User avatar
Overmann

Posted Sat Jul 28, 2018 10:52 am

My favourite text editor on the Amiga was always Interword. It came on the CU Amiga august 1993 cover disk and is fantastic! It has a very sparse interface and just the features you'll need to get writing done. I wrote school assignments on my Amiga well into the late 90's and possibly early 2000's using Interword.

The company that made interword also made interoffice, but I don't have much experience with the other programs in that package. I'm sure they're at least competent.

I urge everyone to give it a try. I don't know if it's a full word processor but for creative writing or to just get in the zone and write it has worked wonderfully for me. I am actally using it to flesh out a game design at the moment. I still find it very easy to use.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_606

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sun Jul 29, 2018 1:19 am

Thanks a lot for that suggestion.

I really love it when I get contemporary hints from people who have been there back then and used the Amiga for something actually.

I recently browsed through an old WB-install of a system I acquired and it really felt like a time warp.

My impression is that especially in terms of software we forget how things worked even a few years ago.

Thanks a lot!
Last edited by McTrinsic on Sat Feb 13, 2021 8:22 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
maurensen

Posted Sat Feb 13, 2021 7:27 am

Man you used tears for fears shout lyric one of my favourites groups! Respect bro!:-)

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Wavemaker
Poland

Posted Sat Mar 27, 2021 1:25 pm

I use Excellence! to write articles for K&A Plus. Very solid and simple, perfect for ASCII editing.

I read today that it was the first WYSIWYG word processor on the system, not sure if that is true.

User avatar
roscoe500

Posted Wed May 26, 2021 2:30 pm

Thanks for this article. Since reading I have been using WordPerfect on my A500 for some longer bits of writing for work and loving it, totally sold on the distraction free UI and typing on the Amiga feels good without the distractions that can happen on a modern networked PC.

Thanks for the ADFs, never used WordPerfect back in the day and have to confess didn't know it existed on the Amiga. I used Transwrite in the early 90s with a dot-matrix printer, then later Wordsworth and finally AmigaWriter in the early 2000s with an inkjet printer.

<3

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Wed Aug 25, 2021 2:36 pm

Ok, I for one don't miss writing on the Amiga—my current keyboard is a lot better than my Amiga ones ever were, let alone after ~ 30 years. I'm not particularly picky about word processing / text editing software, but after almost 20 years I do really depend on the way Mac keyboard mappings work. (Recently I spent some time editing source code on the Amiga and only being able to use the right Amiga key for copy/paste was hard to get used to, for instance.)

But I do have to stick up for Wordperfect. Back in my Amiga 500 days, I actually used WP to write my emails. Just to refresh my memory, I installed WP 5.0 on my 1200, but that didn't really work under 3.1.4. So I managed to boot the 1200 under KS/WB 1.3 with harddrive support and that was a lot better.

It's amazing how fast the program is, and you can tell they worked on that: when you scroll by the screenful by hitting alt or control arrow up/down, if you do that faster than the computer can redraw the screen, it will actually stop redrawing and start redrawing from the new position so it remains responsive.

Now of course WP was made in a completely different world. In that world, we already had MacWrite and geoWrite, which were obviously the predecessors of what we use today. But back in 1990 or so, those WYSIWYG word processors were clunky and slow, and the WYSIWYG was hampered by the low screen resolutions so you didn't quite see what you would get. WordPerfect, on the other hand, made no effort at all to show you what your printed pages would look like, which was of course a big downside, but this allowed it to be many times faster. Printing to a printer with built-in fonts was also many times faster than the graphical printing that WYSIWYG word processors normally do.

WP on the Amiga does have normal menus, but WP was of course created to be used with the function keys. I also used WP on the PC at work around the same time, so having the two versions work the same way was great once you started remembering all the function key combinations.

WP on the Amiga did actually support a few Amiga shortcuts, like A-C for copy and A-X for cut. And A-P for paste. :shock: Yeah not everything was better back then. ;)

Back in those days the obvious way to exchange files with PCs et cetera was of course using floppies. But today that doesn't work so well anymore.

A few years later I got Wordworth 6 that's still on my A1200, maybe I'll check that out and see how it holds up one of these days.

User avatar
MattX
Stargard, Poland

Posted Thu Nov 04, 2021 2:41 am

For older Amigas with KS1. x I can recommend TransWrite (fast), Scribble! (standalone or as part of Platinum Works! suite), and InterWord.

I don't know why but WordPerfect has problem with opening big text files that are over 1MB in size. It just makes an error beep.

For testing I got Frank Herbert's Dune (English) in plain text I downloaded from the internet. It takes something about 1.2MB.

TransWrite opens it without any problem and the scrolling is really fast. Scribble! and InterWord seem a bit slower.

EDIT: I just discovered that WordPerfect can open big files, but it operates in the chip memory, so 512k won't do even if You got plenty of slow/fast memory. This wouldn't be a problem back in the day it was released since I honestly doubt that people edited files that were like 1MB in size anyway. Too bad it doesn't make use of the memory other than chip. For such a well known program it kind of weird.

User avatar
BatteMan
France

Posted Sun Nov 07, 2021 10:01 am

And for the fun, I translated this wonderful text about Monkey Island, wrote by Jimmy Maher, with Interword on my A1000 ! <3
a1000_interword_tarduction_monkeyisland.jpg

Here, you can read the result
Last edited by BatteMan on Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

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MattX
Stargard, Poland

Posted Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:19 am

BatteMan wrote:
Sun Nov 07, 2021 10:01 am
Wow! I'm really impressed. It's a quite big piece of text to translate. Too bad photo of your wonderful A1000 isn't displayed in the post. I had to paste the adres of the picture into browser to see it. It's really cool you are using InterWord. It's a great piece of software. I would like to hear your opinion about this program as you're a true user. 😊

Link to BatteMan's A1000 photo:
http://obligement.free.fr/gfx3/a1000_in ... island.jpg

User avatar
BatteMan
France

Posted Mon Nov 08, 2021 9:19 am

MattX wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 3:19 am
BatteMan wrote:
Sun Nov 07, 2021 10:01 am
Wow! I'm really impressed. It's a quite big piece of text to translate. Too bad photo of your wonderful A1000 isn't displayed in the post. I had to paste the adres of the picture into browser to see it. It's really cool you are using InterWord. It's a great piece of software. I would like to hear your opinion about this program as you're a true user. 😊
It's strange as I can see picture in my differents browsers... I just added a link under the photo too ;-)

For InterWord, it's fast and very light, but I must admit that I got a Classic 520 :D (you can take a look at my configuration here). I'm using Interword because I can load and save my text in a format readable with MorphOS but I don't use it more than a simple text editor, for now... But I'll probably use it more "intensively" in the future ;)





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