by Kev Beardsworth

Look at any list of text editors, word processors, document processors or desk top publishers and you'll always find one name present in all, Papyrus. Not only will it be in all the lists the chances are it will be at or near the top as well. The lists will be fairly long so it's not there due to a shortage of competition but rather due to its legendary flexibility. What we intend to find out is does it really deserve such an accolade.

Papyrus first came to public attention back in the summer of '94. In those days it had some really stiff competition in the shape of ST software giants like PageStream, Calligrapher, Calamus, Protext and That's Write. Its slick professional interface carried it to the front in the battle of word crunchers very quickly, but there's more to software than the way it looks. Papyrus is currently up to version 4 with a strong whisper of five just around the corner [Hopefully at the forthcoming Atari Shows - Ed]. It has to be said that any reviewer given limited time to type out his opinions would fall in love with the interface straight away. Back in '94 it was fresh and powerful. It's been updated for version 4 and now has the standard 3D interface we come to expect from all quality software. This again hits the reviewer with a classy body which could easily hide who knows what under the surface. It has been on my system now for some time. Any novelty value has well and truly vanished during the constant pounding I've given it. So let's try to answer the question I asked in the first paragraph.

ROM software are responsible for the actual programming and as they've just released version five on the continent I'd say you had no worries about its future development.

According to the recent Atari Computing survey there should be no problem in running Papyrus on the majority of Atari systems. The manual recommends any ST/STe/TT or Falcon with a minimum of 2Mb memory. You'll also need a high resolution monitor and two floppy drives or one high density drive. As with all manuals this is a minimum setup. I'd recommend at least 4 Mb of RAM and a hard drive. Remember you'll also need a copy of GDOS. Again the manual says you can get away with GDOS 1.1 but in reality you're going to need SpeedoGDOS or NVDI 3/4. A CD Rom drive would be a great advantage if you want to get at the fonts on the free CD supplied.

I tested the installation under the three most common operating system, TOS, MagiC and Geneva. Simply run the install program on disk one. You must register Papyrus with your name and enter a serial number. This hides your details inside the Papyrus program file, so if you make pirate copies they'll be traceable back to you, so don't do it! Next fill in the path dialog and select OK. The Install program will then copy the files to the pre-picked paths. Everything went well until it came to running the software. It wasn't there. The Install program had copied across every file apart from the program and resource file. I tried it several times and each time the same thing occurred. It's easily corrected you just copy the files over using the desktop's normal copy routines but it was a little disconcerting at the time.

To install version 4 you just copy over the files on the version 4 disk to your Papyrus folder, easy.

The search/replace facilities are again excellent. Blocks can be inserted into either field with ease and can just as easily be created from this dialog.

As with anything I write there's going to be an abundance of typos and spelling mistakes [pytos and speeling mistooks; you, never! - Ed]. Papyrus can be made to alert you of these errors with a slightly annoying ping. It also underlines the offending word with the circumflex, thus pointing out the word for all to see. Once marked these words can be ignored or checked in the spell checker. Once the word is marked a simple right click highlights the word and calls the spell checker. A very accurate similarity search is performed and all words Papyrus thinks you were really trying to spell and displayed. If the similarity search fails just start backspacing your word and Papyrus will keep searching until a close match is found. Of course you may prefer to check for errors at the end of your document. This shows up another intelligent addition to the spell check operation. If Papyrus finds a word it doesn't know it will display the checker dialog and ask you to correct it. If you select ignore all other occurrences of that word will be ignored. Say for example you've misspelled one of these words later in you text Papyrus will display it as wrong but give you the word it previously didn't know as an option for correction. Now that's just amazing. I've got one niggle with the spell checker. If you're only checking a word that's just been entered is it absolutely necessary to display another dialog telling you there's no misspelled words below the cursor. We know that! Having to clear this dialog each and every time is a pain in the butt, to put it bluntly.

As we've already said Papyrus is a document processor and as such it needs to manage far more complicated operations that spell checking or searching. Most people read Desk Top Publisher when they read document processor, and while this is incorrect, in Papyrus' case it very nearly isn't.

We all expect some form of paragraph tagging and advanced text manipulation from our document processors and Papyrus is only to pleased to oblige. To start with there's create text style. Here you can define font, size, effects, colour, hyphenation and spacing. You can also delete and block mark styles from the style dialog. There's also a very powerful text style exceptions option built into this dialog. What this does is stop other styles being added to this text style once it's been tagged. With this option switched on Papyrus will not object say if you italicise a word inside this tagged style. If however it's switched off Papyrus will ask you to confirm that this is what you want to do. It will then ask if you wish to add the change you've made to the style into the pre-defined tag definition. Of course once this is done all the other areas of text with this particular tag will also change. Another great way to alter vast areas of you document with the minimum of fuss. There's also a separate paragraph style option. It seems strange that there should be a separate option for this at first glance, but the main reason is to control a table of contents. I would think the majority of users will stick to the text style dialog and leave the other for the novelists among us.

Alignment of paragraphs and words is also well covered in this document processor. Paragraphs can be laid out in the now customary left, right, centred and justified alignments as well being set into columns. The space between paragraphs and characters is easily defined. A couple of extra features in the paragraph offsets dialog allows you to justify the last line of every paragraph and write from right to left. It's little details like this that make Papyrus the program it is today. You may never use them but they are nice to see.

Of course the whole idea of using such a program is to put text onto a page. Most of us these days use A4 paper when we are writing letters, reviews, doing our homework or whatever. But just in case we use anything else Papyrus has 14 other sizes built in, just pick the one you want from the Paper format dialog.

There is no point having all the paper setting possibilities without the back up of page setting controls. These, and I think a pattern is developing now, are as complete as all the other options supplied. Full control over margin and column position and sizes are present along with controls for headers and footers, widows and orphans, footnotes, page numbering and footnote numbering. Papyrus even includes the ability to use master pages. These can be inserted in any place within the document and can influence as many or as few pages as you desire.

We want more than text these days though don't we? Your written, printed page looks far better with a few graphical elements. It lets you define areas of text and makes the page easier on the eye. Papyrus is supplied with a whole armoury of graphics effects. From your simple line, box or circle. All of which are once again supplied with an abundance of options, just so you can get the right size, shape, position or colour. Through to the creation of tables and the importation of pictures.

Those of you familiar with other HiSoft products will probably be aware of the External File Management System or EFMS. These are the tiny modules written by HiSoft that can be used by any program and stored only in one place, thus saving hard drive space. Their function is to take control of the import and export of different graphics file types. It's a great idea but one that hasn't been implemented properly with this software. The idea is to keep these modules in one place. There is no where inside Papyrus to alter their path. The only place I could get them to work was inside the Papyrus directory. Thus other HiSoft products need to be pointed at the Papyrus directory too. This is OK but not always successful. I've found that under certain circumstances other pieces of software prefer the modules to be on drive C.

Papyrus can now import many different types of colour pictures however the dithering of some types of colour graphic files is next to awful and the effect it has on the scrolling speed is devastating to say the least. The programmers have supplied an option to show graphics as a grey blocks, this cures the problem to a large extent. Let me make it clear, this only happened with certain pictures. The majority are handled without these difficulties. Having said this it's important to note that the more colours your computer can handle the less this becomes a problem. If you're going to do work with a lot of colour files I'd recommend at least 256 colours. On the positive side the options available to manipulate the graphic once it has been imported are again excellent.

It's in this area that the divide between document processor and desk top publisher becomes very grey indeed. For a start all pictures imported into a Papyrus document are also stored in a separate picture window.

From here various operations can be performed such as cropping, pasting, loading new images and removing images that are no longer present inside the text window itself. Picture manipulation does not stop here though. Once a picture has been placed in the document it can be moved and re-sized easily just by using the mouse. Double clicking on the graphic displays options to fine tune the picture to your screen or, more importantly, your printer. This should insure that the printer output produced is the best possible. Pictures automatically anchor themselves to paragraphs. This is an excellent feature and very important. After all you don't want pictures appearing next to non-relevant areas of text. Picture sizing and positioning is a little hit and miss when using the mouse and more accurate placement can be achieved by entering measurements directly into the object attributes dialog.

The computer is basically an input output device. There's not a lot of point being able to type in all this text and import all these graphics if you can't get it out again. Printing on the whole is easy, if you've installed the software correctly and the quality of output is very good indeed. Colour graphics can be a problem I'm told even on a modern deskjet. The problem may well lay with NVDI so I can't place the blame squarely at Papyrus' door. It's enough to say that 99 percent of the time printing from this software is of a high standard. It also doesn't lock up your machine and shut down other tasks so again Papyrus is a winner for all the multi-tasking fans out there.

Also included is a mail merge function. The data types that may be imported into the mail merge function are one line per entry, comma separated and user defined. The user define function lets you tell Papyrus which characters to use for field separation, data separation and a quote character.

Text macros have recently been added to Papyrus. These allow you to define a keyboard shortcut to a string of text or a file. All writers doing repetitive tasks should find these very useful.

Special characters can also be included in your texts. These include page numbers, the date, file names and even paths. The date is the most powerful of these as it can be variable or fixed. If you ask for a fixed date the current date stored in your computers memory is input to your text at the current cursor position. A variable date does the same thing, but every time you open that file it will be updated to the new date stored in your computer. A handy feature that comes in particularly useful when creating document templates.There is another variable date option that lets you add so many days, weeks or months to the current date. A clever idea, but I cannot think of a use for such a function.

There are many other operations that can be performed inside Papyrus but I think I've covered the most important. On the whole it's a great piece of software and certainly a classic on the Atari platform, can you feel a but coming?

But it has some strange omissions and at least one silly bug, I can only assume the beta tester was having a bad day. There's no way to open an ASCII file using the Open option as you could in version 3. To get an ASCII file into Papyrus you have create a new document and then import the text. Not a major flaw I agree but if you forget it's dammed annoying.

The omissions I spoke of are quite frankly unbelievable for a program of this quality. There is no word count, not serious for most users I agree but I can't understand why it's been left out after all the comments made towards version 3 on its lack of one. The second omission, where's the Thesaurus? Perhaps these omission will be dealt with in a later version.

Finding the odd characters you sometimes need to use is also very easy. Full font and keyboard layout dialogs are supplied. Just open the font layout box, search out the letter or symbol you want and click on it, it will then appear in your text at the cursor position. All the font characters will be displayed as Papyrus 4 now supports 16 bit character sets so you'll no longer be struggling to find that illusive mathematical symbol.

So what's the answer to that question asked right back in the first paragraph. Should you spend 129 pounds on a copy of Papyrus or if you're still using version 3 should you upgrade. Your not seriously waiting for me to answer that are you? Of course you should! I will add one point, it makes a great text editor but use one designed for the task. I say this for two reasons. One, you'll find a dedicated text editor faster especially in the scrolling department. The second reason, Papyrus takes a fair while to load even on an accelerated Falcon, so why wait for it to load when something like Everest loads in the blink of an eye. As for the word processor, document processor or desktop publisher you've been using, I think it's time to hit the delete key, Papyrus certainly tops these lists for the average user.