A WORD IN YOUR SPECTRUM

The Spectrum is under-estimated as a word processing machine, says John Wase. Here he reviews eight programs in support of his argument.

Word processing does not require much computer power. PipeDream on the new Z-88 uses exactly the same Z-80 chip as all versions of the venerable Spectrum. Thus the Spectrum, too, should, in theory, provide good word processing facilities, although in practice there are limitations like memory. A 48K Spectrum has around 41K for both program and text file, around 110K for the 128K version, and the screen display at only 32 columns.

Nevertheless, I found eight readily-available packages, plus variants for various models, of assorted prices, features, sophistication and complexity. Each has been written with some particular purpose in mind and all have virtues and vices associated with what is, after all, a compromise, for no word processing program suits everyone or all applications.

The constraints of the 32-column screen are overcome in a variety of ways. In some programs text lines continue along a second or third display line and end with some recognisable symbol, while in others the screen is re-defined to up to 80 characters per line, further augmented by multiple lines or sideways scrolling, giving as many as 148 characters per printer line.

While it is possible to provide a good deal of the information about the packages in tabular form, it really gives little feeling for the strong and weak points, the aims and the overall success of each package. Therefore I have chosen a combination of tables and comment to provide sufficient information to guide you in choosing packages suitable for your needs. The packages are Mini-Office, a suite of programs for younger children; Ramprint, an add-on printer interface with integral word processor; Spectral Writer, bundled with Wafadrive; WordMaster; Word Manager; The Last Word; The Writer and finally, the Tasword family. They are listed in table one, along with the outstanding features of each package, the cost and supplier.

The easiest thing to do is to take them in groups. First, Mini-Office, which has a very simple set of instructions on a cassette-sized book; interpretation by an adult will be necessary. There is a simple test piece to be typed-in; it appeared in big letters an inch or more high in yellow on a black background on my old TV; it is very easy for a child to write a simple letter but with very little more scope.

The normal mode is insert and there is also a crude copy, so letters or lines can be added or deleted; crude tabs complete the features. The main menu offers the usual save, verify, load or options with a further choice of double height, double width, margin setting and characters per line.

It could have been an excellent program to introduce a child to an integrated suite had it been revamped but there are no facilities to use a printer other than the obsolete Sinclair gadget or compatibles, and the other options integrate badly into the word processor. You would need a suitable printer for your child to make the most of it.

The next pair are proper programs, both intended for the serious user, and both released relatively early. Tasword 2, a development of Tasword on the ZX-81, provides a 64-character line, a fixed text length of 320 lines - 10-and-a-bit pages of double-spaced A4. Spectral Writer is similar but with squarer letters some say much more legible. In both programs insertion is by opening a word or a line and then re-justifying; there is no auto insert mode.

LINE AND COLUMN

Line and column are given on-screen but there is no word count. The cursor will move by line, character, or to the start or finish of the text; in Tasword 2 it is very slow. Word wrap is automatic, characters and lines can be deleted, blocks can be moved and copied and there is a crude search and replace.

Text can be justified with smooth or ragged right margin and centred and margins can be set for tables but there are no tabs in Tasword 2 and no headers, footers or auto-page numbering, no mail-merge, conditional printing or macros; just start and finish lines, one copy only. You can put eight printer codes in the program at once and change them whenever you like.

Both programs are good, straightforward, very simple word processors. You can achieve professional results very quickly Spectral Writer scores by having tabs, a line-end bell and is a little slicker but it normally is only bundled with Wafadrive, Tasword 2 is ubiquitous and bundled with Microdrives.

The chief advantage of both programs is that they are very simple; much is in Basic and is easily user-adapted. The major disadvantage is that printer control codes in the text destroys WYSIWYG concept unless you adopt low cunning or a patch. For simple letters of only a few pages they are easy and adequate.

The other processors are, in general, more sophisticated and it is probably easier to deal with their main features in a large table and just comment briefly on their strengths and weaknesses. The simplest is probably Ramprint, a printer interface and joystick port with a built-in word processor on ROM. I found the documentation brief but the gadget easy to use.

Although it contains most features one needs, there are disadvantages. It will work only with tape or Microdrives, for instance, and it will display only 32 columns when you are entering text, making complex work almost impossible, although it will display a 64-column screen to show you what the work will be like at the end.

That apart, having the works in an EPROM means that there is no software to load; plug it in, type one command and go. For straightforward documents, also those needing underlining, italics and other such fancy bits, even page numbering, it works and works well.

Word-Master again is for the Spectrum owner who has no discs. It works well with tape or Microdrive and an EPROM-driven interface. Within limitations I found a program which was specifically aimed at crude desk-top publishing. The documentation could be improved and I did not particularly like its 64-column character set. A further problem is that right justification could not be implemented on-screen, although was satisfactory when printed; that does not help DTP layout.

Against that, several files can be held in memory at once, page numbers, headers and footers are catered for and printer control codes are handled beautifully, either in a command line which does not print but affects the text below or as special characters for the more common sorts, so that H2O can be printed readily without upsetting justification.

PICTURES

Pictures can be incorporated with the graphic commands and text can be printed either to the right or to the left of it; again, instructions are a little sparse. Graphmate, a separate, stand-alone program, produces bar charts or pie charts easily but with provision for labelling axes left to Word-Master. The programs are independent and the products of Graphmate have to be saved before incorporation.

Cardex also supplied Headliner on a separate tape. It will produce headlines in a variety of styles for subsequent incorporation. This is a useful suite as it stands; further development and the production of disc/128K versions using more interfaces would make it still better.

Word Manager 4 is aimed at a different end-user, evident from its being bundled with Mail and Address Manager II. The review version 4.2 has a number of improvements over earlier issues, including a completely re-written Address Manager II. All saves and loads are in Basic and I liked particularly the single keypress to modify and transfer everything to disc. The 64-column character set looked almost like script, unlike any of the others; I liked it. The normal screen is bright. Lines longer than 64 characters are wrapped round and shown on the line below - not bright.

The instruction book was adequate. Some features were easy to use but I did not like the constant switching between modes to use cursors and delete, the lack of on-screen prompts - particularly caps - or the way in which paragraphs were completed before on-screen justification took place.

Page numbering is there but not headers or footers. Address Manager II is a database specific for Word Manager; Mail Manager takes the text from Word Manager and the names and addresses from Mail Manager and integrates them. There are conditional indices for Mr. Mrs. M/s or Miss but no real conditional printing is available.

For circulation of simple club letters or even, at a pinch, a short club magazine, this would do the trick satisfactorily if you get used to the vagaries involved in editing and, at the price which includes all three programs, it is unbeatable.

In contrast, The Last Word has a very well-produced and extensive manual. I found it very easy to use. Again, all the loads and saves are in Basic but you will have to type-in some new lines - supplied - to get it working from Microdrive or disc; a novice might not like this.

The screen display is changeable from 40, 48, 60 or 80 characters per line - not too good on a monitor, better on a large television set where the slight fuzz causes the eye to assume a good deal. It has most of the features one might expect, like headers, footers, page numbers, selected printing from Basic and mail-merge, with its own data files.

Because lines are terminated by a carriage return symbol there is no insert mode; you have to split a line to insert letters or words. Screen refresh is a trifle slow and the program is 48K, although the author says that there is the possibility of a 128K program in the future.

That said, everything else is good. Control codes do not disturb justification; by screen wrap-around you can get up to 148 characters per line; formatting is very flexible, exiting into Basic to insert your own routines is encouraged and examples given.

Tutor files loaded from tape help you to learn to manipulate text and load and save mail-merge information. Although I had never used it previously and am very familiar with another processor, I found the keys logical and liked the program.

NO COLOURS

The Writer is in two versions, 48K and 128K. Although Softek was very helpful on the telephone and promised to send both programs, plus The Artist, plus a pre-release version of The Filer, they did not arrive in time for this review. Fortunately I was able to borrow a 48K version of The Writer. It is well-presented with a good instruction book. No colours are used; the screen is uniformly white letters on a black background and looks very smart.

The 64 characters a line lettering is clear, square rather like Spectral Writer - and easy to read. The normal text manipulations are on symbol or extended mode and the program starts in insert mode. Press "Edit" and move the arrow over the top-line menu; up comes an overlay menu with obvious choices for all the things like file handling, saving and so on.

Printing includes mail-merge, conditional printing and can include calculations. All in all, a very impressive package. I found it easy to use, too, and liked it. The 128K version contains a pagemaker facility which imports pictures from The Artist. I had hoped to be able to look at this, too, and compare it to the Word-Master DTP facilities.

Finally, the Tasword series. Tasword 3 uses the same black on white character set as Tasword 2 - adequate and readable but scarcely exciting - but there the similarity ends. Because, unlike several of the other programs, all loads and saves are in machine code, there are a number of versions to fit various machines and devices, including Microdrive. Opus and Disciple discs, but there is no tape version, because to fit in all the features and still keep a respectable length file, the main menu is fed in as an overlay; it is frustrating to have to wait seven seconds for it to load from Microdrive or Opus.

All the standard features are present; mail-merge from Masterfile or from its own address lists produced from within the program, headers, footers, pagination, plenty of control codes to send, print several text files sequentially, print multiple copies, customise program, overtype - standard - or insert mode, word count, space remaining - do not fill it too tightly, though.

The main menu is, like all the Spectrum Taswords, accessed by symbol shift and A; the rest is easy. The manual is well-printed and laid-out and a tutor file is included. The 128K versions are almost exactly the same, except for the control key for insertion and some tidying as the Amstrad Spectrums no longer have symbols on the keys.

The main menu appears instantly and the text file is large, between 40 and 50 pages of double-spaced A4, which is a tremendous advantage if you write complicated documents and need to keep referring to what has gone before. The new +3 version appears similar to the user but contains code enabling a spellchecker to work and the extended mode bug which locks the main menu has been fixed.

The biggest disadvantage is the lack of justification when control codes are inserted - redeemed by a patch from Seven Stars Software; against this is the ease of use and the fact that Tasword and Masterfile are both available on a range of machines, even PC compatibles. Again, I liked Tasword; it works well and is good value.

Compared to most other machines, the choice of word processors on the Spectrum is wide and some are technically very good. There is no need to buy that new Amstrad or PC-compatible if all you want is a word processor, particularly if you have a +2 or a +3 with their good keyboards. After all, Tasword is very similar on the PC. Moreover, the PC will not play budget games as well when you are not using it.

RAGE HARD!

You wanna know what's hardest in hardware? Once again YS whips out the magic screwdriver in our first hardware round up of '88.

It's been ages since we did a really ripping hardware spread, so we thought it was about time. After a bit of barking at Phil Snout to get his screwdriver out and look at these beasts, we've pulled together a positive cornucopia of hoopy hardware and super software, to turn even the most soft-boiled trainspotter into a hard-boiled egghead.

The star of our show is Miles Gordon Technology's Plus D disk interface, the only real alternative for tape users to upgrade to a +3, from the designers of the Disciple. Check out the review further on.

Other contenders for the hardware crown are the Multiface family from Romantic Robot, the plastic pal who's fun to be with; a couple of wacky Multiplugs for those of you who work all your household appliances from one socket; an aerial switch so you can plug all your computers, game consoles and videos into your telly at the same time; and Computer Cupboard's nifty little Trojan Light Pen for you to scribble on your screen. Worra lorra lorra stuff.

As well as all this hardware, we've got a brain-boggling selection of the most fascinating hardware-based software. So, let's cut the babbling and launch into the reviews.

Tasword Plus Three
Tasman Software
£19.95 disk

There can't be a Spectrum user who hasn't heard of Tasword. It has been the standard text editor on the Speccy for more years than this magazine can recall. And now, keeping up with the times as ever, Tasman has produced an extended +3 disk version of the popular word engine. The thing which makes Tasword such a belt to use it it's little on-line help pages, which means you can call them up while editing a document, just by pressing a couple of keys. Like The Last Word it's user alterable to your taste, and like it says in the blurb "now you can write a manual without having to read one." Who wrote that?

In summing up, it's nice to see so many good British products in this hardware lineup. There's not many computers you could say that of, and fewer that could match the quality and design of the peripherals represented here.

(Simon N Goodwin owns the copyright to this review. Please visit http://simon.mooli.org.uk to find original articles and updates, much new material and his contact details.)

THE WORD ACCORDING TO TASMAN
The ABC of +3 writing!

Bored of hearing about Norman's mother all the time, fed up with having to lend him a cup of Jif every week for a the shower and basically worried about living so close to the Bates Motel, SIMON N GOODWIN packs his toothbrush and his middle initial and decides to let some else take his Tech Tips slot.

But he's not a man to give up easily - first he says he'll carry on writing for CRASH, and then he announces he's go lots to say about Spectrum word processing and publishing this month.

Tasman Software's classic Spectrum word processor Tasword has now appeared on disk for +3 users. And they've also brought out a companion package, TasSpell, which is a first for the Spectrum: an automatic spelling-checker.

Tasword started its life running on Sir Clive Sinclair's humble ZX-81 computer. In 1983 it was converted for the Spectrum and then came Tasword 2, the classic release, with an innovative 64-column display, onscreen formatting and help. Tasword 2 is still available, priced £13.90.

Tasword 3 was faster and more capable, introducing the data-merge facility which lets you produce form letters customised for each recipient. But it is only available for 48K microdrives and Opus disk systems; it costs £16.50 on cartridge or £19.50 on disk.

The next two versions, Tasword 128 and Tasword +2, took advantage of the 128K Spectrum. They let you edit files up to 60K long, and both cost £13.90 (£19.50 for the Opus +2 version).

Now comes Tasword +3 at £19.95, with extra features to make use of the disk drive, and other improvements. You can move directly to any line or page of the document. Onscreen justification has been tidied up, and the search-and-replace facilities let you replace groups of characters as well as complete words.

WHAT YOU GET

For £19.95 you get a binder, a 3-inch disk and a clearly-structured 64-page A5 reference manual. There's an excellent tutorial file on the disk, which teaches you how to use Tasword by getting you to edit the tutorial file itself!

The 3-inch disk holds about 70K of data, and all the files are duplicated on side B. When you go into +3 BASIC and type LOAD - a relic from the days of the microdrive! - the screen is divided into three areas, each using a cramped 64-column display format.

The Spectrum can only display 256 dots across the screen, so Tasman have been forced to squash each character into a grid three or four dots wide in order to get a useful amount of text on the screen.

I found the 64-column display rather hard to read on my telly, but that's a matter of taste - Tasword Two used the same format, and worked considerably slower, yet many people were happy with it. You can select a 32-column text display if you'd prefer to see large characters panning left and right instead of small stationary characters.

Screen-handling in this version is impressively fast. The screen scrolls quickly, and you can pan back and forth over 128 columns of text. It's not a true 'what you see is what you get' display, because features like underlining and bold text are not shown - nonetheless, you can get a good idea of the final appearance of your document.

PARAGRAPHICS

Paragraphs are blocks of text separated by blank lines. You can set different margins for every paragraph, and arrange text so that it is justified to fill the space between the margins, or pushed against the left or right margin. Individual lines can be centred, and useful keystrokes push text left and right across a line

Breaks between one page and the next are automatically worked out and can be shown on the screen as dotted lines, but this feature is a bit of a bodge. You can type in a special character to force an unconditional new page, but this doesn't affect the display of subsequent page breaks - so the display gets out of step with the final result.

The speed of operations like text insertions, centring of lines and rejustification of paragraphs would do credit to any word processor, but it's still annoying to have to centre lines and rejustify paragraphs manually, one by one, after changes.

Keyboard-handling is also better than I expected, in view of the dreaded performance of +3 BASIC, but it's difficult to enter the same character twice in quick succession: I ran into problems with double letters and repeated deletions.

Options are accessed by pressing Symbol Shift with another key, or by selecting Extend Mode (both Shifts) followed by a letter or digit. The status line flashes while you're in Extend Mode, and some options leave you in that mode until you press Extend again to swap back. This makes sense, but it means you sometimes end up accidentally at the start or end of your file.

Tasword +3 lets you get around the file quickly, by character, word, line or page. You can replace words, or part of a word, with another word, throughout the document. All through Tasword +3, drastic actions need to be confirmed by pressing Y or cancelled with N.

You can define a single block of text and then move it, delete it, or copy it once or many times. The block is stored in the same 62K area as your text; optionally you can define some of that space as a 'RAM disk', but I couldn't see much point in doing that as it reduces the size of file you can edit.

The 62K limit is genuine: I had no trouble editing a 60K file though some operations - like moving to the start or end of file - took a moment or so to work.

SOOO SLOOOW

Disk access is a bit sluggish, as seasoned +3 users might expect. A small file, of about 500 words, can be saved or loaded in five seconds, but a 10,000-word 60K file took 28 seconds to save, and 35 to reload. The file options are even slower, although more friendly, if you configure Tasword to show you the disk directory whenever you use the file menus.

Blocks of text can be saved to disk, and you can rename or erase files without leaving Tasword. You can even read through a file on disk, copying it to the screen without loading it: this can save a lot of time-saving and reloading documents.

Tasword lets you use all the features of a standard Epson printer - it's configured to work with modern models, and can also use other printers, but you should contact Tasman before you order a copy of the program if you've got an obscure printer.

The GRAPHICS key is used to enter symbols that correspond to a library of printer-control characters - you can select text variations like enlarged, emphasised, underlined, italic, condensed and proportional text. Tasword +3 can cope with up to 32 control sequences. each of up to 32 characters.

There's an extra character set, containing arrows, accents, and other squiggles which print out using the Epson bit-image mode.

Printed documents can have numbered pages up to 999, starting from any value. Page numbers can appear at the top, bottom or alternate sides of each page. You can also specify 'headers' and 'footers' - single lines of text to be printed at the top and bottom of each page.

Very large documents can be printed from a sequence of disk files, given a list of the appropriate filenames in another file. Multiple copies are allowed, and you can print any sequence of continuous pages.

About 10K of memory is reserved for a spooler. Characters can be copied from this area to the printer while you edit another file - so you can print a 1,500-word document at the same time as you word-process a different document. You can use the +3's Centronics or Serial interfaces, but not both at once.

The data-merge option lets you include text from one file in successive printed copies - for instance, Tasword +3 could read a database of names and addresses and insert them into a form letter before printing. Data can come from a Tasword tile or from the +3 version of the Masterfile database.

You can also mix file data with entries made from the keyboard during printing. This is an advanced feature compared with most mail-merge systems.

Tasword +3 is directly compatible with 3-inch disk files produced using earlier versions of Tasword for Amstrad's CPC and PCW computers. Tasman supply a conversion program that transfers Spectrum tape files produced using older versions of Tasword to disk.

You can customise Tasword +3 at any time once it's loaded, and then save a new copy to disk. You can change the display colours or printed page layout, and generally adjust the program to suit yourself - turning warnings on and off, for instance.

CORREKT YORE SPALLING

The companion program TasSpell costs the same as Tasword + 3, and only runs with it on a Spectrum +3. In conjunction with Tasword +3. The manual is just 12 pages long, but Tasspell is very simple to use.

TasSpell will check single words, or the words in the document you're editing, to find spelling mistakes. It does this by looking for each word in a 155K dictionary held on disk. Data-compression means that the dictionary, supplied by publishers Longmans, holds 70,000 words.

This sounds a vast number, when you consider that most people have a vocabulary between 5,000 and 10,000 words - but as usual the figure sounds more impressive than it really is, because computer systems count singular and plural, and other small variations, as different words. (For instance, 'computer', 'computers' and 'computing' would be treated as three different words.) You can list, add or delete words in the user dictionary freely, and can have several different dictionaries on one disk, using one at a time - but there's no way to edit the main dictionary.

MERELY ANAGRAMS

You can also search for anagrams - words that reuse a certain group of letters (like 'orchestra' and 'carthorse') - and words that match a pattern with certain letters missing (for instance, 'Simon' and 'lemon' fit the pattern '**mon'), These features should appeal to crossword puzzlers who need to cheat.

You can call up TasSpell to check individual words as you use Tasword +3, but most people will want to use it to check complete documents for spelling and typing mistakes. This it will do, listing unmatched words on the screen or printer with their line and column position in the file - but it's dreadfully slow.

It takes 17 seconds and two disk swaps to get from Tasword +3 to the main menu of TasSpell, another 13 seconds and one disk to get back. Unfortunately that's nothing compared with the time you'll spend waiting for text to be checked.

As a file is checked the disk clicks and grinds furiously, while words appear intermittently, in capitals, on the top line of the display. Only one line - with a few characters of overrun - is used so its hard to seethe context of mistakes, or to proof-read your file as the spelling is checked. Up to 20 unmatched words - including duplicates - can be listed in the remainder of the screen. Checking pauses whenever the screen is full.

Your document is read from memory, while the dictionary is held entirely on disk. This seems the wrong way around to me; it would be more sensible to put the most commonly-used part of the dictionary in the 62K text buffer, and read the file to be checked from disk - after all, the program only needs to read each word in the file once, whereas it reads the dictionary many times.

As it is, it takes three to four minutes for TasSpell to check one single-spaced A4 page of text -a checking rate of about 70 words a minute. Some people can type faster than TasSpell can read!

SOO SLOOOW TOOOOO

In case there was some quirk in my test files (more than likely knowing Simon - Ed), I put a small file generated by Tasman through the checker. I used the README file, 480 words of updates to the printed documentation for Tasman.

It took almost seven minutes for the file to be checked. I don't think people will be able to put up with this extreme sloth, and this time I can't blame Amstrad's disk drive - Tasman are just not doing this the best way.

It's a shame that TasSpell is so slow, because it's high time the Spectrum had a spelling-checker - there was a simple one supplied as a demonstration with the Mira Pascal compiler, but that only allowed a small dictionary.

In principle TasSpell is workable, but the continuous disk access slows it down to the point where few people will bother to use it. Perhaps this is why there were two typing mistakes on the first page of the word-processed letter Tasman sent me with the review copy...

THE VERDICT!

Tasword +3 is well-designed and carefully written. It's good value, at £19.95, and if you want to use your +3 as a word processor it will serve you well. Most of the limitations are Amstrad's - some people will find the 64-column display hard to read, and the keyboard a bit sluggish. Disk access is slow, but not unbearably so.

TasSpell is not so easy to recommend, though it may appeal to crossword buffs.

Both packages are available direct from Tasman Software, Springfield House, Hyde Terrace, Leeds LS2 9LN. Tel (0532) 438301.