either, so if you're planning to print out to a PostScript device, you'll
have to use one or more of the twenty other fonts supplied with FCII.
Actually, "twenty" is a little misleading -- only courier, Times, Helvetica
and schoolbook are supplied, each in their standard, bold, italic and
bold-italic styles, making up twenty in all. Having bold and italic fonts
which have been designed from scratch, though, is far preferable to
simulating them by slanting or doubling up the standard font. Extra font
disks are available from SoftWood, incidentally, although I was unable to
find out the price.
It's worth pointing out that Final Copy fonts are a law unto
themselves, ignoring all Compugraphic, Intellifont, Adobe and any other sort
of standard. While this means that SoftWood has a monopoly on the creation
and sale of any new fonts, they do take up much less memory than the
aforementioned standard formats, and consequently load and scale much
quicker too.
The properties of any text you type can be readily altered by
highlighting the text concerned and making a selection from the "Font"
menu. This provides for changing the font, size, underlining style (if
any), width (50-150% of normal), case (normal, all capitals or small
capitals), colour and obliqueness (slant).
All the usual clipboard facilities (cut, copy, paste and clear)
are available, again by highlighting text and making a menu selection.
Naturally, keyboard shortcuts are available for these and other common
functions. One unusual clipboard feature is "column addition"; if you
highlight a column of numbers (while holding down the ALT key), FCII will
add them up and store the result in the clipboard, ready to be pasted
somewhere. Almost totally useless, but novel, nonetheless !
Word-wrapping is automatic, and justification (left, right, centre
or full) can be set separately for each paragraph, as can most of FCII's
other style features. Hyphenation can be switched on or off (again, for
each individual paragraph, if you wish), and the point along a line of text
at which a word should be considered for hyphenation is also
user-definable. FCII uses the Collins/PROXIMITY hyphenation system,
incidentally, so you shouldn't need to worry about it hyphenating your words
on the wrong syllables. Margins and tab stops are set by dragging markers
along the ruler at the top of the page, and again this can be a little
fiddly on an interlace screen. This is true of the left margin in
particular, since its marker is half the size of the right margin's to
accommodate yet another marker -- the "first line indent" marker, which is
used to set the amount that the first line of each paragraph should be
indented. As a result, this and the left margin marker look very similar;
they are both small, right-facing arrows, and although one sits slightly
above the other, they can be easily confused.
Left and right master pages can be defined, acting as templates
for each page of your document. Any graphics or text you place on these
will be placed on each of your document before you even start typing; the
most common use for these is for page numbers and suchlike. Not
surprisingly, the left master page acts as a template for all the
even-numbered pages in your document, and the right master page as a
template for the odd-numbered pages. There is no easy way of copying the
right master page to the left or vice-versa, though, so if you want the
same graphics and text to appear at the same place on every page, you will
have to rely on your skill and judgement to set up both master pages
identically.
Graphics
========
Where FCII pulls away from the rest of the competition is in its
ability to handle graphics -- not just IFF and HAM, but 24-bit as well,
not to mention its own structured drawing tools.
Importing an IFF/HAM/24-bit graphic into a document is simply a case
of selecting the "insert IFF ILBM" option from the graphics menu. A few
seconds later, the graphic will appear on your screen, either in grey scale
or colour according to your preference, ready to be moved, rescaled or
cropped. If you wish, a box of user-definable colour and thickness can be
automatically drawn around the graphic. The background colour can be made
transparent; if the background colour of the graphic was black, for example,
any black areas will not be printed, leaving the paper to shine through.
You can ask that text automatically flow round the left or right side of the
graphic, either vertically (i.e. in a straight line) or contoured -- the
latter is particularly useful for non-rectangular IFF brushes. Or you can
have no text flow whatsoever, allowing you to type all over your picture.
Finally, you can opt to save either the whole graphic with the document or
just a link to it (i.e. its pathname), which obviously takes up a lot less
memory. Note that this is a "cool" link rather than a "hot" one, so if you
are multitasking FCII with DPaint and use the latter to update one of your
graphics, the change will not take place in FCII automatically; you would
have to save your document and reload it.
FCII provides a number of structured drawing tools as well -- that
means that whatever you've drawn with them can be rescaled without any
loss of resolution (or a bad case of the jaggies). Lines, arrows, circles,
ovals, rectangles and rectangles with rounded edges are all available, in
any colour or thickness. The two-dimensional objects can be filled (in a
different colour to the border, if you wish), and any object can be
resized or moved after it has been drawn. Like IFF graphics, text can be
made to flow down or around either side of a structured graphic, or right
over the top of it. Depth-ordering is also possible, so if you are
insistent that the line runs underneath the oval but over the square,
there is no problem.
In practice, FCII's tools are not quite as powerful as they first
sound. Although you can group together a number of objects in a limited
way, the group can then only be moved or deleted, not resized. Individual
objects cannot be cloned (or at least, not without the intervention of
ARexx, which is fully supported), so if you want two identical ovals,
you will have to draw them separately, although you can specify the exact
position and size of any object, so it is not impossible. The tools are
very useful nonetheless for highlighting text or drawing simple charts and
diagrams.
Preferences
===========
As you might expect, there are a vast number of preferences which
can be set up within FCII. Here are a few of the more important ones:
Display Preferences -- Allow you to specify the unit of measurement
(inches, metric or picas) used throughout the document, the way in which
colours are displayed on-screen, and which page guides (if any) you wish
displayed -- these are faint lines which show the print and edit areas (of
which more later), header and footer areas, and columns, if you are using
them.
ASCII I/O Preferences -- FCII will read and write standard ASCII files.
This menu allows you to specify where the program should make new
paragraphs when doing this; the options are "at each new line character"
and "after each blank line" in each case.
Startup Preferences -- You can specify the default type and resolution of
the screen on which FCII runs, or alternatively have it ask you each time
you start it up.
Speller Preferences -- Allows you to alter the sizes of the areas of memory
used by the speller to improve its speed.
Hyphenation preferences -- Again, the size of the memory set aside as a
workspace while hyphenating text affects the speed; the options are
"Buffered" (slower) and "use 32K" (faster).
Document preferences -- Lets you specify in which format you would like the
date to appear in your documents (there are about a dozen possibilities),
whether to use 12 or 24 hour notation if you insert the time in your
document, and the page numbering style (Arabic, large or small Roman, or
large or small alphabetic).
Document Colour Prefs -- Up to 16 colours can be defined and named. These
colours are used only for text and when using any of FCII's drawing tools
-- they do not affect imported IFF graphics, and are not necessarily
related to the colours which are displayed on the screen. They will print
correctly, however.
Printing
========
SoftWood makes a lot of claims about the quality of FCII's printing
capabilities, and I have to say they are entirely justified. I have a
Canon BJ20 BubbleJet printer, and the quality of printouts produced on it
by FCII is virtually indistinguishable from a laser printer. As you would
expect, since the program's scaled fonts are really graphics rather than
ASCII text, printing is considerably slower than normal. My BJ20, which
is a slow printer anyway, will print a normal page of text in about ten
or fifteen seconds, whereas with FCII you can expect to wait for about ten
minutes for a 360x360dpi print. I stress again that the BJ20 is a slow
printer -- you can expect a dot matrix (or indeed a laser printer) to print
considerably quicker.
Before you can print anything, though, you are advised to set up
the preferences to take account of your printer's "print area" -- the area
of the page onto which it is physically capable of printing. This
information is usually to be found in your printer's manual. FCII uses
this information in conjunction with the information you give it about the
size of the "edit area" -- the area of the page onto which you want to be
able to type. For example, you may wish a 1" margin all round your page;
this is the edit area. If your printer can't print nearer than 0.25" from
the edge of the page, however (perhaps because there are sprocket holes
there), your 1" margin is actually only 0.75" as far as the printer is
concerned, because of the 0.25" "dead" area. Provided you can tell FCII
all about this, though, the program will compensate and you will have a
perfect 1" margin wherever you want it.
Unfortunately, the print area cannot be set at less than 0.25"
from either side of the page, although it can be set at zero for the top
and bottom. My Canon BJ20 can print up to 0.13" from the side of the page,
though, so it's impossible to set the print area correctly. However, if I
put my (A4 size) paper into the printer slot marked "USLegal", it all
seems to work correctly! Not ideal, but usable.
There are many print options available within FCII, including the
ability to print a range of pages rather than the whole document, to print
the document back to front (very handy -- if you're using cut sheet paper,
it then comes out the right way round!), or to print just the odd (or
even) numbered pages -- you can then put the printed pages back in your
printer back to front and print out the other pages, giving you a perfect
document printed on both sides of each sheet. If you _are_ printing on
both sides, rather than setting "left" and "right" margins for each page
you set "inner" and "outer" -- usually, you will want to set the inner
margin wider than the outer, so that is looks good when bound.
Print density, colour correction and grey-scale algorithm (ordered
dither or halftone) are selectable from this requester as well, and there
is also the option to print out in a draft mode, in which all graphics are
ignored and text is printed in your printer's own font -- this is obviously
far quicker than a graphic printout, but no notion of layout is included
in the print.
Finally, you can also print to PostScript printers, or if you
don't have one, you can save your document as a PostScript file and port
it on to the machine of somebody who does and print it out there! I
haven't tried this myself, but having seen sample documents printed on a
Star laser printer, it seems to work perfectly well.
Miscellaneous Features
======================
Finally, a look at a few of the features which don't quite fit
into any other category.
FCII has both a 100,000+ word spell checker and an 80,000+ word
thesaurus. For the UK, both use the proper spellings of words. :-)
The speller is unusual in that it uses the Collins/PROXIMITY
method, which is based on not just what the word looks like but how it
sounds, so when it suggests a replacement for a misspelled word it is
more likely to come up with something sensible. A user-dictionary can be
created, but only one; you can't make up a number of different ones and
specify which one you wish to use. There is no batch mode, either, so you
have to deal with each spelling mistake as it is detected, rather than be
given a listing of them all when it has finished checking the whole
document.
A number of styles can be defined for text, so you can give a name
(eg "headline", "body text") to a set of parameters (such as size = 12pt,
font = Times, tab stops = every 0.5 inches) and use that "style" for any
section of text you type. For example, if your document includes a number
of headlines, you might set up a "headline" style which uses Helvetica
Bold font in 18pt size, which is centred on any given line. Then, if you
change your mind later and want all your headlines to be in Times instead,
you only need to change the definition of your "headline" style, and all
the text which was designated as a "headline" in your document will be
changed accordingly.
A mail merge facility is also provided, so that if you provide
FCII with a file of names and addresses, say, you can send a personalised
letter to each of them.
If you wish, FCII will print a number of columns to a page, but
this must then be adhered to throughout the document -- this isn't DTP, you
know!
And as a final miscellany, FCII fully supports ARexx, allows you to
insert the current date or time at any point in your document (and update
them later on), and sort paragraphs alphabetically.
DOCUMENTATION
Documentation is in the form of a thick, spiral bound tome of a
couple of hundred pages or so (although it's difficult to tell -- the pages
aren't numbered as such, but use the "Chapter -- Page number within chapter"
style.
When you've been using computers for a long time, it's always
difficult to judge whether or not a beginner would understand any given
documentation, but it was all clear enough to me, and my less
computer-literate brother had no problems either! The manual leads you
through a tutorial in the first few chapters, building up to more advanced
features later on. A reference section is given at the back, but this only
covers the menus, not the (large) requesters.
LIKES AND DISLIKES
FCII is beautifully presented, and looks as good as any piece of
software you'll see on an Amiga. Graphics are handled quickly and easily,
and the drawing tools are very useful, if a little limited. Print quality
is superb.
On the downside, screen updates are understandably sluggish on a
standard A500, and some people might find the five fonts supplied a bit
limiting. An indexing/contents feature would be nice too.
COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS
The only real competitor for FCII is the recently-released Wordworth
2, from Digita. It too is a WYSIWYG document publisher, but will only
produce outline fonts on WB2 machines. It does use bitmap fonts as well,
though, and you can even use your printer's internal fonts on the same page
as your graphics and Compugraphic fonts! Otherwise, the feature list is
very similar indeed to FCII, the only major differences being the inclusion
of indexing/contents generation, and the fact that it uses standard
Compugraphic fonts, so there is a much wider range available.
Wordworth, however, is really not practical unless you have a hard
disk, and takes an age to set up. You really need at least 2.5Mb to make it
usable, and it costs more too!
BUGS
So far I have come across two problems. The first is that,
occasionally, and under circumstances which I have yet to pin down, any text
which you have written in some font other than the default SoftSans will
mysteriously revert back to being displayed (and printed) in SoftSans. The
only way to get it back is to save your document and reload it, which is a
bit annoying for floppy-based users in particular.
Also, the program once crashed when I tried to import a HAM graphic
while running FCII in 16 colour interlace mode. This hasn't happened since,
but if it's happened once there's no reason why it shouldn't happen again.
FCII has also crashed a couple of times on me whilst I switched it
into the background to use the Workbench. This may just have been due to a
lack of memory, though; I only have 2Mb on my machine.
WARRANTY
SoftWood guarantees the disks against failure for 90 days.
CONCLUSIONS
Final Copy II is without doubt an excellent piece of software. No
other word-processor can beat its output (particularly if you are running
WB1.3, which doesn't support outline fonts), and it has more than enough
features to deal with letters, reports or books. As with any such program,
the more money you can throw at your Amiga in the form of accelerators, hard
drives and memory expansions, the better FCII will perform. But it is also
very usable on a standard A500 (albeit with an extra disk drive), and for
poor people like me, that gives it the edge over its main competitor,
Wordworth 2. It's also 30% cheaper. Provided you bear in mind that it's
NOT supposed to be a DTP package, it will serve you well for a long time to
come .. well, until the next version is released, at any rate!
---
Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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