The Last Word 3.1 Released

[flashjazzcat]

The Last Word 3.1 is now available at atari8.co.uk.

This version includes:

 

• Revised screen update which is up to twice as fast as LW 3.0.
• Batch renaming of tagged files on the disk menu.
• Fully debugged macro processor which actually works now!
• 20 sample macros.
• Sample config and SYS files.
• 4 sample extension programs.
• A selection of printer drivers.
• Lots of other bug fixes and improvements.

I'd like to see if there are any problems with this version before writing any major extensions such as spell-checkers, etc, because changing the equates in the add-ins after recompiling the main program is a real pain.

 

In the meantime, enjoy!

 

Direct download link. Can webmasters please update their links, since version 3.1 supercedes 3.0 (which should be abandoned). It's always best to link to the main atari8.co.uk site in case download links or the site structure alters (rather than using the direct URL as a permanent link).

Edited November 8, 2009 by flashjazzcat

[Mr.Amiga500]

The Last Word 3.1 is now available at atari8.co.uk.

This version includes:

 

• Revised screen update which is up to twice as fast as LW 3.0.
• Batch renaming of tagged files on the disk menu.
• Fully debugged macro processor which actually works now!
• 20 sample macros.
• Sample config and SYS files.
• 4 sample extension programs.
• A selection of printer drivers.
• Lots of other bug fixes and improvements.

I'd like to see if there are any problems with this version before writing any major extensions such as spell-checkers, etc, because changing the equates in the add-ins after recompiling the main program is a real pain.

 

In the meantime, enjoy!

 

Direct download link. Can webmasters please update their links, since version 3.1 supercedes 3.0 (which should be abandoned). It's always best to link to the main atari8.co.uk site in case download links or the site structure alters (rather than using the direct URL as a permanent link).

 

Wow, this is great! Thanks very much. It's amazing seeing great new software for a 30-year-old computer.

 

I've got a couple questions. (sorry if this is already answered in the help files or manual... I can't find it and I'm a bit too lazy to search right now )

 

1. Is it possible to change the colour scheme? 80-column text on a 1084 monitor is a bit hard to read. Maybe other colours would help.

 

2. Is it possible to get rid of the carriage return symbol when editing? (I've never been too fond of carriage return symbols.)

[JamesD]

Impressive to see so much progress in a short period of time and this isn't a full time gig.

 

I remember the first CoCo software that displayed text with graphics. It was something like 6 months from the first add until you could get your hands on it. And after that there were bug fixes for months and I don't think it had macros.

[JamesD]

I remember the first CoCo software that displayed text with graphics. It was something like 6 months from the first add until you could get your hands on it. And after that there were bug fixes for months and I don't think it had macros.

I was talking word processor here.

[Roydea6]

Wow, this is great! Thanks very much. It's amazing seeing great new software for a 30-year-old computer.

 

I've got a couple questions. (sorry if this is already answered in the help files or manual... I can't find it and I'm a bit too lazy to search right now )

 

1. Is it possible to change the colour scheme? 80-column text on a 1084 monitor is a bit hard to read. Maybe other colours would help.

 

2. Is it possible to get rid of the carriage return symbol when editing? (I've never been too fond of carriage return symbols.)

 

1. control+k to change text, background, Prompt, and Border. Control+K opens a dialogue to make changes.

 

2. Control+shift+< 'clr' will hide the eol character.

 

I have been using dark text, light background & Border, and dark Prompt.

[Mr.Amiga500]

 

1. control+k to change text, background, Prompt, and Border. Control+K opens a dialogue to make changes.

 

2. Control+shift+< 'clr' will hide the eol character.

 

I have been using dark text, light background & Border, and dark Prompt.

 

Thanks. That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's much more readable. Now... how do I save the settings?

 

Edit: Never mind. I didn't realise that an amazingly huge PDF document came with the program. I should probably read the thing. (wow... I'm even lazier than I thought)

Edited November 12, 2009 by Mr.Amiga500

[flashjazzcat]

Thanks for the great feedback... makes it worthwhile.

 

[Thanks. That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's much more readable. Now... how do I save the settings?

Shift+Ctrl+Q, and type LW <Return> to make it the default configuration.

[Mr.Amiga500]

Thanks for the great feedback... makes it worthwhile.

 

[Thanks. That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's much more readable. Now... how do I save the settings?

Shift+Ctrl+Q, and type LW <Return> to make it the default configuration.

 

Yes, I figured that out right after I posted. I got off my ass... well, on my ass, actually.. and read through your impressive PDF manual.

 

Thanks very much for this program!

[Roydea6]

I enjoy the original 2.1 also, and in someways I like it better. One function of 3.1 that bothers me is the screen being flaged for saveing even if the screen is blank (i.e.) after delete. Is there a way to kill the flaged save? In 2.1 after deleting and/or backspacing to clear screen the save warning goes away.

 

Working with macros: How do I know which key activates the macro after loading a non autostart macro?

[flashjazzcat]

I enjoy the original 2.1 also, and in someways I like it better. One function of 3.1 that bothers me is the screen being flaged for saveing even if the screen is blank (i.e.) after delete. Is there a way to kill the flaged save? In 2.1 after deleting and/or backspacing to clear screen the save warning goes away.

 

Working with macros: How do I know which key activates the macro after loading a non autostart macro?

The file is flagged for save if the screen is blank because deleting all the content from a file might legitimately be regarded as an edit. Pedentic perhaps, but perhaps I could include "flag empty files" as an option in the next update. 3.0 used to prompt to save an empty file even if the file wasn't yet assigned a name. This was fixed as of version 3.1. You can turn all the warnings off with "WARNINGS OFF" in LW.CFG. You can clear the edited text flag from within a macro (refer to the manual) but I'm not sure it will remove the asterisk, since its behaviour is to be cleared when a file's edits are saved. I certainly take on-board that this might be a candidate for a user-setting.

 

As for the macro activation: all the supplied ones usually run either as autoruns or off the Start key, IIRC. I should probably have spent more time writing the notes at the top of the macros. If you load a macro into the editor, the character to the left of the first inverse equals sign (or the second if the first is a "display macro name" macro) is usually the one which triggers the functionality. If you have specific questions, fire away: I'd be happy to help with macros or any other problems.

[flashjazzcat]

I thought about the "flagged for save" issue and decided it was a cosmetic bug. Now (in the work-in-progress 3.11: The Last Word for Workgroups ), the asterisk next to the filename disappears if you erase the last character in a file which hasn't yet been assigned a name (i.e. been loaded or saved). The asterisk stays, however, if a file which has been assigned a name is edited: even if you delete the last character from it.

 

I've also been messing around some more with the screen redraw and have managed to get selection highlighting and word wrap all inside the same loop which initially fills the line buffer. Previously, the procedure was: 1) grab a line of text; 2) scan back for the last space; 3) do selection highlighting; and 4) finally output the line. The selection highlighting is all done with counters so it was a bit fiddly, but it just about works. The next job is to replace the eighty long-winded calls to the character output routine for every line with a single optimized loop which will output all the characters on a line. The upshot of this will be 1) screen redraws will happen more quickly, and 2) there won't be such a noticeable slowdown of the editor when text is being highlighted for selection.

Edited November 19, 2009 by flashjazzcat

[+bf2k+]

I thought about the "flagged for save" issue and decided it was a cosmetic bug. Now (in the work-in-progress 3.11: The Last Word for Workgroups ), the

 

Hey, it won't need DOS will it?

[+Stephen]

I thought about the "flagged for save" issue and decided it was a cosmetic bug. Now (in the work-in-progress 3.11: The Last Word for Workgroups ), the

 

Hey, it won't need DOS will it?

Nice.

 

Stephen Anderson

[flashjazzcat]

Hey, it won't need DOS will it?

Nice.

That was the other thing I forgot to mention. I needed extra memory so this is a tape-only version.

[Marius]

This piece of software is really A M A Z I N G!

 

It is really GOOD.

 

I've been working a lot with word processors in the past, and I would never believed back then, that my Atari 8bit would be able to run such a program like this.

 

Sometimes I still use my atari 8bit for serious things, like keeping an adressbook and typing little letters. Well thanks to your program I might even use my atari 8bit more for that!

 

Greetings from The Netherlands.

Marius

[sup8pdct]

I'd like to see if there are any problems with this version before writing any major extensions such as spell-checkers, etc, because changing the equates in the add-ins after recompiling the main program is a real pain.

 

 

Good stuff.

 

Just a little thing About spell check. Remember atariwriter plus? It's spell check dictionary was on disk 2. Was fun hearing it grind away spell checking a document.

What i used to do was diskcopy the dictionary disk to an MIO ramdisk set to D2 (had an image stored on my harddrive). Man was it fast.

 

Would it be possiable for you to do this for those of us lucky enough to have an MIO? Or are you thinking of doing it a different way?

 

James

[flashjazzcat]

Just a little thing About spell check. Remember atariwriter plus? It's spell check dictionary was on disk 2. Was fun hearing it grind away spell checking a document.

What i used to do was diskcopy the dictionary disk to an MIO ramdisk set to D2 (had an image stored on my harddrive). Man was it fast.

 

Would it be possiable for you to do this for those of us lucky enough to have an MIO? Or are you thinking of doing it a different way?

Well - when the spellchecker happens (and I'm not saying it will be any time soon, since I have a ton of other projects which need finishing) I had hoped to keep the dictionary files as normal DOS files rather than RAW sector data like the Atariwriter Plus dictionary. If anything, this should make life easier, and you'll be able to keep the dictionary anywhere you like. The dictionary will be expandable, though, so if you add words to it, you'll naturally have to remember to save it to non-volatile media at the end. Simplicity will be the watchword: the spell checker will simply create an alphabetised list of all the words in a text bank and check them off against the dictionary file(s).

[flashjazzcat]

I've decided to get to work on the spell-checker for LW this week. It will be totally language independent and the user will have to generate the dictionary files from known correct text. The design is fairly simple, with some basic tokenisation of the dictionary. It won't be in the Atari-Writer Plus league, but it will work with any language as I say and it should make the package seem more "rounded".

[Mr.Amiga500]

Is a spell-checker really needed? You can do what ever you want of course, but I'd rather see your valuable Atari programming time spent making other useful programs. I've always hated spell-checkers. My speling is perfekt.

[flashjazzcat]

Is a spell-checker really needed? You can do what ever you want of course, but I'd rather see your valuable Atari programming time spent making other useful programs. I've always hated spell-checkers. My speling is perfekt.

It shouldn't take long and I regard it as an interesting exercise. Since it will call routines in the main program (it will run as an extension), the executable might only be a few hundred bytes.

[flashjazzcat]

Spell-checker aside for a moment, I'm actually getting more and more antsy about a proportional font version of LW. I worked out today that by getting rid of fixed 40 column and 80 column fonts and the 40 column line buffers, I'd immediately free up 2K for the proportional gubbins.

 

So bewildering are the issues and opportunities that proportional editing and printing bring to the table, it will have to be a case of incremental development. The first job is to make a proportional font (standard, 8 bytes per char, with all the characters shoved up against the left hand side of the cell, since a software algorithm will ignore all the white space to the right - except in the case of the space character - until I develop a proper proportional font editor). The initial job will be getting the editor to work in proportional mode: there are many complex optimisations to be implemented to get it to work quickly enough (although I'm extremely happy with the lines of assembler I drew up on paper this afternoon).

 

At this point, several interesting questions present themselves:

 

1. If we don't have scroll bars or anything else at the side of the edit window, we could still use a dynamic display list for scrolling. Even if we end up with different font sizes (and line heights), we could use an LMS on every mode 15 line.
2. How wide do we allow the edit window to be? If we restrict it to 320 pixels across, we can't have anything approaching a WYSIWYG display.
3. The display formatter's line buffer is - naturally - 256 bytes long. If we allow for more than this, it becomes awkward. 256 consecutive instances of a 1-pixel wide letter "i" with a 1-pixel space between each of them will take 512 pixels. 512 pixels, then, would have to be the maximum displayable page width.
4. Or do we abandon horizontal scrolling (and thus, WYSIWYG) altogether and format the text using control codes, saving the as-it-prints display for print preview?

 

Urgh... do I really want to try this? The document will, I imagine, have to be printed as graphics. The output should approximate to something equivalent to that of the DTP program Newsroom. I don't want to start displaying printer fonts on the screen.

 

If multi-sized fonts are to be a possibility (preferably pre-defined at different point sizes), a good, flexible font format is required. A way of bulk-converting fonts from another source would be a real time-saver. I can then busy myself with figuring out how to display them on the screen.

 

I'm just off to have another play on GEOS in CCS64...

Edited November 25, 2009 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

I finally got GEOS Write working properly with the mouse in Power64 under Mac OS. Frankly it was an enormous disappointment. It certainly looks pretty, but assuming the emulator is accurate, it's eye-wateringly, impractically slow. It appears to be using block memory moves for scrolling, and there's a lag of about three seconds between keystrokes when simply editing the simple README file.

 

I KNOW the Atari can do better than this. So it is written, so let it be done.

Edited November 25, 2009 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

There'll be a (final) update of version 3 of this program in the new year, with just a few fixes and changes. I just found another bug in version 3.1: can't alter the luma of the status bar text using the CTRL+K command.

 

Feedback's gone virtually silent on LW lately, which I assume is a good thing (i.e. it must work for those using it).

 

To say I feel at a crossroads now it's finished is putting it mildly...

 

 

 

 

[flashjazzcat]

Oh, and I'll take the opportunity to mark my 1,000th post at AtariAge with a massive thank you for making the last year since I joined one of the most interesting, challenging and rewarding I can remember. To see a personal project like LW finally get wide exposure, make so many valued new friends, and engage in daily discussion on one of my favourite topics with the world's leading authorities on the subject has been a truly great experience.

 

Thanks to everyone at AtariAge, and here's to more of the same over the coming year.

[Mr.Amiga500]

There'll be a (final) update of version 3 of this program in the new year, with just a few fixes and changes. I just found another bug in version 3.1: can't alter the luma of the status bar text using the CTRL+K command.

 

Feedback's gone virtually silent on LW lately, which I assume is a good thing (i.e. it must work for those using it).

 

That's right. I'm using it and haven't said much because I haven't found any problems with it. I'm pretty happy with it.

 

I suppose the only change I'd want is to have LW.EXE autoload if that's possible (not sure because I'm no Atari expert). With AtariWriter, I can just load the atr (800XL with SDrive) and AtariWriter will load automatically. With The Last Word, I have to load the atr, then type "L" "LW.EXE" from DOS to load it. It doesn't kill me to do this, but the less steps the better.

 

It's a good thing you noticed the text colour problem in the status bar. That was the only other small problem I was going to mention.

Edited December 9, 2009 by Mr.Amiga500