Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: aquirt@bnr.ca (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: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <1ri5d9$ior@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: aquirt@bnr.ca (Alan A.R. Quirt) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu 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: (800) 247-8330 (USA and Canada) (602) 431-9151 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 Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu