Word Processing in the 90's a review of First Word Plus Ver. 3.14 by GST Holdings price from $59 to $79 reviewed by Bill Pike (PAC) When you obtain a computer one of the first things that you will probably want to purchase, after games, is a way to write and print. Well in order to print you will need to purchase a printer. With a Atari computer you are in luck, you can use virtually any printer. The only restriction is that you need to either have a driver for that printer, as part of the program you want to use, or be able to construct a driver. The next thing that you will want is a Word Processor but here there is a problem. There are quite a few different word processors out there that cost from "FREE" to "THE SKYS THE LIMIT". If you are like me, cheap, you will be looking for one that does what you want it to do for the least amount of money. Each wordprocessor has things that are "Easy To Do","More Difficult To Do", "Down Right Impossible To Do", and "FORGET IT!". I needed one that was very easy to use and was able to keep me from messing things things up to badly. It should also be "what you see is what you get". The program should be fast in what I asked it to do. I found out you can't have everything, much to my disgust. One of the things that I looked for was the ability to have a dictionary and spell checking. Here there is a debate, do you want a dictionary with 50 billion words or a more modest one? My own experience, from using the 8-bit word processors are that about 40,000 words will more than cover most everything I need, if I am able to use personal dictionaries easily. My reasoning for this is that with the larger dictionaries there is just to much of a chance to misspell a word or make a typo and have it match the spelling of another word. In other words, you want to write one word and you make a slip of the key and actually write another word, the spell checker won't catch it as it is a correctly spelled word. I make to many spelling mistakes to allow that. A thesaurus is also a very handy thing to have letting you choose words that make what you write interesting rather than repetitive, it can also make you down right obnoxious if used to excess. The next thing that I looked for is being able to change pitch (how many letters per inch) on the fly. Do you want to print in Pica (10 letters/in.), Elite (12 letters/in.), Condensed (15 letters/in.), or Expanded (6 letters/in.). I like to change pitches and margins as I go so I wanted a program that can easily do this. Being able to print in boldface, italic, underlined, light, superscript, and subscript also comes in very handy. Another thing that is very useful is the ability to use the full character set that your printer has available. This means international characters and other symbols such as "less than or equal to", "greater than or equal to", and "not equal", among others. Mail Merging is another handy ability. This is the ability to customize a series of letters with basically the same text by including personal names, dates, ect., at appropriate places in each letter. It makes it look like you typed each letter individually and worked harder than you actually did. I don't use this feature much. The next ability that is nice to have is to use "footnotes" and sometimes "End Notes". This is real a convenience when you are writing reports and such. Especially if the program auto- matically keeps things like numbers and paging correct for you. I don't use this one much but when you need it there is no substitute for it. Now that I have used up 600 plus words let's get down to the nitty gritty. I have tried ST Writer, First Word, First Word Plus, Word Writer ST, Microsoft Write, and a couple of other programs. I have elected to use First Word Plus for my main word processor program. First Word Plus supports a passle of different printers and if none of these drivers do exactly what you want you can make your own or modify a existing one. A program is included that makes this very easy. Just boot the install program and then follow the directions by putting in the requested codes from your printer manual. When you finish the program will make the printer driver for you. Just rename the file and place it in with the main program and you are ready to go. First Word Plus has a 40k word basic spelling dictionary and the ability to use unlimited personal dictionaries. I can also merge my personal dictionary with the main dictionary so I don't have to load several separate dictionaries or I can use several personal dictionaries, one for each type of writing I have to do. I can spell check a entire document or have a continual check as I type. There is also a on-board hyphenation directory. The thesaurus from Partner ST by Timeworks works very well with this program. There is the ability to change pitches on the fly, also to reset margins and tab stops with each line. You can keep different combinations of pitch, tab stops, and margins on files and read each file into the document resetting whatever is typed next as you like. There is also a feature called decimal tabs that will keep the decimal points in a column of figures lined up and looking pretty. You also have the option of single, double, triple spacing. You also have the option of space and a half (1.5 spaces) between lines. You can print both draft and NLQ (near letter quality), if your printer will support it. I can print in any attribute or combination except mixing bold and light, come on now. Each of these features shows up on the screen as what it is. You can also change from one attribute to another if the first one doesn't seen right. Using this in combination with the rulers, resetting tabstops, margins, pitches, indent, outdent, ect. Things can really be made inter- esting. The full character set of your printer is available to you by lifting the text window and clicking on the character you want. It will be placed where the cursor is in the text window. I usually resize the window to above this selector than switch back and forth with the full screen option in the upper right corner of the GEM window. There is a separate program for mail merging. It is somewhat like using a standard database but you will need to learn it before you try getting fancy. It also supports script files which let you make things really fancy by selecting what to put where and when to do it, you can really foul things up also. Footnotes are handled very well. The program numbers each footnote for you and places each on the page that refers to that note. As you add and delete text the footnotes are renumbered automatically and added and deleted, as needed, with the text referred to by that note or notes. You also have the option of a separate pitch, margin, ect. for the Footnotes. End Notes have to be put in by hand, sorry. Some other goodies are being able to use a "Spill File" which uses the space on the disk (Hard Disk) for text as you work. You can work with a file as big as your disk free space, that's a lot of file. You can also work between four text files at the same time (four active windows). All standard editing features are supported. You can Import both First Word and ASCII format text files and Export both First Word and ASCII format text files. Graphics can be imported directly in IMG format. Justify Left, Right, and Center are supported. Hard Page Breaks and Condition- al Page Breaks are supported (Page Eject). Continuous feed paper and single sheet are supported. The ability to print the document you are working on or a document file off the disk is also there. You can also Set Markers (up to four) in the text and jump back and forth between them if you want to return to specific places, in the text, and you can select a specific page to go to. Like I said in the beginning I wanted a easy to use program that would do what I wanted it to do. I had to trade off some things for others but I am very satisfied with this program. Other programs will do exactly what I wanted but were very much more expensive and more difficult to use. Some other programs didn't do what I wanted but were cheaper. I settled on First Word Plus and I recommend if for your consideration.