AmigaLove

motrucker wrote:I still use Final Writer 97 on my A2000. It's the best Amiga processor for my use. Up until this last move (5 months ago) I had this hooked to an HP 4M Laser printer, with excellent results (no color though, obviously).
The later word processors for the Amiga, would not work with a stock A500, or A1000, due to the lack of power of the 68000 CPU. IIRC, even Final Copy needed at least an '020, and 2.1 OS to work.

Final Copy II on my Amiga 500 6800 with Workbench 1.3.

I always say everyone is going to be damn hard pressed to find even a handful of "commercial" releases that do not support 1.3 to the bitter end. A few AGA games, not many... But practically zero utilities. I wouldn't call it fast... But nor would I call it slow... And I run it with 16 colors... Throw it down to what other processors had, like 4... and it runs fine. Although it's not fast enough for my everyday use, I just use it for special projects.

Hey guys, very good reading this thread through! Lots of great information. I very recently got into the Amiga world, and bought a lot with a stock A600 and a bunch of boxed software from the UK, and the word processor TransWrite was included. Supposedly its designed specifically for being super fast and low RAM usage. The documentation markets it as perfect for writing very large documents, like novels. It truly is fast. With a 68000 CPU it keeps up fine no matter how fast I write.

I have it installed on the CF card and it includes a spell checker. Now one of the coolest features of this software is that you can activate "on the fly" spell checking, which produces no noticeable slow down in performance. It can also import and export to WordPerfect format, although I haven't tested that feature yet by opening the files on a PC.

I've also been using Final Copy II (thanks Intric8!) and its sluggish in comparison. Its got more features, thats for sure, but you cant really type fast with it. Anyway, I'd definitely recommend checking out TransWrite. If you do, make sure to go to Project>Screen Format>Workbench, so that it integrates properly with WB.

Looks nice. Advertises itself as supporting Word Perfect 4 and 5 files, and Word Perfect doesn't even support 5! hahah. Unfortunately it looks to be a hard one to find, not listed on my normal sites.

Nice find, @alterus. The company that made TransWrite - Gold Disk - used to advertise big time in AmigaWorld magazine in the late 80s. I believe they were a Canadian company.

That right there would be a cool ADF to have. Sounds like a light-weight version of the type of word processors I've been going for - ones that use the system fonts in particular.

Does it support any basic formatting? It'll be interesting to see how that translates if/when you migrate the files to a PC. If it saves to Word Perfect files, you should be in really good shape.

I have a boxed version of TransWrite. I don't think it uses any copy protection, I will have to check. I could up a adf somewhere if needed.

Back then, like 1990 or 1991, I used WordPerfect. Can't say which version.
I loved the split-view with the upper screen showing 'effects' like italic or bold, while the other screen displayed the respective characters.
I learned it back then and it still works in Office programs: _italic_ and *bold* .

I just checked the backup of the HDD of the previous owner of my system (no, no personal data!).

He used Excellence! with an OS2-system back then.

For some time I found Turbotext to be a nice compromise between speed and comfort.

Cheers,
McT

Both Excellence! and TurboText are great. The only "problem" with TurboText 2.0 is that it was aimed at OS 2.04 and above. The cool thing about it, though, is that the original author turned it into freeware long after Oxxi Software died and even offered some nice bug patches for it. It's a really nice and snappy editor. I installed it on the Phoenix since I can flip between 1.3 and 2.04 by flipping a switch pre-boot.

No wonder, TurboText (TT) is written by Martin Taillefer, known at CBM/Amiga as "Mr. 3.1", main person behind the Workbench 3.1 release. At least he didn't make it 3.1 only

If you like TT, try out another editor inspired by TT, ne (Nice Editor). There is an Amiga version on Aminet, and currently maintained versions for Linux from the author.

I found BeckerText to be excellent. It was very popular in Germany, but got a bad reputation in the US because version 1.0 was very buggy.

Version 2.0, however, and above were great. It was distributed by Abacus.

I wonder if the name turned off buyers, as the speed and features of version 2 and up were excellent.