The Last Word 3.11 Public Beta

[nosty]

And I have two different ideas how LW can works with cartridge... And I must talk with flashjazzcat

Great. I'm listening...

 

I have sent the e-mail you...

Edited February 21, 2010 by nosty

[flashjazzcat]

And I have two different ideas how LW can works with cartridge... And I must talk with flashjazzcat

Great. I'm listening...

 

I have sent the e-mail you...

Replied.

 

Since the subject of carts has come up, it's necessary to clarify a couple of things.

 

• LW 3.11 is the last disk version of The Last Word. Although it could be launched from a cart, it's designed to run from a disk. Little reason to modify the code for a cart, because...
• LW 4.0 (or whichever revision number it gets) is being written now, and will be a bank-switched cart application of some 48K in size, with 32K text buffers on expanded machines, automatic VBXE detection and display, SpartaDOS 3.x/RealDOS compatibility, menus, all the trimmings.

I still think it would be nice to have a disk version of the program by GR8, followed by (hopefully before the year's out) the custom written cart version. That's just my view: interested to hear who'd be interested in a boxed retail version of 3.11 on disk (many people were interested last summer).

Edited February 21, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[+Philsan]

That's just my view: interested to hear who'd be interested in a boxed retail version of 3.11 on disk (many people were interested last summer).

 

I would like that all the best new A8 software could have a beautiful boxed version GR8 Software like.

So, yes, I would surely buy a boxed version of LW.

Moreover, this application would have a beautiful big manual!

[flashjazzcat]

I would like that all the best new A8 software could have a beautiful boxed version GR8 Software like.

So, yes, I would surely buy a boxed version of LW.

Moreover, this application would have a beautiful big manual!

I'd certainly like one on my shelf! After all, it took ten years to get it published.

 

We have a German translation of the 3.x manual nearing completion, but no Polish translation yet (that I'm aware of). The English docs were full of mistakes, and will need correcting anyway before 3.11 comes out.

[spookt]

I'd certainly buy one. In fact I'm just waiting for the announcement. I don't mind either cart or disk. Disk might be nice so I can install it on my Sparta partition but whatever, I'd *love* a nice boxed edition of TLW.

[flashjazzcat]

I hope Nosty will release this version on disk. Given the go-ahead, I could have 3.11 debugged and finalized inside of a week. With that done and dusted, I'd start work on the cartridge version, which should be to 8-bit word processing what SDX is to 8-bit DOS.

Edited February 21, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[+Philsan]

Perhaps a good idea, but not from a commercial point of view, would be to make only one box version without writing on it version # or media used (disk or cartridge).

In this way, people could soon buy LW 64K box with disk and manual, and eventually they could buy cart and manual only.

Obviously you have to make another box for the new GUI you are planning!

[flashjazzcat]

Perhaps a good idea, but not from a commercial point of view, would be to make only one box version without writing on it version # or media used (disk or cartridge).

In this way, people could soon buy LW 64K box with disk and manual, and eventually they could buy cart and manual only.

Obviously you have to make another box for the new GUI you are planning!

Interesting notion. It's unclear at the moment just how different the cart version will be. So much work has already gone into writing and translating the docs for LW 3.x, it would be nice if the new features of the cart version could be covered in some sort of addendum. At least this way, the packaging and design could be broadly similar for both editions. The "look and feel" will be similar: the idea is that with the cart version, pressing a console key or some such will superimpose a menu system over the existing editor screen, which shouldn't need much in the way of explanation.

 

Not much progress with the GUI yet, but the idea of putting that on a cart as well is becoming increasingly attractive. Once you factor in Sparta 3.x compatibility (one thing LW 3.x doesn't have), the only other option is to run code out of extended banks (especially when the app needs 10K of main memory for the screen and makes extensive use of the 16K banking window). This limits the user base (though not so much as it used to), and creates massive headaches when both large amounts of data and large amounts of code using that data are both housed in extended RAM.

[Mr.Amiga500]

I've just tested it and it is a bug. The fact is the border text colour change is broken. I thought I'd fixed that bug but obviously not. It'll be fixed in the final version, so you'll be able to accomplish exactly what you describe.

 

Great... but now I don't even need to accomplish exactly what I describe. I've been playing around with colours and found a few schemes that work pretty well as it is - dark background, medium border and light text - using the same hue (blues or greens). I'm so glad The Last Word allows you to save/load multiple configurations. When I get tired of one colour scheme, I can just load another. (just like I used to do with Amiga prefs)

 

However, there's nothing in place to pause it after each screenful (the way CTRL+V will "page" a file on the disk menu, while "V" on its own just scrolls the file by. You can page a file in the editor with CTRL+J: type the name, and add /P after it.); I'll try and add it as an option? It's an excellent observation, anyway: thanks again.

 

Either pause after screen page or pause scroll on keypress would be useful. The ultimate would be pause scroll on keypress, backwards scroll on a up key, forward scroll on down key (esc to exit). That would make it similar to MuchMore on Amiga. It would be even better if it was possible to do this with a 1 pixel super-smooth scroll... though I don't know if Atari can do this, or if it's worth doing it. It would look great though.

 

Print preview colours are a bit ugly though.

 

(damn, I keep pressing Control to use the arrow keys when typing this, like on Atari... I've been using The Last Word too much )

[Mr.Amiga500]

(damn, I keep pressing Control to use the arrow keys when typing this, like on Atari... I've been using The Last Word too much )

 

Hey, that makes me think... what about an option allowing you to use arrow keys without pressing Control? I use the arrow keys much more than "-+=*" symbols. I'd much rather use the arrow keys without holding Control and press Control when I want to type those symbols. What do you think?

[flashjazzcat]

What I was just about to implement was an extra option on the CTRL+P Print command - "Paged Preview". This would just output the preview by the screenful, without clearing the screen after each keystroke (unlike the way paged file view does). It also won't wait on the page wait directive: no point.

 

Like I said, you can pause the output with CTRL+1 and SELECT and OPTION. I'll add space to that list if you like.

 

I was toying with the idea of making file view (CTRL+J) have the option of scrolling backwards through the content. Just about impossible to do with print preview, though, owing to the linear nature of the print formatting. The only way would be to write the output to a page buffer (like AtariWriter Plus). The cartridge version of LW will do double column printing and will probably work that way (building one entire page at a time).

 

Preview colours are meant to approximate what a sheet of paper looks like.

 

If you want to redefine the cursor keys to work without CTRL, you can. You have to use the KEY directive in LW.SYS. It's frankly not an easy task: you need to remap the cursor and math keys so they produce different internal codes.

 

I'm busy working on a series of video tutorials at the moment, covering the more tricky aspects of LW, so I'll cover something like that in one of the guides.

Edited February 23, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[Mr.Amiga500]

Preview colours are meant to approximate what a sheet of paper looks like.

 

Yes, but in that case it should be black text on white background, not grey (which looks a bit dingy). That doesn't really matter anyway. As it works now, Print Preview isn't very useful to me. (it would be if it was a multi-directional smooth scroller or page flipper - to easily read what I wrote)

 

 

A bit off topic... does anybody know how I can properly extract text from ATR files? Say I wrote a long document with The Last Word, saved it in an ATR file (on SDrive) and then I wanted to transfer it to another computer (Amiga/PC). Is there a way to do that? (without formatting problems)

 

Actually, I can probably answer my own question. I bet somebody made a Windows or MS-DOS utility for that. Unfortunately (but fortunately for my sanity), I don't use Windows. I mainly use BeOS and Amiga. Occasionally, I must use Linux. Has anybody heard of an ATR extraction utility for either BeOS, Amiga or Linux?

[flashjazzcat]

Preview colours are meant to approximate what a sheet of paper looks like.

Yes, but in that case it should be black text on white background, not grey (which looks a bit dingy). That doesn't really matter anyway. As it works now, Print Preview isn't very useful to me. (it would be if it was a multi-directional smooth scroller or page flipper - to easily read what I wrote)

Eh? The copies of the program I've sent out have all had black text on a white background (apart from one which had dark grey text on a white background, which was quickly dropped). The background looks white on my screen, without being headache-inducingly bright. Any else find it looks grey? Brighness controls?

 

Print preview is designed to give a reasonabily faithful representation of what a mono-spaced document will look like when printed out. Once you start setting up hanging indents and auto-numbered headings, and various other of LW's fairly comprehensive print formatting commands, you have no way of knowing whether they're going to look right until you either preview or print out. However, The Last Word's print preview isn't much use to me 90% of the time either, since I usually want True-Type fonts in a mixture of styles and point sizes in my documents, along with embedded jpeg images and WYSIWYG editing.

 

As for tranferring text files, I tend to use Atari800Win's H: drive with EOL translation. There are many other utilities which will do the same thing for you, though. There was a great stand-along ATR utility which did CR/LF conversion: I can't for the life of me remember what it was called. ATR-Tool?

Edited February 23, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[Roydea6]

A bit off topic... does anybody know how I can properly extract text from ATR files? Say I wrote a long document with The Last Word, saved it in an ATR file (on SDrive) and then I wanted to transfer it to another computer (Amiga/PC). Is there a way to do that? (without formatting problems)

 

Actually, I can probably answer my own question. I bet somebody made a Windows or MS-DOS utility for that. Unfortunately (but fortunately for my sanity), I don't use Windows. I mainly use BeOS and Amiga. Occasionally, I must use Linux. Has anybody heard of an ATR extraction utility for either BeOS, Amiga or Linux?

 

If you use any type of atari emulator with your machine/OS type. You can search/replace all the atari EOL's and change them to your preferred EOL ending. Last Word can read/write to any Floppy, Partition, drive atr.

 

Sorry never used BeOS or Amiga.

Linux might be supported for extractions.

[Mr.Amiga500]

Eh? The copies of the program I've sent out have all had black text on a white background (apart from one which had dark grey text on a white background, which was quickly dropped). The background looks white on my screen, without being headache-inducingly bright. Any else find it looks grey? Brighness controls?

 

Are you viewing in PAL? I've noticed lots of PAL screenshots have different hues and brightness. It looks grey to me - on 7-year-old CRT TV. Maybe also the latest LCD & Plasma TVs have "uber contrast" and are as you say, "headache-inducingly bright". Maybe that's what causes grey to look white to you.

 

 

If you use any type of atari emulator with your machine/OS type.

 

I never emulate. Emulation is for wimps and losers. Just kidding. Damn, it looks like I'll have to write my own program to do this.

Edited February 23, 2010 by Mr.Amiga500

[PeteD]

http://www.crowcastle.net/preston/atari/ anything on there help? some C sources about 1/2 way down for converting atr, seemingly to dump files from them to native filesystem.

 

 

Pete

[flashjazzcat]

Eh? The copies of the program I've sent out have all had black text on a white background (apart from one which had dark grey text on a white background, which was quickly dropped). The background looks white on my screen, without being headache-inducingly bright. Any else find it looks grey? Brighness controls?

 

Are you viewing in PAL? I've noticed lots of PAL screenshots have different hues and brightness. It looks grey to me - on 7-year-old CRT TV. Maybe also the latest LCD & Plasma TVs have "uber contrast" and are as you say, "headache-inducingly bright". Maybe that's what causes grey to look white to you.

Yes, viewing PAL. Since 1987 I've regarded POKE 710,10 as a white screen on the A8. First on a 12" portable TV through RF, then on a small, old TFT TV, then finally on the new LG. I've tended to regard 12 as bright white, and 14 as dazzling. It must just be my eyes. I realize that white on the PC is RGB FFFFFF, but it just never occured to me to brighten the print preview screen. It's not something I've ever thought about before.

 

Anyone else think the grey looks too dingy? Or should we compromise and go 14?

Edited February 23, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[Mr.Amiga500]

What am I thinking? Whatever Windows/MS-DOS utilities are out there will probably run on Wine or DOSbox in Linux.

 

 

http://www.crowcastle.net/preston/atari/ anything on there help? some C sources about 1/2 way down for converting atr, seemingly to dump files from them to native filesystem.

 

Thanks. I'll check those out.

[Mr.Amiga500]

Since 1987 I've regarded POKE 710,10 as a white screen on the A8.

 

Since 1987! Wow, you've been wrong that long, eh?

 

I've always considered white to be maximum... whiteness... and anything less than that to be variations of off-white, cream, light grey... and so on. (But I'm probably a little too obsessed with that sort of thing. I refuse to have light bulbs in my house that are anything less than 6500K.)

 

 

Anyone else think the grey looks too dingy? Or should we compromise and go 14?

 

12...we've got 12... anybody go for 13... we have a 13... do we have a 14....14... sold!

 

I don't need the maximum. That'd probably cause too much artifacting with the black text. Just a notch or two up and I'd be fine. (actually, I'm not too concerned about it... really )

Edited February 23, 2010 by Mr.Amiga500

[Roydea6]

13 is what I use in most basic programs.. preview is a little grey.

[flashjazzcat]

13's asking for trouble. Might as well go for 12: it gives the same colour.

 

On reflection it does look a little dim. I'll certainly up it to 12, and heck - who knows - I may go the full 14.

 

Oh - and I can't stand those energy saving lightbulbs. I insist on a 100W full fat light in my work area.

[flashjazzcat]

I experimented a bit with different "white" values today, but since I kind of like the default light grey text on the editor screen and title screen, it seemed odd that the status bar text on the print preview screen appeared much brighter when the colour of the "paper" was changed.

 

The system I'm testing at the moment actually allows manual setting of the preview screen colour, in as much as the preview screen simply takes on the colour scheme of the status bar. So, if you liked LW's editor screen with a brown border and beige status bar text, the print preview's page colour will be beige on a brown background. Of course, if you prefer a white border and black text, your paper colour will be black. But them's the breaks, I think.

 

 

Edited February 28, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[dwhyte]

The more I've used your word processor, flashjazzcat, the more I've realized that I no longer need Word '07 or any other PC based word processor. From now on, all of my writing will be done using The Last Word and then sent to LyX for typesetting a final document. Thank you so much for all your hard work and for giving me a reason to spend more time with my Atari!

 

I think I may now have to get a 1200XL so I can have a lovely keyboard to type with...

[flashjazzcat]

The more I've used your word processor, flashjazzcat, the more I've realized that I no longer need Word '07 or any other PC based word processor. From now on, all of my writing will be done using The Last Word and then sent to LyX for typesetting a final document. Thank you so much for all your hard work and for giving me a reason to spend more time with my Atari!

 

I think I may now have to get a 1200XL so I can have a lovely keyboard to type with...

Thanks for those motivational remarks. Love the avatar, by the way!

 

There's a bit of fiddly work to do today on elements of the program which had basically got lost in the mire over the past year or so, then this version can be signed off at last. Might have a play with the GUI for a while after that, before starting the cart version.

 

Wouldn't mind a 1200XL myself!

Edited March 1, 2010 by flashjazzcat

[flashjazzcat]

To all users of The Last Word: Dontations are always welcome: I don't charge a penny for this software and "crippling" the free versions is something I would not do, but if you use it regularly, please consider a donation.