Issue 47: Sep 2004
Features
- | Foreword
- | Tip of the day
- | Classic Gaming Expo UK 2004
Reviews
- | Tempus-Word NG 5.35 beta
- | Driv3r
| Tempus-Word NG 5.35 beta Thomas Wellicome reviews the all new English version of the Tempus package without trying to mention the fact that modern ST word processors are like buses - you wait ages for one to come along and then... Shortly after finishing the review of Papyrus Office X I became aware of the impending release of the latest version of Tempus-Word, which would also be translated into English. ST development seems to have become very cyclical since the commercial death of the ST, with bursts of breakthroughs in various fields followed by years of neglect, before development shooting off again. The release of two word processors within the space of a few months is something which hasn't been seen since the heady days of the early nineties and is one in the eye for those who might suggest the ST is a dead platform. The aim of this review is to compare Tempus-Word with its "heavyweight" opponent, mainly in terms of ease of use, speed and results. Saying that though, the manual recommends a machine with at least 8 MB of memory and preferably 4 MB of ST RAM and 8 MB of TT RAM. Either way it seems that stock ST users (by which I mean ST users with 4 MB of RAM and a hard drive, not 512 KB and one disk drive!) might as well dig out their copies of Calligrapher and Atari Works again. It seems that with a lot of modern Atari software, the Atari ST just doesn't cut it any more, which seems a bit of shame, but if the Atari computer is to remain a viable platform for working on then I suppose this is the future. Conflictingly, the web site states that the program should work on any Atari, but if you want to get anything serious done then you'll want the higher specs.
Tempus-Word NG in all its glory.
The version used in this review is the beta version of 5.35, though initially the current public release 5.30 was used. The new beta version differs only slightly from the current release, with the only major addition on the feature department being that of templates. Most of the additions are behind the scenes in the form of bug fixes and improvements in printing. It should be pointed out at this stage that, as with Papyrus, this is a big program and you could spend weeks exploring all the features available, therefore this review is intended as a brief guide to the features available to the average user, rather than a full blow-by-blow account of how everything works down to the last detail. Hence apologies in advance if this review overlooks something. Tempus-Word was first launched in the late '80s in Germany, but never really made it in a big way to the UK or beyond. The program was developed until 1993 at which point its developer went into liquidation and all development ceased. Development was restarted for the Milan II project but again stopped when that project went belly up. Finally the current authors bought the rights and this current version is the result. The program always valued speed and functionality before looks and spin and that has been carried into its descendant. As such the interface is pretty dull and uninspiring, the button icons in the tool-bar are black and white (or black and grey on a system with a colour interface) and while tidy and functional aren't exactly going to make anyone's jaw drop in disbelief. The main reason for this is for compatibility with the standard ST high resolution, but it seems a shame to limit everyone to the same interface. Still, looks aren't everything (which is something I often say to myself when looking in the mirror) and if discarding a snazzy interface will get some extra speed out of your machine then this is to be commended, particularly as the majority of ST compatibles still operate below the 100 Mhz limit. Tempus-Word is billed as a writer's text processor, which, while being slightly derisory to users of other word processors, it does try hard to achieve. And let's face it, it's certainly a whole step up in terms of looks and ease of use from Protext, the last program to be billed as such. Apparently an interface re-design is on the cards so there will be a newer, prettier version on the cards soon.
Not all that pretty to look at, but all you could need. Perhaps more than you would need!
The initial look of Tempus-Word upon loading the program is somewhat intimidating with a veritable forest of, for the most part, small and indecipherable icons sitting above the standard blank document. Luckily the icons all have BubbleGEM labels, which is handy. The menus are clearly laid out with the labels giving a fairly obvious clue as to their function, though there are quite a lot of sub-menus to wade through to find a particular option in some cases, the system parameters being a maze of different dialog boxes. Tempus-Word certainly gives the initial impression that it is a program to be learned (like Protext for example) rather than something that can picked up and quickly put into action (like 1st Word), however this assumption would be wrong, because if all you want to do is blast out a quick pretty letter now and again the majority of Tempus-Word's more powerful functions can be easily ignored. Most of the basic buttons are presented in the format most people who'd ever used a word processor before will be familiar with, even MS Office users might be able to knock a reasonable looking document together in a short time (though don't count on it - boom boom!). Strangely enough the forest of icons doesn't include an Undo button and you have to search through the menus for it. Some of the icons chosen for the buttons are also a little peculiar, mainly the ones which relate to the application of text effects. The button for memorizing a text effect, for example, is the button more commonly used in art packages for picking a colour from a drawing to use as the current colour. There is a kind of logic there but it could become confusing. Similarly, the button to apply the aforementioned effects is represented by the button normally used in art programs from time and memorial to fill areas. As far as layout is concerned there's little to seperate Papyrus Office and Tempus-Word, at least in general use anyway. Tempus-Word supports all the standard features such as indexing, headers and footers, referencing, spacing and microspacing and all the usual page layout and paper format functions. It does seem that a certain amount of Tempus features can be tweaked to a slightly greater degree allowing advanced users more control over the look of their documents. For most use, however, there seems to be little in it and you have to question whether you should be using a DTP package rather than a document processor if you want full control over the way your document looks. Not that this is a complaint either, as extra features are always welcome. A nifty feature on Tempus-Word is that selecting a block of text and then right-clicking allows you to apply a whole range of formatting effects to the selected block. Right-clicking does not, however, bring up the option of spell-checking an incorrectly-spelt word, a useful feature available in Papyrus and that other word processor by that company on that platform whose name I've completely forgotten. As with Papyrus, you're limited to the 16-colour system palette as far as text colour or in-program created graphic objects are concerned, which is somewhat limiting. One thing I did find slightly irritating about the current public release of Tempus-Word (5.30) was that when typing, pressing the space bar with the [Shift] key depressed did not produce a space as you would expect (at least on the test machine, a Milan 040). This is a problem for sloppy typists like myself for whom inaccurate key pressing is a way of life. Most word processors let you get away with this, but quickly typing "ATARI ST compatible" on Tempus-Word produces something like, "'ATARISTcompatible". After contacting the Tempus-Word team about the problem I received a reply within a couple of hours, full marks there. This "bug" is actually part of a not fully implemented shortcut feature that in future releases can be turned off. I was thinking while using version 5.30 that it would be nice to see this perhaps as a feature that can be turned on rather than one that has to be turned off, so the more manual shy of us (like myself) don't have to worry about it. Hey presto, no sooner said than done, in the current beta release (5.35) no more problems! It should be mentioned that this "feature" is just one of many keyboard shortcuts that cover the majority of functions in the program, so power users are again well catered for. Some of the shortcuts require up to four buttons to be pressed at once which makes you wonder how much of a shortcut these are likely to be unless you're a speed typist. Spell checking in the current release follows a different approach to that used by Word and Papyrus. There are two ways to check your work; the first of these is continuous checking - you can either set the program to bring up a spell check box or bleep at you when you make a mistake. The former of these can prove irritating, there's nothing like being interrupted mid-sentence to correct a simple typing error to drive a typist to distraction, though if the text has to be just right then this feature is more useful. The latter method is slightly more practical, as it doesn't interrupt the flow of your writing. However, by the time you've finished the paragraph you might well have forgotten where the bleep occurred! You can also of course do the normal run through the document step by step, though Tempus-Word did irritate me slightly by moving the dialog box all over the place presumably to let me see the context of the word which it believes is spelt wrongly. In theory this is a good idea, but it's a pain to continue to have to move the mouse all the time. The other annoying feature about this mode is that when you click on a replacement selection it immediately replaces the word. Again, fine if you've clicked on the right word, but a problem if you select the wrong one, and have to wade through the whole document again to find the mistake. Perhaps making this a double-click affair would make this feature a little less accident prone. Papyrus Word's underlining of spelling mistakes, while slowing the performance of the program, is far more useful and makes for much easier correction of mistakes. To be fair to the authors this is a feature to be included in a future release, so I can't grumble too much about that one! On the plus side, spell checking is fast and the dictionary is large and functional. Oddly enough the only common word I found missing was "its" but that's considerably less of a hassle than Papyrus 5's complete lack of two-letter words! There is, like in Papyrus, no grammar checker, but this probably would have slowed the whole program down quite considerably. There are features to automatically correct transposal errors and capital error mistakes. The transposal error correction seemed to work well during the test, the capitalization correction seemed to check all words in a sentence, not those just after a full stop which meant writing a word like "Papyrus" (which as we Atarians know may well need to be spelt with capitals) resulted in "papyrus". The function generally works well and perhaps some options to slightly tweak its functionality could make it very helpful indeed. There is a work-around to the Papyrus/papyrus problem which involves going through the document adding capitalized versions of problem words to the spelling dictionary, this solves the problem, but may take some time, the benefit being that you'll never have to worry about those words again. Finally a special mention should be made of the Text Modules option. This allows a user to specify an abbreviation which Tempus will convert into a whole word when typed. It can be used in a similar but not quite as powerful way as predictive text on your mobile phone or in Open Office on the PC, however it has a even more powerful function. Simple abbreviations can in fact be used to shortcut to pargraphs or even whole documents, including graphics, so writing out birthday "thank you" notes to your family and friends will never be a chore again!
A picture within a picture.
Tempus-Word supports the importation of various graphics formats, these include: GEM, IMG, GIF and TIFF files. JPEG images are unsupported and although this format isn't a great choice for use in print due to the loss of quality incurred when re-sizing the format, it seems a bit of a glaring omission. Users could always get around this by converting the JPEG files into one of the supported image types using Imagecopy or a similar program, but, again, the loss in quality resulting from altering this sort of image format is pretty high. IMG import was also a tad limited with none of the colour IMG screen grabs, created using Imagecopy for this review, being accepted as being of the required format. Tempus-Word also supports the in-package drawing of various crude geometric vector shapes such as squares, lines and circles for use in your layout, although this function isn't as intuitive to use as the one included Papyrus. While we're on the subject of printing it should be noted that Tempus offers true WYSIWYG printing. It also has a handy print preview function, allowing you see exactly what you're going to get when you print the document. This feature is one of the few parts of Tempus that anyone who is used to using a PC will feel immediately at home with. The layout is very similar to the one used in most PC word processors. It's also considerably more flexible than Papyrus' equivalent. Of course one of the big features of Tempus is its speed so a quick head-to-head against Papyrus was definitely in order. I decided to use the Tempus manual (which is a pretty hefty piece of work at 128 pages) as the test document, converting it to Rich Text Format so there could be no cheating. The test machine was a Milan 040 with 96 MB of memory and MagiC as the operating system. Both Papyrus and Tempus were open at the same time. Papyrus took 35 seconds to open and format the document, which seems like quite a long time and would probably be a ghastly wait on a slower machine. Once opened, the document could be scrolled through at will without any further loading, though this is probably due to the amount of memory as I seem to remember some tedious waits when the Milan only had 32 MB of memory. Tempus-Word in contrast took approximately 10 seconds to do the same thing, which is quite astounding. Again there would probably be some reformatting delays with less memory. In a simple search and replace excercise replacing all instances of "a" in the manual document with "cd" showed another clear difference. Papyrus crawled in at well over 15 minutes, so long in fact I gave up trying to time it and went to make a cup of tea; and this was on the Milan. Tempus on the other hand only took 30 seconds, which again had me reaching for my jaw, which had hit the floor and carried on several metres into the earth. Papyrus made things worse for itself by not having the ability to undo the replace operation. Clearly Tempus-Word lives up to the hype and is much faster than Papyrus. Documentation is extensive, with two versions of the manual included with the release. There's no on-line manual like Papyrus and the manual itself has to be loaded up as a document, which is a slightly peculiar way of doing things, although admittedly it is fine in use, if not exactly obvious. The documentation has been painstakingly translated from the original language by DDP Translations and is for the most part a success, any problems coming from the original documentation rather than the translation. The very fact that the two huge accompanying documents have been translated so fully is worthy of congratulations. One slight problem with the translation is the constant referral to the "Info Line" when what really is meant is the tool-bar. I initially spent some time searching through the menus, presuming that this was the most likely place for the Info Line to be hiding only to find I was entirely in the wrong ball park. BubbleGEM is supported, with help bubbles being available for most if not all of the program functions. The method is slightly non-standard in that right-clicking brings up a "What is this?" menu which then has to be clicked on to get access to the help bubble. Again in fairness right-clicking on certain buttons also allows you to change some of the parameters and to combine this and bubble help within the same dialog would have been unworkable. Of course just leaving the mouse to linger over a button brings up the BubbleGEM description anyway, so it's not really a problem.
Database alert!
Table creation within Tempus-Word is easy enough but calculating sums within the table is much less intuitive than in Papyrus. Doing a simple addition for two cells within Papyrus is straightforward, I don't have to even look at the manual. Tempus-Word, however, makes things decidedly trickier with the program requiring you to set up fields to calculate numbers. While this may in theory give the user more control, it's a bit of a pain when you just want to calculate your bank balance after a shopping trip. The database section of Tempus-Word is referred to in the manual as being quick and easy to set up and use, I must admit I struggled a bit in getting this to work properly partially because of the way Tempus-Word outputs the data into your document but mainly because the initial documentation included with 5.30 was not exactly extensive on the database front. For starters the database is hidden away in the Extra menu, rather than under the more obvious position of the File menu, almost as if the programmers don't want you to find it. You are then presented by a somewhat confusing dialog, where to create a new database you have to click on a button marked load in the bottom of the dialog, then enter the name of your new database, before clicking on Load in the file selector to open a new database. This seems a peculiar way of doing things, but casting my mind back it's not the first ST-compatible application to do things this way round. For example the first thing you see when you load Papyrus X is a file selector with the legend "Open file", great if you've never used it before and just want to create a new file... Perhaps it's a translation thing, but it couldn't hurt to have the option to create a new database in its own seperate entry under the File menu. I hold my hands up here and should mention to the reader I spent an hour fiddling with this dialog before finally spotting the half-sentence tacked onto the database chapter telling me how to create a new database. I should also point out that revised documentation for the database has also been prepared and that the Tempus-Word team e-mailed me a copy "hot off the press" as it were to help me along with the review. The new version is much more helpful and should ease you into database creation much more easily. I'd have to admit that being used to MS Access (for my sins I have a MOUS certificate in it) I find the database part of the program a tad clunky and maybe slightly old-fashioned, but it seems to be capable of most of the basic functions you'd like it to be able do, and to ask for Access levels of sophistication in a database incorporated into a word processor is probably a little bit much to ask, though Papyrus does a much better job of it. The database is based on 1stbase, a database only released in Germany some time ago. It's pretty nippy, on the Milan anyway, and really is pretty easy and simple to use once you've overcome the initial hurdles. There are a few problems with its functionality however. Firstly there's no undo function, with the revised manual stating you should create an extra backup of the file in case of disaster. The second problem I had was with changing field definitions when I'd already added records to a database. Changing a field seemed to result in the entirety of the entered data apparently disappearing! This is not really the case, the program has merely put you back to a blank record and you can get access to records you have already entered by using two small arrows in the dialog box. I was a tad worried at first though, I have to admit. Having said that, inserting database records into a document is pretty straightforward, something you have to do if you want to get printed output, as you can't print records directly from the database itself. Records can then be formatted and laid out as you please. The database itself can also be searched using a cut down version of the standard SQL (Structured Query Language) commands such as "and" and "or".
Hmm, now what was I doing on 6 September. Now there are no excuses. Presenting the Tempus-Word calendar.
Other features of note within Tempus-Word are its calender/appointment diary, calculator and notepad. These features are described within the manual as hidden, which seems a trifle strange as if you're not the manual type you could use the program for years without realizing they were there. The calendar can be accessed by pressing [F8] on the keyboard or by selecting using a button on the topmost tool-bar. The calender incorporates an appointment diary (which itself can be accessed using [F7]) allowing you to chronicle important dates and set off alarms to remind you that you've missed them (all too useful for reminding MyAtari writers they've gone past this month's deadline). It actually uses Tempus-Word's database features to store its files, which is quite useful as this means you can output the calendar directly into your document if necessary. The calculator is a fairly simple affair, similar to about a thousand available in the public domain. It doesn't have any scientific functions as such and the calculations available aren't very comprehensive. Programmers aren't going to be able to convert between binary and hexidecimal, for example, though why you'd want to load up a word processor to do that anyway I don't know. All in all the calculator is nothing more than a gadget that is handy if you quickly want to calculate something simple but not useful for anything else. Finally we come to the notepad. Again a simple tool that you've probably got lurking in your accessory folder anyway, or even on the desktop if you use MagiC. One of the benefits of the Tempus-Word notepad is that you can quickly and easily dump text from the notepad directly into your text all with the touch of a button. This is also true of the calculator, where you can paste the results of your calculation, and the calendar where you can plop the date into your text. Support for Tempus-Word seems to be second to none, with an extensive public beta test being carried out before this version was released. Response times to queries is quick and friendly which is welcome and the authors are responsive to any ideas that users would like to see in future versions. There is also a dedicated forum on the Tempus-Word web site, which although seemingly mainly used by German users is also open to anyone else. Now to the tricky question, which is better, Tempus-Word or Papyrus Office? It's a difficult question to answer, really, and to a certain extent I'm going to have to do the dirty and sit on the fence. Tempus-Word certainly wins in the speed stakes and boasts most of the features of Papyrus, at a cheaper price. On the other hand the table handling and database functions of Papyrus are far easier to use and its import and export functions are far more extensive. I must admit I probably wouldn't use the calculation and database features of Tempus-Word all that much, in their current form, as it is far easier, more flexible and probably quicker to use a dedicated package such as Twist or Texel for such a purpose. The features are there if you want to use them, however, and it's certainly handy to have a database to hand when you're working on a long document. Papyrus also shares a greater similarity with other word processors on certain majority platforms and as such seems more instantly intuitive. The layout of the interface seems less intimidating than that of Tempus-Word, but those users who may use their word processors day in, day out may be won over by having more of their most used functions close to hand. Tempus-Word, it should be said, also seems to be a much more stable program and didn't crash once during the review, which is more than can be said for Papyrus which crashes more times than is necessarily comfortable for anyone in the habit of writing long, sensitive documents. Support, it must be said, is also better on the Tempus-Word side, with the ST-compatible version of Papyrus long having been a side issue to that of the PC version. On the basis of this I'd have to say it is a draw and you should really think about what they intend to use the program for. If you want to create long documents and don't have the fastest machine in the world, then probably Tempus-Word is the program for you. If you have a faster machine, want greater compatibility with that ugly PC box in the office and aren't put off by the occasional unexplained crash then Papyrus is probably just still the best bet, mainly because of its superior export and import facilities and easy-to-use database. It should be noted that a lot of the problems with Tempus-Word are in the process of being sorted out, and the future for this program looks very bright. Hopefully, having two quality word processors on the market may inspire a little friendly competition between the two camps. thomas@myatari.net I have to thank Peter West for speeding through a translation of the new database tutorial and to Tempus-Word team for putting up with some of my more inane queries! Without either of their input this article would probably still be lurking on my hard drive.
Verdict
Name: | Tempus-Word NG
Authors: | Claudio Kronmüller, Dirk Beyelstein
Web site: | http://www.tempus-word.de/en/index.htm
Requires: | Any ST with double-sided disk drive
Price: | 100 Euros - demo version available.
Pros: | Super fast and stable. Verging on DTP functions. A writer's word processor.
Cons: | Slightly old-fashioned/unfriendly table calculation and database facilities (but they're there!). Interface a little dated. Limited import and export functions.
Rating: |
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