WORD WORK ON THE SPECTRUM

The first word processor to be produced for use with the 48K Spectrum is from Tasman Software and called Tasword. It includes most of the facilities available on larger machines, such as automatic word wrapping, left and right justification, insertion and deletion of lines and words, and cursor-controlled editing.

Text files can contain up to 900 lines and each text file can be saved independently of the program. It is also possible to merge text files if sufficient room exists within the program. The program has an example text file saved after it on the tape. That allows the user to pracise with the control key before typing-in a new text file.

The user manual has been set using the justified print of the ZX printer and is very easy to read and understand. Unfortunately that only shows the inadequacy of the Sinclair printer and the word processor package needs a dot matrix printer to demonstrate its true value.

Ta sword is to be upgraded when the Microdrive and RS232 interface arrive and that will be offered to existing owners of Tasword at a reduced price.

The package is worth the money and with the additional software to follow will prove useful to anyone with reports or letters to write. Tasword costs £7.95 and is available from Tasman Software, 17 Hartley Crescent, Leeds LS6 2LL.

YOU HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY, NOW ALL YOU NEED IS THE SOFTWARE. BILL BENNETT ASSESSES WORD PROCESSING FOR THE HOME.

WORD PROCESSING was invented in 1968 by IBM. A magnetic tape machine connected to an electric typewriter allowed a typist to produce a number of copies of any letter or document typed into the system.

What made the word processor more than a clever but expensive photocopier was a simple editing facility which let the typist change small parts of the document on the magnetic tape. Today's word processors, range from home letter-writing packages, to huge devices the size of freezers capable of storing an entire encyclopaedia in memory.

The print you see on the pages of newspapers, books and magazines like Your Computer is produced by an advanced form of word processing called typesetting. Words are typed into a typesetting machine and juggled around. Modern photo-typesetting machines are only slightly more sophisticated than ordinary word-processors.

All these systems, from the most powerful dedicated microcomputers based around one special program to the most humble home unit all have a number of features in common.

These are an inputting device - usually a keyboard - a real-time output device - usually a video display screen - a printer or batch output device, a working memory, a disc drive or tape back-up memory and a central processing unit.

REPLACING THE TYPEWRITER

More important than all that hardware is the software. Over half of the world's business computers are used at some time or other as word processors, which makes it the single most important computer application.

In the home a computer can be used in conjunction with a relevant software package to replace a typewriter.

Students can use them to type essays neatly and edit and correct them as many times as necessary. Some word processors interface with databases, allowing - for example - an almost identical letter to be sent to a list of people. The program might even print out a list of names and addresses at the end of the run to help you label the envelopes. Certain relevant phrases or words, such as Sir, Madam, Mr or Ms can be inserted at relevant points in the letter.

Word processors are popular with authors, who like to revise their material constantly before sending it to a publisher. The same applies to playwrights, scriptwriters and some types of journalists. Secretaries use word processors, and to some extent are being replaced by them. Because secretaries often have to type the same sentence time after time, they can, for example, type the sentence or paragraph just once, store it on disc and recall it with a few keystrokes each time it is to be used.

Certain professionals, especially solicitors, often need to write letters and documents which are cobbled together from standard clauses. They find word processors a boon. How about your local computer users' club? A word processor could help you produce a newsletter.

The keyboard is the front-end of any computer system and, when applied to a word processor system, its design is all important. Ideally a keyboard should be as near to a typewriter keyboard as possible. The keys should have a positive feel to them, so that you know when they are hit. If this is not possible then audio feedback in the form of a keyboard bleep can be almost as good.

Keys should be laid out as on a typewriter, in the QWERTY pattern. The more standard the better. The space between keys is important, fiddly little keyboards are much harder to use than those with the keys spaced in the conventional way. A proper space-bar is a great help, as are proper shift keys, ideally one at each end of the bottom row of letters.

The return key should be to the right of the middle two rows of letters, and it should be impossible to hit it by mistake, or to accidentally hit some other key which has dire consequences. Function keys are a great help to word processing, as they enable the various functions of the software to be implemented quickly. There is also less chance of something going wrong if they are used.

FUNCTION KEYS

Dedicated word-processors usually have the function keys marked with the relevant function. Home packages are easier to use if there is some way of doing this. For example, there is a strip of Perspex above the function keys on the BBC Micro, which can have a printed list of the functions inserted beneath.

Some people find it easier to type using a small keyboard which will sit on their lap. Many home micros are ideal for this. On bigger micros, there is often a numeric keypad to the right of the main set of keys. This can be used in a word processing system as a cursor control pad. Other ways of moving a cursor around involve control-characters, function keys and in some cases even joysticks.

Repeat keys can be useful and many home computers have an auto-repeat facility which starts after the key has been depressed for a certain amount of time. There are a number of alternatives to the keyboard approach but the only one that is likely to be seen by most home users is the Microwriter, which can be used with the fingers of one hand.

The display is every bit as important as the keyboard. Together with the keyboard it forms the interface between the user and the word processor. Before the advent of cheap personal computing the keyboard-display team was often known as a terminal, a name which is a hangover from the days when computers were large expensive machines with a number of terminals.

For serious word processing, choice of display is crucial. A bad display can ruin your eyesight if used for more than a few hours a day.

For display the home user has three choices: you could spend money on a monitor, simply use the television set, or if your machine allows it, an LCD display. For home word processing there is little point in spending a lot of money on a monitor unless you intend to do a lot of word processing, or you have another use for the monitor.

A monochrome monitor has the advantage of higher resolution than the average TV, but it costs money. Also most home micros do not readily connect to monochrome monitors. Often they have green screens with light-green characters, which in theory at least are better for the eyes than white on black. Many experts prefer yellow on a brown or orange background, as this is thought to be more restful.

Most home users will be content with the more usual TV display. If you intend to use this it is more important than usual to tune the set in properly. You may even need to adjust the setting on your micro. Do not attempt this without consulting your manual because you could make things worse than they already are.

The set needs to be properly tuned because you are going to spend a lot of time looking at the screen, and especially if your micro is capable of 80 characters to a line, you will quickly get eyestrain. Some word processors make use of colour, but the majority do not. It is up to you how you adjust for this. I find that a sharper clearer picture can be obtained on most machines by sacrificing some of the colour quality.

Certain home micros have a naturally white or green background with the writing in black. This is harder to tune properly than a predominantly black background with white, or light-coloured characters. If your software allows you to choose, always choose a darker background. A television is capable of displaying fewer characters on the screen than a monitor, but with home computers the width of the display is usually determined by the hardware. A screen which can display more characters makes it easier to find your way around the text you are processing. It can also allow you to inspect on the screen the actual format your document will take when it is finally printed out.

If the screen width is as narrow as the Vic-20 - only 22 characters wide - horizontal scrolling may be used to allow you to input long lines. Alternatively the software might just turn the text around at the end of a line and leave the width-handling until the output stage.

The majority of home micros can interface to Centronics-type printers fairly easily. That does not mean that the printer has to be a Centronics one, merely that it has that type of interface. This opens up a whole range of printers to the microcomputer, from the Sharp/Tandy multicolour plotter/printer upwards.

The Tandy CGP-115 produces adequate printout in colour for a number of tasks, and is good value at around £150, but only prints to a width of 4.5in. Slightly more expensive but much better in terms of quality is the black-and-white Seikosha GP-80, which also happens to be the Vic printer and the Acorn Atom printer. This produces a dot-matrix output which is suitable for just about anything a home word processor will ever print. The Oki-Microline printer also falls into this category.

At around £200 this gives a high enough quality of print for us to accept letters and articles written using them. They are also suitable for students to use when writing essays, but could only be used as a commercial printer by the tiniest of businesses.

Above the Seikosha and Oki comes the Epson range of printers and these really are superb. They are capable of producing output in a number of sizes and widths, and some of them can even produce text in a number of different typefaces. They also allow expanded and condensed print. Used with certain word-processors they have proportional spacing.

Proportional spacing occurs when the number of characters sent to a line by the computer is not enough to fill it. If nothing was done the right edge of the column would look ragged. To compensate, most cheap word processors just distribute extra spaces between the words to fill the line. With proportional spacing that extra space is evenly distributed between the characters in a word and those interword spaces.

At around £300 the Epson RX-80 is probably the best investment you could make if you are considering getting down to some home word processing. One particular good feature is that the printer has a double-strike mode where a character is printed twice with the print-head just slightly displaced to get a better character.

Back-up memory is a vexing problem to the home computer user, and even more so to the home word processor. For a long time we have been waiting for a cheap, reliable and fast memory-backing medium to replace cassette tapes, which amongst other problems are slow. For most purposes cassette tape is the only option open to the home user.

Microdrives and microfloppy disc drives will be a great help because a lot of word processing is to do with pulling phrases from one document and sending them to another, a task eminently suited to disc.

You will need at least 16K of RAM before you can even think of word processing. A character takes up a minimum of one byte, so even if there are no overheads in terms of memory use, and the word-processing software takes no RAM, the maximum size document would be around 16,000 characters or 2,500 words.

The three packages for the Spectrum all require a minimum of 48K RAM. Wordcraft for the Vic-20 is in ROM but it still requires an additional 8K of RAM - which is supplied - to run. Typically Wordcraft allows about 1,000 words and the Spectrum programs allow around 5,000 words. View, the BBC word-processor allows around 4,000 when in mode 7 and 1,500 in mode 3. The cheaper Gemini word-processing package allows about 1,000 words to be typed into the BBC Micro.

Some micro displays are net capable of handling lower-case and capital letters, though you may want to use both in your document. In that case capitals are usually indicated on the screen by reversing that character space to black on white, or perhaps some other colour.

On other systems the reversed characters might indicate that the characters are to be printed in a different size, or that they are different typefaces. The resolution of the screen - that is, the total number of pixels available to make up the various characters - is also important. On the Spectrum each character cell is eight by eight pixels. On the Oric it is merely six by eight. This means that the characters on the Spectrum look clearer.

If the character cell is too small then descenders are not possible. These are the parts of a character that go below the character line, for example the tail of g and y. If descenders are not possible then the text can be very difficult to read.

it is best to use a television that can be easily moved to the most comfortable viewing position, because backache and neck-strain are just as serious problems as eye-strain. It is important not to sit too near a television set for a long time. The minimum safety margin is to take half an hour off for every one and a half hours working and never work for more than six hours at a stretch.

Choosing a suitable printer for your word processor is one of the most difficult decisions to make. The quality and look of your printed output will in many cases make more of an impression on those you wish to communicate with than what you write. Just imagine if Chamberlain had come back from Munich with a scrap of ZX printout declaring "peace- in our time", or if Shakespeare only had a copy of Julius Caesar printed without real descenders when he was trying to raise the production capital.

There are a number of possible choices of printer but for the most part you will be restricted by cost and compatibility. In most cases a good quality printer will cost substantially more than the micro that drives it. The compatibility is important, for example the Sinclair printer only works with Sinclair micros and Sinclair micros will not work with other printers without extra hardware.

ZX SPECTRUM

The biggest-selling micro in Britain is the Sinclair Spectrum. As a word processor it has a number of limitations, but if you already own 8 Spectrum, a tape recorder and a printer, than paying a few pounds for a word- processing package is not going to break the bank.

The video output of the Spectrum, especially when white on black is more than adequate. It allows only 32 characters across, which is about the minimum useful width of a word-processor screen. The big let-down of the Spectrum is its keyboard, which simply is not suitable for touch-typing. The problem is not just the feel of the keys but also the lack of a space-bar. You could buy a separate moving-key board but this adds to the expense.

Like most home computers the Spectrum has an adequate tape-operating system which can be used to store prepared documents. It has the advantage of being reliable and faster than the tape-operating systems on most other home computers. Microdrives will give the Spectrum access to fast, reliable and relatively large files.

Unfortunately the Spectrum needs a special interface to be able to use a proper printer. The ZX Printer is not suitable for word processing. The ZX LPrint from Euroelectronics interfaces the Spectrum to any Centronics-type printer for about £35. There is also a £45 unit available from Kempston Electronics.

The Quicksilva word-processing package for the Spectrum is written in Basic. The advantage of this is that it allows the user to customise the program fairly easily. Such customisation will really come into its own when Microdrives become available. Unfortunately it also means that the response is slower than that of the keyboard.

Tasword is written in machine-code and is consequently faster. The author of the package has so much faith in his software that he used the package, together with the ZX printer to produce the useful manual. It is an impressive word-processing package when you take into account its low price and the limitations of the machine.

The Microl word-processing package is better organised and consequently more expensive than the other two Spectrum packages. At times it almost seems pompous. Unlike the other two packages it allows graphics characters to be used freely.

DRAGON 32

The home computer that seems to have been neglected by software houses is the Dragon 32. Its 6809 processor seems to have been too much of a challenge for programmers. Probably the best piece of Dragon software is a word processor called Telewriter. Telewriter was originally written in the U.S.A. for the Tandy Colour Computer, which is very similar to the Dragon.

As a word processing micro the Dragon is a little disappointing. Its so-called real keyboard does not appear to be up to taking the kind of beating that a hard-working word processor can expect. When using it I found that the machine's case tended to wander about all over the table. This is because it is so light. After weighing it down with books I found that it worked satisfactorily, but the keyboard just did not feel quite right.

Telewriter is a marvellous piece of software, and well documented too. It is excellent. Like all the other packages I looked at, the quality of the software was higher than that of the hardware. The Dragon has an awkward screen and is downright difficult to use with a tape recorder.

I particularly like the Demonstration program - always a good idea - supplied with Telewriter. Also praiseworthy is the way a number of different formats are available, matching the package to different printers. There is even a program to convert files from ASCII to the Telewriter format.

VIC-20

The Commodore Vic-20 has the best keyboard in its price range. It is solid and robust, there are four function keys, and it is the right size, shape and weight. I could type on it all day. Despite this the Vic is not exactly an ideal micro to use as a word processor.

For a kick-off, the screen width is a mere 23 characters. That is about four words. After a while you begin to get hopelessly lost, because you cannot realistically read through a document when only 22 lines of 23 characters each are visible. The other big black mark against the Vic is its tiny memory - less than 3K is available to play with.

Wordcraft-20 gets around the memory problems by supplying some of its own. This is done easily because the package comes in a plug-in cartridge that has both ROM and RAM. Even with the extra 8K supplied, there is only room for around a thousand words, which is not a very long document. If Tolstoy had had a Vic-20, the War and Peace might only have been a pamphlet.

The Wordcraft-20 package has the advantage of being switchable. This means that you can return to Basic, and use the 8K of RAM for other purposes. It does of course work with the disc unit. It is an ideal unit for someone who already has a Vic-20.

BBC

The BBC Micro, which has an excellent ROM-based word processor called View. The BBC Micro is the best home computer for word processing, but it also happens to be the most expensive. View has a number of features which can only be found on word processors for the more expensive micros.

View costs £60 and lives in 16K of ROM. Although it can be used on its own with a cassette player, it is better suited to a disc-based system which makes it fairly expensive. To use it with a printer also requires a special driver program which will set you back a further £10. View can be used with the BBC Micro in a number of modes, which affects radically the number of characters seen on the screen at any moment and the amount of text that can be held in memory.

The BBC Micro is well-suited to word processing, having a real keyboard with a whole raft of function keys. It also has a real typewriter feel, which makes touch-typing not only possible, but easy. The 80-column screen display available in mode 3 is an excellent bonus, but it does have associated disadvantages. It only leaves you with 10K of memory space to play with, which is not a lot of text. Furthermore, to use the 80-column screen without causing permanent eye-strain requires the extra expense of a good monitor. Luckily a monochrome one will do the job.

View allows continuous processing, when used with discs. This allows the user to continuously update a file held on that disc, leaving both the original copy and the final copy on that disc. It also allows the user to create macros. These are effectively multiple instructions which allow the user to define a whole group of instructions by a single instruction.

LYNX, ORIC AND ATOM

The Lynx is eminently suited to word processing and in fact that could become its main usage when the disc unit and CP/M become available on the micro. The world's biggest-selling word-processor is Wordstar and that should be up and running on the Lynx before long. An interesting feature of the Lynx that may enhance its ability as a word processor is its soft screen. However, the return key is in the wrong place and there have been troubles with the printer interface.

ORIC

The 48K Oric is better suited to word processing than the Spectrum, mainly because of its keyboard. The keys are harder than those of the Spectrum which gives it a better feel, though it is still not as good as a proper keyboard as found on the BBC or the Vic-20. However the Oric does have an ersatz space-bar which together with the audio feedback given by the micro does enable an approximation of touch-typing.

The separate Cursor keys are again helpful for moving around the screen. The 40- character screen width is a plus, but the characters are of lower resolution than the Spectrum. The worst feature of the Oric as a word processor is that it is difficult to get a high-quality image on the screen. Your Computer contributor Dr John Dawson explains on page 26 how he is writing an Oric word processor called Author.

ACORN ATOM

The Acorn Atom was the first cheap computer to have a word processor. At only £30 the Atom Wordpack was ahead of its time. It is based in ROM rather than on tape and simply fits into the main board of the Atom. The package is very good, and is helped by the Atom's good keyboard.

CONCLUSIONS

When looking for a word processor for your micro remember the following points.

Interfacing your micro to a suitable printer is not always easy. Investigate the possibilities before spending money on software.

Before buying a package let someone demonstrate it to you. Check that you really do find it easy to use, ask awkward questions.

If you do not have a micro already, but want word processing, look for a real keyboard, a wide screen display, and a Centronics-type printer interface.

If you intend to do a lot of serious word- processing then the hardware you purchase must take this into account.