Amiga ISO Collection/AmigaDemoCD2.iso/ASCII/TEXTE/c.s.a.reviews/software/text/FinalCopyII_3

Internet Message Format | 1994-06-02 | 17.4 KB

Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Alan A.R. Quirt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Final Copy II, Release 2
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 27 Apr 1993 02:22:33 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
Lines: 366
Sender: [e-mail] (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
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Message-ID: <1ri5d9$[e-mail]>
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Alan A.R. Quirt)
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Keywords: word processor, graphics, commercial


PRODUCT NAME

    Final Copy II, Release 2 (Feb 25, 1993).
    USA version.


BRIEF DESCRIPTION

    A mid-range graphical word processor with exceptionally high-quality
printing using proprietary outline fonts.  Release 2 adds landscape printing
and support for Postscript Type 1 Fonts and standard Amiga Compugraphic
fonts.


AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

    Name:        Softwood, Inc.
    Address:    PO Box 50178
            Phoenix, AZ  85076
            USA

    Telephone:    [phone] (USA and Canada)
            [phone]


LIST PRICE

    $159 (US).  By mailorder, approximately $90 plus shipping.
An upgrade from Release 1 is available for $20 plus $5 shipping.


SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

    HARDWARE

        2 floppies or Hard disk (strongly recommended).
        1 MB RAM (more if using many fonts in a document).
        Barely adequate speed with a basic 68000 processor.

    SOFTWARE

        Requires Kickstart 1.3 or newer.


COPY PROTECTION

    None.

    Installs easily on a hard drive using Commodore's Installer.  The
Installer for the Release 2 update is not set up to update an existing hard
disk installation.  It insists on creating a new drawer to hold the program;
so if your disk is as full as mine, you may have to delete at least part of
your original installation before you install the new version.


MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

    Amiga 2000HD with 52 Mbyte Quantum drive.
    1 Mbyte Chip RAM. 2 Mbytes Fast RAM on A2091 disk controller.
    AmigaDOS 2.04 (Kickstart 37.175, Workbench 37.67)
    Commodore 1080 Monitor.
    Printers:  HP DeskJet 550C, Panasonic 9-pin.

SUMMARY

    Here's one more view of Final Copy II.  Like previous reviewers, I am
glad I bought it and consider it to be excellent value. The best new feature
in Release 2 is support for Postscript Type 1 fonts.

Pros:

-   Unbeatable output quality on any printer, from 9-pin to laser.
-   Fine tune text: kerning, leading, width scaling, and slanting.
-   Style tags let you easily play with the look of a document.
-   The structured drawing tools work well for simple shapes.
-   Prints bit-mapped graphics well, and flows text smoothly around them.
-   Handles left and right pages, at layout time and print time.
-   Nearly all Softwood fonts have full support for accented characters.
-   Outline fonts are used on-screen, so any size looks good.
-   Release 2 supports Amiga Compugraphic and Postscript Type 1 fonts.

Cons:

-   There is no Undo function, so save your work often.
-   Multi-column layouts apply to the whole document.
-   Layout is paragraph-based, not frame-based.  Not a desktop publisher.
-   Graphics always have fixed page positions: they cannot float with text.


THE FONTS

    Final Copy II release 1 had no support at all for standard Amiga
fonts.  That turned out to be a marketing problem, so Softwood added support
in Release 2 for Workbench 2.1 (or higher) Compugraphic fonts. I doubt I will
ever use them. I could not try them because I am still running AmigaDOS
2.04, but the upgrade documentation warns that quality is poorer than Nimbus
Q.  From my experience with PageSetter, I expect Compugraphic fonts to look
fine on the screen, and to print with smooth shapes but ugly letter spacing
(kerning).  To judge by comments on the network, other programs such as
ProWrite that use Compugraphic fonts have similar problems.

    I did try the Type 1 font support, using the two full disks of public
domain fonts that Softwood is supplying free with the upgrade until the end
of April.  The upgrade documentation warns you that the quality of public
domain fonts is spotty.  If this sample is typical, I agree.  Most have no
accented characters, some have no lower case, some have no numbers, and the
otherwise attractive Middleton font is missing lower case letter 'x'.  The
general look of many of them is less than professional.  Still, I'm planning
to keep about 15 out of 40 on my hard disk.  Some are fun novelties, such as
PostCrypt, a Halloween font with mossy letters.  By the way, on my slow
Amiga, Final Copy takes about 30 seconds to load a Type 1 font, and
rendering seems a bit slower than Nimbus Q both on screen and to printer.

    Nimbus Q fonts in Final Copy render faster than Compugraphic fonts in
PageSetter II, and print quality is better.  With my old Panasonic 9-pin
printer, characters are as smooth as the printer's best built-in fonts, but
the printer's narrowest lines are too thick for some fonts.  With my new
DeskJet 550C and the right paper, the overall impression is as professional
as Postscript laser printing.

    You cannot find public domain Amiga Nimbus Q typefaces on bulletin
boards, but the program comes with a generous selection.  Softwood counts
typefaces the way printer makers do, claiming 35.  I count 8 font families,
each supplied in plain, italic, bold, and bolditalic, plus 3 single-style
fonts.  Most are clones of standard Postscript laser printer fonts:  Avante
Garde, Bookman, Courier, Helvetica, Palatino, New Century Schoolbook, and
Times.  You also get the bland sans-serif font "SoftSans".  The specialty
fonts are Symbol, Old English, and a clone of the Postscript old-style font
Zapf Chancery.  The serif italic fonts are true italics, not just slanted.

    Softwood sells four font sets, each containing 25 name-brand
typefaces from ITC and Letraset.  A large poster included with the program
shows you samples of all of them.  They cost less than the going rate for
licensed fonts.  List price is $100 per set, but a typical mailorder price
is $60, and Softwood has had specials.  In comparison, Adobe's list price is
$149 (introductory price $59) for each set of 8 to 10 Postscript typefaces
that it sells for Adobe Type Manager.

    You should budget for at least one font set.  I decided that the
basic serif and sans-serif fonts were equally attractive in all the sets, so
I chose Set 1 to get Zapf Dingbats.  The joined script fonts Balmoral and
Rage Italic are good for certificates.  Bible Script looks like calligraphy.
Dolmen is ultra black, great for posters.  The 27 typefaces in Set 1
(including surprise extra weights of Bauhaus and Kabel) are equal to at
least 40 from Adobe, because Softwood doesn't need italic versions of the
sans-serif ones; you can slant any font.  There's also no need for condensed
versions when you can scale the width of any font.  It is great to be able
to scale a title to 94% so that it fits perfectly on one line.


PRINTING

    Typical print speed is a leisurely 5 minutes per page with either of
my printers, using their highest quality graphics mode.  Release 1 had
trouble multi-tasking during printing, but Release 2 is fine (though Final
Copy itself does nothing else while it prints).  By choosing a lower density
graphics mode (150 dpi on the DeskJet) I got reasonable rough printouts in
two to three minutes a page.  Forget about what Final Copy calls draft
printing.  It uses your printer's built-in fonts for speed, but totally
ignores your page layout.

    Release 2 adds the ability to print in landscape (wide) mode.  First
the good news -- it works, and output quality is fine.  But it is far too
slow to be practical on an unaccelerated Amiga.  A simple certificate that
normally printed in under five minutes took over 33 minutes on the DeskJet in
landscape mode.  Setup is also a bit awkward; you have to define a custom
page wider than it is high, and rearrange your margins.  For example, the one
labelled "right margin" controls the top of your sideways page.

    I've tried a little colour printing.  Using public domain print
drivers, the colours were murky and the printout had obvious raster lines.
Using the DeskJet driver from Wolf Faust's Studio package, the quality was
good, though a bit pale.  I'm sure I can make it much better by playing
with the dozens of adjustments.  A page of black text with one colour image
4 inches wide by 3 inches high took over ten minutes to print.  I hate to
think how long a big colour picture would take in landscape mode!

    I haven't tried Postscript printing, but it looks easy in the
documentation.  You can send printer output to a file if you don't have a
Postscript printer attached to your Amiga.  Postscript landscape mode seems
to use normal margins, unlike graphic printer landscape mode.


DOCUMENTATION

    There is an attractive, spiral-bound manual nearly 200 pages long.
It is clearly written and has plenty of illustrations and screen shots.  It
starts with a good introduction for beginners, including a short tutorial.
The next nine chapters each cover a topic such as Setting Preferences,
Formatting a Document, and Working with Graphics.  A nine-page Reference
section describes each menu very briefly.  Appendices include keyboard
shortcuts, a Glossary, and a list of Postscript font equivalents.

    One chapter describes Final Copy's outlining features.  They hardly
deserve a paragraph.  There are some predefined style tags that will indent
text so that it looks like an outline, but there are none of the features of
a real outliner like More on the Macintosh (or even Microsoft Word).
Perhaps they intended to have outlining, but it didn't work well enough to
release.

    There are some strange omissions.  For example the two sections on
deleting text mention the Cut menu function and the backspace key, but not
the Del key.  (It does work normally.)  There is no listing of the characters
in the supplied Symbol font, so you have to find out by trial and error.
The Table of Contents may be more useful than the Index.  For example, the
appendix on Postscript fonts is not listed under either "fonts" nor
"Postscript."

    The update documentation is one letter-sized page printed on both
sides.  It describes the new features briefly but gives no help with
installation.


USER INTERFACE

    Final Copy II has an attractive, 3-dimensional, "System 2" look with
a ribbon of formatting icons across the top.  It follows many of Commodore's
user interface guidelines, including standard keyboard shortcuts for basic
menu items like Open and Save (and the poorly chosen standard cut, copy, and
paste keystrokes which cannot be done with one hand).  It does not use
standard file requesters.

    I like little features, like hiding the mouse cursor when you start
typing, and highlighting a whole word including the following space (but not
a following punctuation mark) when you double click on it.  Like Macintosh
programs, Final Copy lets you replace a highlighted text block by simply
typing a new version.  I appreciate that feature on the Mac, but it is a
mixed blessing when there is no Undo.

    Text is rendered to the screen using selectable horizontal and
vertical resolutions.  That is slower than using prescaled screen fonts, but
ensures that any size of any font looks equally good.  The default of 80
horizontal by 72 vertical gives text and graphics proper proportions on an
interlaced or Productivity screen, but 80x80 is easier to read.  You can
select a non-interlaced screen to reduce flicker on older Amigas like mine,
but that gives you a choice of vertically stretched or illegible text.  I
don't have a flicker fixer, but I find the level of flicker tolerable using
the standard colour scheme and a cheap dark plastic anti-glare screen.

    There are some handy undocumented features in the interface.  Hold
down the Right Alt key, and the cursor turns into a magnifying glass with a
'+' in the middle.  Each mouse click magnifies the display by a factor of
two, and the text is redrawn in the higher resolution.  Shifted Right Alt
gives a magnifying glass with a minus sign; as you might expect it has the
reverse effect.  Smaller magnifications remain fully editable.  I found that
very handy for rearranging a page to correct the overall look.

    If you hold down the Right Amiga key, nothing visible happens, but if
you then press the left mouse button, the cursor turns into a four-way arrow.
You can then drag whatever is under the cursor to a new location on the
screen.  This is very useful when working at high magnifications.  (In my
opinion, the cursor should change before you press the button.)


GRAPHICS

    You can import IFF ILBM picture files and scale or crop them.  You
can create lines and boxes (round, oval, rectangular, or round-cornered) with
the built-in drawing tools.  Final Copy will flow text around the graphics
(for illustrations) or place the graphics under the text (for separator
lines or shaded text boxes).  However, you cannot import or export
structured drawings in any standard Amiga format, and you cannot treat text
as a graphic object that can be placed in arbitrary positions on the page.
The best you can do if you want a drop capital, for example, is to create it
extra large in a paint program, import it, and scale it down to reduce the
jagged look of its bitmapped image.


COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

    I have used WordPerfect and PageSetter (I and II) on my Amiga since
1987.  The whole family (including children age 10 and 12) now uses Final
Copy for letters, school reports, and anything else that comes along.  At
work I use More (an outliner and presentation graphics program) and
Microsoft Word, both on a big-screen Macintosh SE whose processor is as slow
as my Amiga's.

    Amiga WordPerfect is my obvious choice at home for heavy-duty
reports with tables, footnotes, and table of contents.  When I don't need
those features, and at home I seldom do, I use Final Copy for its graphics,
choice of fonts, and superb print quality.  Final Copy is a little slower
than Word (but to be fair I should compare it to Word plus Adobe Type
Manager).  I miss some Word features such as imported structured graphics
and the ability to change the number of columns within a document.

    Final Copy's ads are misleading.  They show a three-column
newsletter with a full width banner title across the top.  You can do that,
but only by putting the banner in a master page that will print on every
odd-numbered page.  If your newsletter is more than two pages long, you will
have the annoyance of having to create the front page as a separate
document.  In Word, you would just start a new section with a different
number of columns.  Structured graphics of course should allow text, as they
do in Word.  That would make it easy to have multi-column headlines and drop
capitals.

    The spell checker and thesaurus, licensed from Proximity Technology,
are first rate.  The spell checker is better than others I have used at
suggesting replacements that sound like a badly spelled word, and the
thesaurus gives helpful definitions not just a list of related words.


BUGS

    I hesitate to mention bugs nobody else has reported, as they may
just mean my hardware is flakey.  They are not reproducible, but I seldom use
the program for an hour without encountering one of them.

    The scroll bars are active in real time:  you can see the text move
as you drag them.  If I drag them quickly back and forth, or click quickly
on the single-line up/down gadgets, random garbage sometimes appears
superimposed on part of the text.  Fortunately the program appears to
recover if I just click in the scroll bar area to display a complete new
screenful of text.

    The other bug is less common but more serious.  During fast typing,
the whole program locks up and stops accepting mouse or keyboard input.  The
only thing I can do is switch to another screen either by keyboard or with
the screen-to-back gadget.  If I click on the Workbench, the mouse pointer
reappears and everything there works normally, even starting a new Final
Copy session.  I can return to the original Final Copy session, but it
remains locked up with no way to save the file or quit the program.


VENDOR SUPPORT

    Softwood quickly delivered the font pack and the upgrade to Release
2 that I ordered by phone.  I mentioned the bugs I had found in Release 1,
and the person I was speaking to said my report would be passed on to the
programmers, but Release 2 still has the same problems.

    I tried to buy a copy of the British English dictionary and
thesaurus, since British spellings are used in Canadian schools.  I got
nowhere.  The best their sales person could suggest was to write to their
British agent and buy a whole new copy of the British version of Final
Copy.  I plan to write to Softwood with a similar request, and will be most
interested to see what kind of response I get.  I'd prefer Email, but the
company does not seem to have any presence on the networks.


WARRANTY

    The only warranty is 90 days on the diskette medium.


CONCLUSIONS

    Final Copy is a fine word processor.  It has the three features I
wanted most:  style sheets, solid support for graphics, and truly
professional printed output.  There are a few additional features I'd like
to see, and some operations are painfully slow on my Amiga, but I'm glad I
bought the program.  It will be most interesting to see whether the next
release emphasizes desktop publishing (more layout control) or word
processing (index, table of contents, outlining).


COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    Copyright 1993 Alan Quirt.  All Rights Reserved.

---

   Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
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