width of your choosing and without disturbing surrounding text. The speed of the sort slows down considerably with wide and long columns. Spelling checker. Script 64 provides on the same diskette as the word processor, a spelling checker program. With this you can review your text for any misspellings or typographical errors before committing it to paper for a really perfect job! The program allows you to build a dictionary based on your own word usage. The more you use it, therefore, the larger it becomes. This dictionary must be maintained on a separate disk, unless you use the 80SO or 82SO drives. Spelling checker programs are great for the really miserable speller or typist, but do take some extra time to use and maintain. They are fairly popular, however, and sell separately for $SO.OO or more. The inclusion of one with this program is a real bargain. Table of contents. This is a rather neat feature for the book or manual writer. With the proper format command beside your chapter or section headings, plus the page number on which it occurs, PaperClip saves this information to a disk file when you do an output to video. The program is careful to gather this information only during the first pass on output. When the entire book is finished, you load in the file, format it and you have a table of contents all ready. Word count. This feature, unique to PaperClip is a real blessing for writers. During output to video or printer the number of words in the file is displayed on the status line. Students who must write a 3000-word essay now can have a clearer idea of where they stand. Authors asked for an article "not to exceed ISOO words" can now stop fretting. And freelance writers who are paid by the word can now be sure of how big a cheque they can expect!
Printing
or course the goal of word processing is to get you r words down on paper, so the program's ability to support your printer is very important. Many printers have very sophisticated capabilities that must be addressed by the software via control codes. There are two different approaches taken by these four programs. Word Pro and Easy Script address the printer from within the program. They are particularly designed for Commodore printers. ASCII printers are supported generally, but any special control codes must be specifically embedded in text by the user. Script 64 has a number of the most popular printers already configured in its program, but, like PaperClip, also uses separate printer files that are loaded into the program. This latter approach allows a high degree of customization for you r particular printer. PaperClip offers dozens of printer files on its disk for many popular models, and, along with Script 64, provides special programs with which you can create your own file and merge it permanently with the word processor. Table 2 lists most of the major printing functions these programs offer. Some of the more interesting ones are commented on below. I 0, 12, I S- pitch. Script 64 will produce only I 0-pitch on Epson printers. In I 0-pitch it does a bold print that is certainly attractive. When you select 12 or I S-pitch, however, you are given normal I 0-pitch.
WordPro is the grandaddy of word processors for Commodore computers. Consequently its editing and formatting conventions have become more or less standard. Script 64 uses a unique approach to the handling of data. First of all, formatting is handled by control maps that set margins, page length , etc. These control maps are accessed in separate screens outside of the text.
Characters not on keyboard. Certain commonly used characters, such as the cent sign, do not exist on the 64's keyboard. These are accessible by assigning their ASCII value to a specified key. Each program handles this important function slightly differently, but they all work fine.
As mentioned earlier, Script 64 accepts text in distinct screens. This has the advantage of allowing you to retain chunks of data separate from the rest of text and print them out in different documents or places. There is a significant disadvantage, however, in that you have to manually advance to the next screen by pressing the Fl function key every 22 lines. I found myself typing away and forgetting this limitation. Some of my words were lost before I looked up and realized it. Although the program does display the
The Transactor
word " LIMIT" and provide an audible alarm when you reach the screen's limit, I am a touch-typist and am not used to not watching the screen at all times. I also prefer to keep the 64's sound off while word processing. Others may not be bothered by this.
Continuous printing. Easy Script and PaperClip have an extra feature of changing to continuous printing in the middle of a run when you did not specify it at the beginning. Device number. Easy Script allows you to have more than one printer connected. (Some interfaces allow this very conveniently). Since two devices can not have the same number, you can change one of them from within the
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Volume 5, Issue 01