Classic Computer Magazine Archive Article from Atari Classics magazine

Read the original magazine scan at Internet Archive

TextPRO v5.2 Manual
edited by Dale Wooster January 1995

Review by Charles A. Cole Sierra Vista, AZ

    Over the years, I have tried each new release of the TextPRO word processor that was created by Mike Collins and Ronnie Riche. All of these releases, however, suffered from the same basic problem: lack of clear documentation.
    This is something that is not unique to TextPRO. Documentation is usually the last thing a programmer thinks of, and they always seem to assume that everyone thinks the same way they do, and knows what is running through their minds as they write the documentation.
    This stumbling block always led me back to AtariWriter Plus as my favorite word processor. I knew how to use it without having to dig through a long, complicated manual, it did just about everything I wanted a word processor to do, and my familiarity with it made it feel as comfortable as an old shoe. It was consistent, albeit limited in its capabilities.
    With the release of TextPRO v5.20X, with its add-in modules and macro programming language, I was determined to make a more concerted effort to tame this beast and learn how to use it once and for all. No program was going to get the better of me!
    Alas, that old bugaboo of poor documentation reared its ugly head again. This time, however, a campaign was initiated by Rick Reaser, the Atari 8-bit editor for Current Notes (CN) magazine, to assemble a team of editors and tackle the documentation problem head on. The progress of Rick's efforts, however, remain a mystery.
    Frank Walters of Fort Walton Beach, Florida, wrote a very excellent series of articles for CN explaining the power of the TextPRO Macro language, including many useful examples. Still, the basic documentation problem existed.
    Then, I happened to notice an item in Nybbles and Bytes, the newsletter of The Northwest Phoenix Atari Connection (N.W.P.A.C.) of Phoenix, Arizona, (where else?) that the club president, Dale Wooster, has a TextPRO v5.20X manual for sale. The more I read, the better it sounded: color cover, fully indexed, a set of program diskettes with "How To" files and macros available separately, a command wall chart and a printer command wall chart printed in NLQ, professionally bound, updated specifically for the v5.20X release of TextPRO. And the price was right: $12.00. Two 2-disk sets are available. The first set at $6.00 includes the complete ready to run TextPRO v5.20 program and all of the documentation manual files, including the "How To" files. The second set, $4.00, contains additional macros and the original ARCed DOC files. I opted for the manual and first set of disks. Dale ships orders by Priority Mail in the US at no additional charge.
    OK, so what do you get for your 12 bucks? A 106 page, spiral-bound manual printed on 8 ½  x 11 inch paper, printed on both sides of each page in NLQ type on a Star Micronics printer, using enhanced text, underlining, bold, and other print features to highlight important items. The manual comes with a full color front cover, and plastic protective covers over both the front and back covers of the manual to keep them clean. A very professionally produced product!
    Content-wise, Dale has, over the years, kept Ronnie Riche's original documentation updated as each new version of TextPRO was released. In the process of updating, Dale has resolved many of the complaints I had with the original documentation, and added explanatory notes to clarify difficult passages. In this latest effort, he has added comments throughout which pertain only to the v5.20X version, and completely re-indexed the entire manual to reflect his additions, updates, and notes. Additionally, he included a TextPRO Command Summary wall chart, and a Star NX1000 Rainbow printer command wall chart which is also compatible with most Epson printers. If you have a different type of printer and know the decimal codes you can easily modify the wall chart to suit your printer.
    TextPRO has finally begun to be understandable to me, and I am now beginning to have more confidence in its features, thanks to Dale's editing. Part of the problem in the past has been my hardware, which is not stock at all. The really frustrating thing about TextPRO for me, until now, was that the manual had not been kept up-todate by Ronnie Riche to reflect changed keystroke commands. Dale's manual appears, so far, to be completely tested and fairly bullet-proof, even for my modified 130XE with the U.S. Plus OS chip from Computer Software Services and 364K RAM, SpartaDOS X cartridge, and other modifications which affected previous versions.
    So, what it all boils down to is this: If you want the most powerful word processor that has ever been available for our beloved Atari 8-bit computers, and an instruction manual that is a firstclass product to go along with it, then you definitely should order Dale's manual and disks.
    Nits: OK, you just knew this had to come up sooner or later, right? Nothing is perfect, no matter how much effort is put into it. Yes, I have a couple of minor nits to pick.
    Call it personal weirdness if you wish, but I have never liked documents printed on a computer printer with the "Full Justification" turned on. If you're not familiar with this term, full justification means that both the left and right margins are straight down the page; like this article. Computer printers accomplish this by padding short lines with extra spaces between words to push the last character of the last word on the line all the way out to the right margin. I have always preferred a so-called "ragged-right" margin. Full justification works fine for newer, professional typesetting machines, where spaces between every word in the line are adjusted to fill out the line, or even minute spacing is added between letters if the line is still short. But on a computer printer, this is sometimes accomplished by adding as many as five or six extra spaces between the first few words, and then no extra spaces between the rest of the line. This makes for difficult reading. Dale, unfortunately, configured TextPRO for full justification.
    In a few cases, it seems that Dale may have retained Ronnie Riche's original text. Ronnie tended to run thoughts together into one long sentence. Here is an example, selected purely at random from Dale's manual. On page 10, Para 2.3 reads, in part:
Deleting and Moving Text; (Cut & Paste) To delete text you have great flexibility in the TP editor. Just go to the spot from which you want to start the deletion and use the; CTRL-D Delete text command; The command line will turn RED and the prompt; "Delete [S,W,P,F]: RETURN to exit" will appear.
    When I was attending school in the 1940s and 1950s, there seemed to be more emphasis placed on grammar and punctuation than there is today. If I were writing the above paragraph, I would probably come up with something like this:
 2.3 Deleting and Moving Text (Cut & Paste): To delete text, you have great flexibility. Just go to the spot where you want to begin the deletion, and type CTRL-D (Delete Text). The command line will turn RED, and the prompt, "Delete [S,WP,F]: RETURN to exit", will appear.
    Other than these two minor problems, I have found Dale's TextPRO manual to be the first one that I have ever been able to comprehend, and his index makes it very easy to find what you are looking for.
    This manual of Dale's is highly recommended for all TextPRO users.

TextPRO manual pricing:
    $9.00 for TextPRO versions 4.5, 4.55, 4.56, and 5.0 with black and white cover. Specify which command charts you want printed if any.
    $12.00 for TextPRO v.5.20X with color cover, NLQ, expanded, underlining, and other print enhancements. Add $6.00 if you want the TextPRO v5.20X two-disk set containing the complete ready to run program modules and instruction manual text files.
    Add an additional $4.00 if you want two more disks full of support files such as macros, both MAC and MAX and the original ARCed DOC files.
    Dale accepts personal checks or money orders, but does not ship orders paid by personal check until your check has cleared. For faster service, send a money order.