LAPWORD AND T-WORD COMPARISON By Rob Drummond 75515,1757 September 1987 BACKGROUND Both Lapword and SARDINE (with T-WORD) have received enthusiastic support on the M100 SIG. Current Lapword users may wonder what advantages T-WORD offers over Lapword. What follows is a comparison of the two products, the RAM version of Lapword and the ROM version of T-WORD, as part of SARDINE (Vers. 1.3). A detailed product description of SARDINE can be found elsewhere in the DL's. PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS Lapword is a program to format text which is available from the Covington Group. The program comes on cassette with a short manual. T-WORD is available with SARDINE from Traveling Software in both a ROM/Disk and a RAM/Disk version. The SARDINE ROM version contains a 7,000 word spell checking program on ROM and the T-WORD text formatting program. A disk that contains over 33,000 words for more complete spell checking accompanies the ROM chip. Two professionally prepared manuals and a Random House pocket dictionary are included with the software. Both Lapword and T-WORD were written by Jim Irwin. Their common heritage is evident. GENERAL FEATURES In short, SARDINE/T-WORD is a portable word processing system whereas Lapword is a program to format printed text only. Lapword sells for considerably less than SARDINE/T-WORD. In addition to spell checking, SARDINE provides the following enhancements to the built-in TEXT word processing capability of the Model 100: - Overstrike capability by pressing . This function works intelligently by switching to insert mode when the cursor reaches a paragraph marker. - Search & Replace capability by pressing - Byte, Word and Paragraph count by pressing Users of Lapword will find that T-WORD is very similar to working with Lapword. Entry to the T-WORD program is: - Logo Screen - File Screen - Print Format Screen LOGO SCREEN T-WORD greets users with a logo screen that takes about 3 seconds to clear. Lapword skips this screen entirely. The T-WORD identification appears again on the file and format screens. FILE SCREEN The file screen of T-WORD is similar to Lapword, listing all .DO files and their byte sizes, but T-WORD adds the ability to open new files, kill files, directly edit files and access files on the Tandy disk drive (for printing, not editing). PRINT FORMAT SCREEN The main screen of T-WORD to format files has three columns rather than two. Both Lapword and T-WORD give format control over: - Margins (Left,Right,Top,Bottom) - Page Length - Left/Right Justification - Wait Between Pages - Font Code Selection (Based on Custom Printer Table) - Page Number Start - Linefeeds On/Off Additional formatting features of T-WORD are Quick Page Numbering (centered at bottom), # of Copies, Last Page # to Print, and the spacing prompt is for # of lines rather than Y/N for double spacing. Omitted from the T-WORD format screen is the ability to control which page the header starts on. This is controlled in T-WORD by the placement of the header in the file. Standard functions of both programs are pixel plot of page, display of document (line by line), display of page breaks, parallel/serial printer select, edit document, print document, return to file screen, and exit program. Additional functions of T-WORD are: 1. the ability to print to file. This is handy to format documents that will be sent via telecommunications, such as telexes and this document. 2. ability to jump from the graph mode directly to the middle of the page being displayed. 3. ability to save the printer settings with the document by pressing at the format screen. This writes a one-line string as the first line of the file to record every setting of the format screen. FORMATTING CODES Files that were created with Lapword will format properly with T-WORD because the same control character system is used to identify headers (^H), footers (^F), centering (^C), hanging indents (^X) and page numbering (##). These simple codes are hard to improve upon, especially global hanging indents which require only a properly placed ^X to initiate. Also, left and right margins can be reset within text files by the proper placement of ^L or ^R. T-WORD has the additional ability to set tabs by inserting a non-printing, one-line entry. For example, an entry to set 5 tabs at every 4th character would read as follows: ^A^T4,8,12,16,20 T-WORD also has Date and Time stamping of files by inserting ^Q^D and ^Q^T. PRINTER SETTINGS Both Lapword & T-WORD allow considerable flexibility to adapt to a wide variety of printers. A separate program accompanies Lapword to build custom printer setups from .DO files which can be saved as 185 byte .CO files. For example, I maintain 4 separate .CO files in RAM which contain setups for an IBM Proprinter, an Epson FX-286, an HP Laserjet+ to access both the built-in fixed-pitch fonts and add-in cartridge fonts, and a separate Laserjet+ setup to access proportional downloadable soft fonts. Each file is limited to 30 ASCII codes in total. This sharply limits the number of features that can be accessed on the HP because the laser requires long setup strings. In both programs the typestyles are activated by the Font setting in the Format screen or by embedded control characters within the text file. Common embedded characters used to toggle print features on and off within files are boldface (^B), underlining (^U), and wide type (^W). The ROM version of T-WORD simply reads a CONFIG.DO file for the printer settings. My CONFIG.DO file contains all 4 printer set-ups and the printer sets are accessed by placing a ^P3 (for set-up #3 for example) as the very first character in the file. T-WORD can accommodate 99 sets of commands. No real limits here, folks. T-WORD has an undocumented requirement of the CONFIG.DO printer file. The first special character has to be ^B and the last ^Y even if there aren't any assignments to these characters. Failure to do this, trashes the RAM files with 0's and control characters. MERGING T-WORD has the same approach to merging text using ^Q as Lapword. T-WORD improves upon Lapword by allowing files to be chained together. For example, one file can reference three files in the following manner and act much like a batch file: ^Q[file1.DO] ^Q[file2.DO] ^Q[file3.DO] SPELL CHECKING Spell checking is what makes the SARDINE/T-WORD package worth its price. Pressing while on a word invokes the spell checker for that particular word. Pressing invokes spell checking for the entire file. In either case you can select ROM based spell checking or the more complete Disk based spell checking. For more information refer to the spell checker review, "Sardine: A Review of Operation", by Denny Thomas elsewhere in the DL's. SUMMARY There are still more features of both programs that I have not mentioned. I just pressed and T-WORD told me I have typed 7171 bytes, 1183 words and 99 returns!