From: jfreter@triton.unm.edu (The Myth)
Subject: Re: Review of Ami Pro 3.0 ???
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 92 14:28:55 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <1992Sep1.211716.4875@ecl.psu.edu> jam@ecl.psu.edu writes:
>Does anyone have a review of Ami Pro 3.0 ?  What improvements
>were made in this upgrade ?

Well, it just came in and I've not worked with it that much, but some things
to note:

BIG BUG in the screen display.  If you try to insert some text into another
block of text, the inserted text is displayed on top of the original text,
and a copy of the original text moves aside to make room.  This disappears
as soon as you do some kind of redraw (i.e. change the view).  It's annoying,
but not impossible to live with.

It runs much faster than 2.0 (386 SX/20 4MB, standard VGA).  It prints faster
if the printman is disabled and the AmiPrint options are set for no
background printer than AmiPro 2.0 (Panasonic 1124i).

Drag and Drop is quite easy to use.  Unfortunately, you still can't select
a paragraph with imbedded frames (graphics, text, equations, etc.) and copy
or move them together.  You have to move the text and then move the frame.
The reason for this, I found out, is that AmiPro was intended to do some
DTP where page layout is important.  Text fits around the frames quite nicely,
and those frames get fixed to a point on the page.

The grammer checker is not as good as the Grammatik that was offered free
with 2.0, so just install Grammatik.

There a several new features added, too.  There is a much better charting
package (but still no scientific plots,  it's all business).  The program
adds a scanner interface and retoucher.  The drawing program is a little
nicer.  AND THE EQUATION WRITER SUPPORT TEX BETTER.  I haven't tried this
part, yet, since I don't use TeX and have no TeX files to import.  But,
the manual and the new since 2.0 part of help explain that they've added
the ability to use TeX commands.

The SmartIcons are easier to use since they've added the ability to put
spaces between groups of icons.  The size is adjustible so you can choose
a size you like and that fits your display system.

Overall, I think that this program is worth the $49 that I had to pay for
upgrading from 2.0 (I bought 2.0 less than 6 months ago).  It is also worth
the $79 upgrade from 2.0 (bought more than 6 months ago) or from Word/ Word
perfect.  I definately do not think that this program is worth $400 or so
that the non-upgrade price is set at (but then again, neither are Word or
Word Perfect).  This is still a much better and easier to configure program
than both Word and Word Perfect.  It is even closer to being true WYSIWYG
than the others.  I ran a few informal tests, and I couldn't tell the diff-
erence (except by resolution) between the layout on the screen and the way
the file printed.

If you must buy any windows word processor (instead of sticking with DOS
and a DTP combined), then this is the one to get.  It still outperforms
word perfect and word 2.0a.  It makes Word Star for windows look like a
word processor written for a Commodore-64.  And Lotus's customer support
is respectible (even though they still don't have a 1-800 number for
bug reports).