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Failing any advice to the contrary (except the brief reviews in ST
WORLD and ST FORMAT), I rushed out and bought SCRIPT. These then
are my unbiased thoughts (well, I may have convinced myself):
SCRIPT was described in both magazines above as an example of
sophisticated business ST software, the kind that Mac users have
in the past benefitted from. In truth it was very easy to use,
genuinely intuitive, and I was able to use most of the
functions without referring to the manual.
On loading, you are presented with a fairly standard GEM display;
menus allow you to control all the opertaions of the program. The
majority of these options have keyboard shortcuts, so very quickly
you can ignore the menus.
Some of the operations are entirely controlled by mouse - such as
hi-lighting text (very fast), and positioning tabs. In operation
the hi-lighting is like DECwrite: for example, you can hi-light,
say, a paragraph and then type some text: the hi-lighted area is
then entirely deleted, replaced by your text.
The fonts used by SCRIPT are SIGNUM! ones, so plenty exist in
Public Domain. I have about 190 - so there's lots to choose from.
The print out is very high quality, this despite my printer being
the new LQ550 (rather than the superior and earlier LQ500!) Screen
update is impressively fast, paragraphs formatting themselves on
input without any noticeable delay.
Footnote control is also impressive (far better than Protext's
rather lame effort). ^F (?) produces a new window for the
footnote. Again, you can change the font, size, attribute of the
text (though it defaults with superscript). As the text is
inputed, the text rises towards the embedded footnote; when they
meet the footnote text flows to the next page. Closing the window
returns you to the main text.
Graphics can be imported in either SIGNUM, Doodle or IMG format.
These can be cropped within the program - and are treated as
graphic characters, albeit rather large ones, so they can be
centred etc.
The only fault is the size of memory the program consumes. A 1040
is the minimum requirement, but desk accessories, extra fonts etc
quickly return NOT ENOUGH MEMORY messages. Realistically, a 2MB
machine is needed for long documents.
Finally, the program is very stable, and works within a NEODESK
environment, exiting without errors. Nor have I come across
accessories that interfere with its operations.
The program has been out for only 3 months (?) in Germany, where
it was written, and has been out in the UK for now 2 weeks. The
importer, SIGNA PUBLISHING, have completely translated it - and
the manual promises upgrades in the near future.
According to Hisoft, the writers of TEMPUS are currently writing
TEMPUS-WORD, which will surface in Summer, earliest. This would
seem to be Script's main contender (and it's another European program); it
however boasts such features as Index Generation, features which
SCRIPT at present does not possess.
SCRIPT costs �89.95, and at present cannot be obtained cheaper
through mail order.
Regards,
Carl
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