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-
- I just got a disk from my father, in Israel, which contains version
- 2.1 of a new Hebrew/English text editor called QTEXT. As near as I
- can tell (and as reported in the current HUG newsletter) this is a
- FREE text editor written by an Israeli kibbutznik. It has some of the
- limitations of a text editor vs. a full-blown word processor, but it
- also has some unusual strengths. For starters, it appears to be
- bug-free and to perform within the limits of what it claims to be able
- to do, flawlessly. Following are some of the notes I made as I
- experimented with the document tonight (the notes are written using
- QTEXT).
-
- As a text editor, all files are stored in ASCII. As you enter the
- editor, you get a message "2039 lines remaining", which presumably
- sets an upper limit on document size. Frankly, if you need more space
- than that, you probably want a full-fledged word processor like
- Multi-Lingual Scholar or WordMill.
-
- If you are going to use this for Hebrew, you will need either
- a Hebrew chip, or Hebrew EGA/VGA char set.
-
- There is word wrap, but once a line wraps, the line ending is
- treated as a hard line ending, and does not rewrap upon editing.
-
- Inserting and deleting lines follow the WordStar standard: ^Y and
- ^N, respectively, but the bold and underline codes are different.
-
- There is an entire manual on disk, but in Hebrew. If you are not
- facile with Hebrew, there is a quite adequate "quick help"
- facility, which may also be printed out.
-
- There are all of the traditional block features, including one
- that is not seen so frequently--lower/upper case the block. You can
- even print a block. The program also supports headers and footers,
- although I didn't experiment.
-
- I'm not sure what printers are supported. Mine doesn't know from
-
- Hebrew, so it was a poor choice for experimenting. My suspicion is
- that printing is done by treating your printer as a standard, plain
- vanilla DOS printer.
-
- The Hebrew function works perfectly--not only does the Hebrew begin
- inserting itself at the current cursor position and flow
- properly, but when you switch back to English, your cursor
- position is quite correct. You can also remap the keyboard. ("font
- assignment")
-
- You can access two documents at a time, but interestingly, there
- is no feature to view your directory. I used PC-Tools, which is
- always memory resident on my computer, to look for files. At the
- same time, unlike many low-end word processors, this program has
- no trouble accessing files from different subdirectories.