Path: menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet
From: clare@nynexst.com (Clare Chu)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Subject: REVIEW: Final Copy II
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Date: 14 Dec 1992 15:23:20 GMT
Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett
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Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator)
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Reply-To: clare@nynexst.com (Clare Chu)
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Keywords: word processor, graphics, commercial
PRODUCT NAME
Final Copy II. Release 1.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION
A WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") word processor for the
Commodore Amiga, distinguished by its superior printing technology
and graphical features.
AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION
Name: SoftWood, Inc.
Address: P.O. Box 50178
Phoenix, Arizona 85076
Telephone: (602) 431-9151, (800) 247-8330
FAX: (602) 431-8361
PRICE, MAIL-ORDER (All prices are in US dollars)
$89.95
[MODERATOR'S NOTE: The list price is $159.95. - Dan]
Upgrade from Final Copy: $30.00.
SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS
HARDWARE
Required: 2 floppy drives, 1 MB RAM.
Recommended: Hard drive
Works with 68000 processor and above.
SOFTWARE
Works with AmigaDOS 1.3, 2.0, and above.
COPY PROTECTION
None.
Installs easily on a hard drive with the included "Install" program.
MACHINE USED FOR TESTING
Amiga 500 1/2 Meg Chip, 1/2 Meg Fast, 2 floppy drives, 1.3 ROMs
Amiga 3000 1 Meg Chip, 4 Meg Fast, hard drive, 2.04 ROMs
REVIEW
Introduction
============
Final Copy II is SoftWood's latest incarnation of Final Copy, their
highly successful word processor. Final Copy's main claim to fame is the
use of outline font technology to generate crisp, clean output using the full
resolution of your printer. Final Copy prints with any Workbench supported
printer and provides outline fonts on any Amiga, even those still running
1.3. Final Copy II adds new features such as structured drawing tools, mail
merge, master pages and styles sheets, as well as an improved handling of
IFF, HAM and 24bit ILBM graphics, and an improved ARexx command set. Final
Copy II is offered in an American version and a British version. I have been
very happy with Final Copy and therefore was one of the first to upgrade to
Final Copy II. First off, let me mention that SoftWood is very good about
contacting registered owners. They even sent me a few upgrades from Final
Copy 1.3 to Final Copy 1.3.2, after I sent in my registration card. And the
upgrade to Final Copy II was only $30. Final Copy II installs easily to
your hard disk, but requires two floppy drives and some disk swapping if you
want to access all the different fonts, spell checker and thesaurus.
SoftWood provides six fonts and a drawer of 29 PostScript-compatible fonts.
My first impression of Final Copy was relief. I had bought my
husband ProWrite 3.0.1 for Christmas, and he was immediately disappointed in
its print quality on our Hewlett Packard DeskJet 500. After trying all the
gymnastics about fiddling with densities, magnifying and reduction, the
print quality was still noticeably jaggy: certainly NOT resume quality. He
ended up using the draft mode (which uses the DeskJet internal fonts) for
his reports. And the ranting and raving, I didn't hear the end of it. So
when Final Copy came out, I wasn't ready to believe their ads. After all, I
believed that ProWrite was the best (highly rated by AmigaWorld), and found
it lacking in the most important feature of print quality. So I was
hesitant and skeptical when I read all the nice things that people were
saying about Final Copy. That is, until a kind soul on the network offered
to send me a printout from his Final Copy, complete with an imported graphic
picture, and various fonts of all different point sizes, all printed out on
his DeskJet 500. All I can say is that the printout was almost
indistinguishable from a laser printer. I rushed right out and bought Final
Copy, and we've been using it since for my husband's resume, my personal
correspondence, and a newsletter I put out for my family starring our son
Tony (including a B&W scanned photo).
Fonts and Printing
==================
Print quality is, in my opinion, the most important aspect of a word
processor. Others may disagree, but what matters most to me is the look of
the finished product: the actual letters on the paper. Printouts must be
letter quality on printers capable of letter quality printout. Final Copy
exceeds my expectations for printing quality. The choice of fonts makes it
possible to get very professional looking documents on a DeskJet 500. Final
Copy II also has great PostScript support. You can send the output either
directly to a PostScript printer or to a file. I've used the latter option
quite successfully as I have access to a PostScript printer at work. Final
Copy II includes a drawer of PostScript-like fonts. They are basically
clones of the most popular PostScript fonts, including Avant-Garde, Bookman,
Courier, Helvetica, New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, Times and Zapf
Chancery. You don't need a PostScript printer to use these fonts as Final
Copy II uses its own "Nimbus Q" font format and does a graphic dump to any
Workbench supported printer. In any case, I found the print speed on the
DeskJet 500 reasonable, although not lightning fast. It was certainly
faster than my previous word-processor that actually printed blank lines at
300 dpi as white pixels!
SoftWood also offers four volumes of outline fonts called
"SoftFaces." I bought Volume #4, which includes a collection of business
and decorative fonts. All of these fonts can be converted and then
downloaded to a PostScript printer. I've used the PostScript compatible
fonts as well as the extra fonts on business correspondence and found no
trouble with kerning and spacing. All of the typefaces are "outline
typefaces," so they can be used in sizes ranging from 4 to over 300 points.
Some of the decorative typefaces don't look too good in smaller point sizes,
but usually they're used as headlines or banners.
Using lots of fonts is extremely easy on an Amiga with a hard disk
and lots of memory. However on a 1 Meg Amiga 500 with two floppy drives,
you're limited in the number of fonts and document size. Sorry I can't
be more specific, because I have my A500 packed away. But I do remember not
being able to make a "sampler document" where I wanted to print an example
of every typeface that comes with Final Copy. I was also not able to print
out a two page resume with 3 fonts loaded while in interlace-screen mode. I
had to quit Final Copy and restart it in Workbench screen-mode (to save
memory) and print out the document. There is no warning message that memory
is getting low. You just find that the screen flashes when you try to do
something.
A neat trick for the two floppy drive user is to copy the fonts that
you want to use onto the disk where you store your documents. This means
that you don't have to swap disks when loading up your document from another
floppy. Final Copy II has a "select and replace" option where it asks you
for fonts that it can't find. I really love this feature, as it was missing
on Final Copy 1.3.2 which didn't allow you to "delete" fonts. You can now
put your fonts in any directory you like. This is especially convenient for
the floppy drive user since he can now copy font drawers to his various
document floppies. There is a ToolType where you can store the path of the
default drawer when opening a font. Finally, Final Copy II now provides
ARexx access to specifying fonts, a feature missing in the original Final
Copy.
Final Copy II excels in print quality and font support and gives the
average Amiga user the ability to create high quality documents without
resorting to a desktop publishing package.
Graphics
========
Final Copy II can import pictures and brushes created in the
standard Amiga graphic format, IFF ILBM. This includes HAM, Extra-Half-Brite
(EHB), and 24 bit IFF ILBMs. You can make the text "flow" automatically
around a graphic, or define a "color 0" so that the text flows around the
perceived picture, not the rectangular box of the actual graphic clip. Of
course, if you like, you can also put a border around the clip. You can
also turn off automatic flow and superimpose the text on top of the graphic,
if you so desire. An interesting feature is a constrained resize that allows
you to adjust for the non-square pixels of an Amiga display. This is called
integer scaling. A lot of pictures on the Amiga display are slightly
elongated vertically. This is because most scanners use a square pixel (1:1
height:width ratio), but the Amiga's pixels are nonsquare and depend on the
screen format. Therefore a picture that looks right on screen will appear
distorted when printed out. By holding down a combination of keys while
dragging the mouse on the lower right anchor point, you can re-proportion
your graphic so that the printout has the correct aspect ratio. You can
also crop a graphic and resize it any way you want.
A new feature for Final Copy II is a limited set of structured
drawing tools. These include circles, squares, rectangles, lines, and
ovals. You can use these tools to draw borders, lines of any angle, and box
text. Each of these tools comes with a requester where you can choose point
size, specify the exact positioning and size, fill type and other
attributes. My brother-in-law was able to easily create a table for a paper
by just using the straight line tool. Arrow-tipped lines can be drawn,
although there is no way to set it up through the requester.
Final Copy II's IFF-ILBM graphical import feature is very well-done
and easy to use. The structured graphic elements are limited, but should
suffice for the average Amiga user. Again, since Final Copy II is a word
processor, you do not have full control over where text is placed within the
graphic. Rather you draw the graphic, try to tab to the location where you
want the text to appear. The text is not selectable as a graphic object,
and you can't align or center it within a box or oval. However for a word
processor, it is nice to have some way of drawing lines, boxes, and ovals
and Final Copy II provides this in a basic manner.
User Interface and Screen Display
=================================
Final Copy II allows you to choose several different Screen types
and modes. You can use either the Workbench screen or open a new screen.
You are allowed a choice between interlaced and non-interlaced and can have
up to 16 colors. However when I opened up a 16 color screen and imported a
16-color IFF-ILBM, it still showed in four colors. A quick peek in the
manual suggested that I set the Workbench to 16 color mode. I did this, and
I still had only 4 colors for my imported picture. I even tried using the
Workbench screen in 16 color mode, and I still did not get the correct
colors for my picture. There were more than 4 colors, but Final Copy II
seemed to use up a bunch of colors for highlighting the selected menu items,
and my picture was rendered in some ugly blue/grey/brown-red colors. The
manual notes that when you select a graphic, the colors of the mouse pointer
will change to reflect the graphic's colors. This does not apply to IFFs
though.
Font readability on the screen is pretty good IF you stick to Final
Copy II's default font, "SoftSans." However if you try to use any of the
fancier fonts, you'll have trouble reading the screen. This is especially
true in interlace mode. I recommend sticking with the default "SoftSans"
font for readability when typing, and then do a "Select All" and change to
the font of your choice. Be aware, though that if you have text that is
sensitive to spacing, such as tables, or text inside graphics, that the
position of this text might shift when you change fonts. This is annoying,
but unavoidable. Therefore, when I'm doing something where layout is
important, such as resumes, and I need to see the correct proportion on the
screen, I use the interlaced screen and the font of my choice to check out
the placement of text, not that I can necessarily read the text. If in
doubt, I can always magnify the text. This is quite easy with my Amiga
3000, but time consuming on a stock Amiga 500. Magnification of about 150%
is adequate for most text, although I like to type in 100% mode, so that I
can see the whole line. Final Copy II will automatically scroll
horizontally if you are using one of the magnification modes, so that you
can always see what you're typing. It's just kind of weird to see the text
jump back and forth.
Final Copy's command strip at the top of the document window
contains a series of icons used to control various aspects of the program's
operation. They include selectors for justification, spacing, tab stops, as
well as a tool box for the structured graphic elements, and master/body page
selectors, and a selector that enables you to choose whether and how rulers
are displayed. Most of the icons are self-explanatory, but it would have
been nice to have context-sensitive help for some of the more doubtful
ones. Also the document does not show the command strip in one place with a
legend describing each of the icons. Instead, you must go to the relevant
section of the document to see what the icons mean.
One useful display feature is that you can show the page guides of
the edit area, print area, header/footer area, and columns. If you are
placing graphics, you will know where you can place them so that they can
still be printed. I also like to set the ruler mode so that both the
vertical and horizontal ruler is displayed. This helps when you are trying
to format a document. Finally, you should note that different printers have
different limitations to the area of a page that can be printed. You must
reset the print area parameters to match that of your printer, or else, the
measurements shown on the rulers will not match what is printed out on your
printer. Final Copy is set to default on the HP LaserJet's settings, so if
you own something else, you must reset those parameters in order to get the
correct margins, and top/bottom spacing.
Since I'm not much of a hot-key user, I can't comment too much about
the keyboard shortcuts, except to say that they are there, and they seem to
follow the Amiga standards, such as "Amiga-X" for "Cut", etc. There is just
about a keyboard shortcut for every menu item that is not a dialog box
requester, and even shortcuts for some sub-menus.
The requester boxes follow the Workbench 2.0 Style look and feel,
and the mouse works as expected, dragging to select text, double clicking to
select a word. The window automatically scrolls when you drag select more
text than is shown on the screen. So except for screen readability and the
screen color deficiency for IFFs, I find Final Copy II's user-interface to
be easy to use and reasonably good.
ARexx Support
=============
Final Copy II sports major improvements in its ARexx capabilities
over Final Copy. Now you can actually GET information on many Final Copy
attributes, including file names, font attributes, page and positioning
information, print settings and other useful parameters. You can also now
set fonts and preferences through ARexx, although the implementation for
preferences is pretty lame, namely that it opens up the specified
requestor. Fonts can now be set by specifying the font name although you
must specify the complete path to the font if it does not reside in the
default font drawer. Other new commands involve setting values normally set
in requesters such as "Print Preferences" and "Page Setup". An additional
set of "Drawing" commands allow ARexx manipulation of structured graphic
objects. One of the included sample ARexx macros "Shadow Box" draws a
shadow for the currently selected object.
Most of the ARexx commands emulate the Final Copy II menu commands.
Basically anything you can do from the menu bar, you can access via ARexx.
An additional set of "Editing" commands simulate the editing of a document
from the keyboard. Selecting and de-selecting text uses a combination of
the "Cursor" command which moves the insertion point with the status of the
ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys.
You can create as many ARexx scripts for Final Copy as you desire.
However, only ten of them can be assigned to Final Copy's "Macros" menu.
These scripts can also be accessed by pressing one of the F1-F10 function
keys. Unfortunately, there is no way to rename the ARexx macros as the
names for these scripts must begin with "AMacro_" and end with a number from
1 to 10. These scripts must also exist in the same drawer that the Final
Copy program is in. It is annoying that you must remember the meaning of
"AMacro_2" without a more descriptive name. Other scripts are stored in the
"MACRODRAWER" which is a ToolType that you can add to Final Copy's program
icon to specify the path of the default drawer where ARexx macros are stored
in. The standard file requestor is brought up when you access the "Other"
script option so you can store your script anywhere.
I'm not a big ARexx user, at least not yet. But I do find the
included "Font Loader" macro useful. Now I can load in my favorite fonts
with the push of a function key.
New Features
============
Three new features worth looking at in Final Copy II are the
mail-merge, master pages, and style sheets. These features bring Final Copy
II closer to the level of word processors found on other platforms.
Mail-merge is used to produce form letters. Basically you need a
data file that contains the actual information that varies with each letter,
such as names and addresses of recipients. You also need a form letter
document that contains the text that is the same for every copy and also
indicates where the custom data is to be inserted. Creating the data files
seems easy enough until you try to create one that has many fields so that
the fields run into the next line. The data files must be saved in ASCII
format, and there are strict rules stating that the rows within a data file
are separated by either a new line or a return character. The problem lies
in the fact that Final Copy II is a word processor, and it automatically
inserts a new-line when the line gets long enough. Therefore, rows that
contain long fields, or many fields, are split into two lines. And since
this violates the rules for the data file, you get an error when you attempt
the merge. The way around this is to use your favorite text-editor to
prepare the data file. Since it is ASCII anyway, there is no need to use
Final Copy II to set it up. Furthermore, the manual recommends that you set
the ASCII I/O Preferences to "Insert 'New Line' character after each line."
But since a line is already broken up by Final Copy II automatically, you're
guaranteed to have the wrong format. However, if you don't check this
option, all your lines, even the ones you wanted split up, will be
concatenated in the ASCII file. So my advice is to use a text editor to set
up the data file, or else make sure all your rows fit on one Final Copy
line.
Creating the form letter is pretty easy. You basically create it
like any other document. First you select the data file that contains the
names of the merge fields. Then everywhere you want to insert data that is
to be merged into the text, you select one of the field names that appears
in the data file. There is a convenient scrolling list that displays each
of the field names available. Here it is helpful to use the keyboard
shortcut to bring up this requester, although you still have to use the
mouse to double-click on the field name.
Aside from the annoyance of setting up the data file, I found Final
Copy II's mail-merge feature easy to use. However for a person who doesn't
know how to use a text editor, the data file setup can be a very puzzling
experience, as errors are generated at the "Print Merge" stage when Final
Copy II complains about a bad merge field.
Master Pages allow a user to define text and graphics that are to
appear on each of the document's pages. Final Copy II provides both a left
and right master page. However if you have not set the "Left/Right" page
option, only items entered on the right master page will affect your pages.
I quickly used the master page feature to set up some stationery. It works
great if you only have text and graphics in the header and footer area. As
I found out later, the only way to make sure that your regular body page
text doesn't superimpose on the master page text and graphics is to define a
header and footer area that covers the size of the text in your master
page. This works well for such things as stationery and letterheads, but if
you want to put a graphic in the middle of the page on every page, there is
no way you can get text to automatically flow around this graphic. This
really limits the usefulness of master pages. SoftWood would have done
better to just advertise this as an enhanced header and footer support. In
order to be a truly useful Master Page, all text and graphics on the master
page must be off-limits to body page text. In other words, body page text
must automatically flow around master page elements.
Style sheets are another feature that makes Final Copy II a powerful
contender in the word processing market. A style is a set of paragraph
settings, tab stops, font and type attributes applied to text so that the
text complies with these settings. For example, a "Title" style can have
the attributes of "Center Justified", "Size 18", "Bold", "Magenta", and
"Underlined". You can apply this style to all of your titles, without
having to select each one separately and format each one separately. Final
Copy II also allows you to assign a function key to each style you define.
Styles also make changing formats easy since you simply change the style
definition and the changes are automatically applied to all text that is
tagged with that style throughout the document. The manual states that they
have styles for body text, bulleted text, captions, headlines and
sub-headings. However SoftWood did not include the bulleted text and
caption style in the list of styles provided, and I didn't see an easy way
to make bulleted text. There is also no way automatically to update numbers
sequentially in a style, such as a "Chapter" style which automatically
assigns 1 on its first occurrence, 2 for its second occurrence, etc.
These new features make Final Copy II competitive, although each
leaves a little something to be desired. Hopefully SoftWood will polish
these features in their next release.
System Requirements and Recommendations
=======================================
Final Copy II requires an Amiga with at least 1 megabyte of RAM and
either a hard drive or 2 floppy drives. Workbench 1.3.3 or 2.0 or higher is
required. If you have Workbench 1.3 or 1.3.2, don't panic, since SoftWood
includes a 1.3.3 Workbench disk (as well as 2.0 Workbench disk). Using
Final Copy II on the 1 megabyte Amiga with two floppies is possible, but not
recommended. Since Final Copy II has a thesaurus database, a spelling
dictionary, hyphenation database and many outline fonts, a hard drive is
highly recommended. More RAM is also required if you want to use a lot of
fonts or cut and paste between documents, especially since the program size
is over 400K. Finally, while it is possible to use Final Copy II on an
unaccelerated Amiga, you will find that tasks such as moving and resizing
IFF-ILBMs, scrolling the pages, and magnifying the page a lot faster on an
accelerated Amiga. In fact, one of the pushes for me to buy an Amiga 3000
was the frustration of using Final Copy II on my Amiga 500 with 2 floppies
and 1 megabyte of RAM. I ended up never using the spell checker nor
thesaurus and using only a few fonts. I also had to use the Workbench
screen, instead of an interlaced screen, to save memory.
Documentation
=============
The documentation is well-written and adequate, although at some
places they do not explain the reasoning behind the choices. One glaring
omission is how to access special characters by using a "Dead Key"
combination and the Alt key combinations. For example, if you want to put
an accent on top of a letter, you press Alt-F first and then the letter you
want accented. Special characters such as a bullet are accessed by typing
Alt+8. However, the manual doesn't document this. Instead I found the
combinations in the SoftFaces User Manual that came with the extra fonts I
purchased separately.
Likes and Dislikes
==================
For the money, Final Copy II is the Amiga word processor that gives
you the best print quality as well as some desktop publishing features. A
few glaring omissions are the lack of an UNDO function in the Edit menu,
lack of footnoting on the same page, and very basic mathematical
functionality limited to using their Symbol font, which prints out mostly
Greek letters. Screen readability could be better, but is not a big issue
since Final Copy is not using Amiga bitmapped fonts such as Topaz. In a
way, it is truly WYSIWYG if your printer resolution matches the screen
resolution. The default screen resolution is 80 dpi horizontal and 72 dpi
vertical. You can, however, set your screen resolution to 300 dpi if you so
wish, but it is impractical for most purposes.
The main strength of Final Copy II is its printout quality. It
does its job well in a straightforward manner. There is no need to fiddle
with settings, magnification, font sizes, or any other tricks to get
high-quality jaggy free printing. You simply make sure that your Printer
Preferences are set up to the highest resolution of your printer and use the
driver supplied by Commodore. The graphical features and special features
such as mail-merge, style sheets and master pages add to its attraction and
make Final Copy II a well-rounded contender in the Amiga word-processing
market.
All in all, Final Copy II is a high quality word processor for the
Amiga and the most used application in our household. I like it very much
and don't hesitate to show my Final Copy II outputs to my PC or Mac
friends. While Final Copy II doesn't offer all of the desktop publishing
publishing features of PageStream and Professional Page, it is considerably
easier to use. I am impressed with the job that SoftWood has done with
Final Copy II. It has been extremely stable (never crashing or hanging) and
a pleasure to use. I recommend it highly for anyone who is looking for a
reasonably priced word processor for reports, term papers, business
correspondence and fliers.
COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS
I've used ProWrite 3.0.1. I have not much to say about ProWrite
other than it was a frustrating experience trying to get high quality
printouts. I haven't bothered upgrading ProWrite since I went to Final Copy.
BUGS
I didn't find any bugs, unless the failure of text to automatically
flow around graphics in a master page is a bug. I think it's just a missing
feature, that's all.
WARRANTY
The diskettes are warranted for 90 days.
CONCLUSIONS
I think the product is excellent, although it needs a bit of
polishing. The print quality is superior and it is easy to use and
incorporates most word-processing features as well as a few desktop
publishing features.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright 1992 Clare Y. Chu. All rights reserved.
---
Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews
Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu
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General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu