Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 18 Nov 92 20:55:13 GMT+2
Subject: ProWrite 3.3.1, first impressions
From: harry@elfuerte.fipnet.fi (Harri P Pesonen)
Distribution: world
Organization: Fipnet, Helsinki, Finland
X-NewsSoftware: GRn 1.16f (10.17.92) by Mike Schwartz & Michael B. Smith

Yesterday I got ProWrite 3.3.1 by mail, directly from USA right onto my
hall floor.  The upgrade from 3.1.1 cost only 30 USD.  Thanks New Horizons!

I am generally very pleased with the upgrade.  The interface is very
pretty, even though it doesn't use gadtools.library.  There is even a
Windows like pull down selection box.  I have always thought that the
standard gadtools selection box which rotates through all selections is
very cumbersome if there are many selections.

ProWrite can finally wrap text around pictures even though it was
advertised to be able to do it already with version 3.0.  The pictures
don't move with the text, so if you insert much test you must move the
pictures manually.

The AREXX macro interface is much better and you can define the macros in
the menu.

There is NO index or table of contents creation.  There should be, if Pro
means Professional.  Maybe it means Progressive, little by little...

There is a print preview (finally!).

Speaking of printing, this is the only real complaint I have.  I tried the
new "High" quality printing.  It works surprisingly good, I say
surprisingly because I thought that it doesn't work at all from the posts I
read in this newsgroup.  The printing looks very good but there is one
problem: there are sometimes strange gaps between the characters in a word,
and sometimes two separate words are joined together!  

For example, a word "illalla" prints like "il la ll a" and words
"Punahilkka-naytelmaa Kansallisteatteriin" prints like
"Punahilkka-naytelmaaKansallisteatteriin".

When you turn on the "aspect adjusted" option the printing gets even worse.
But you should use this option when printing pictures!  Why can't ProWrite
adjust only pictures and print text normally?  Well, you can always adjust
the pictures manually.

Another complaint is the speed of printing.  It is in fact very slow, maybe
10 minutes per page with my A3000 and Citizen dot matrix printer!  And the
printer is not the bottleneck.  ProWrite does the high quality rendering
very slowly.  Maybe they have tested it with A4000...

The final complaint about printing is: why ProWrite can't send form
feeds when it is printing on continuous paper?  I have single sheets but my
printer knows when it is out of paper so that I just insert a new paper and
it continues.  But ProWrite doesn't send form feed at the end of a paper,
instead it advances the paper normally.  This means that it advances the
new paper I have just inserted.  Oh well.  So I must use the Hand feed
option (and press a key when the new paper is inserted) and luckily it
sends form feeds.

Fortunately ProWrite can of course print Draft/NLQ and even PostScript.
But still I had hoped that the CG font support was better.  Maybe the fault
is in C= libraries or printer drivers as has been stated.

Anyway, it was nice to have the upgrade so fast.  Now if I only could get
the SAS/C 6.0 upgrade...

-- 
    Harri Pesonen               harry@elfuerte.fipnet.fi
    Helsinki, Finland, EC?      Markka is floating...  1 USD = 5.1 FIM
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications,gnu.emacs.help