Papyrus Gold 4.0

The long awaited update to the acclaimed Atari word processor is finally here.

Denesh Bhabuta wonders if it was worth the wait...

The ST on the other hand has

• Marcel, .... a cheap but cheerful word processor with some useful features ;
• Protext .... a fast full-featured word processor
• Atari Works ....a slightly up-market all in one office suite
• Papyrus. .... a cross between a word processor and a DTP package, a la Word on the PC but without the system resources overhead.

Papyrus has been with us since 1992. Quite a remarkable program it showed us the power of the ST. No need to drift to other platforms for creating professional looking documents such as flyers and brochures or even complete manuals. Papyrus is extremely easy to use as it makes full use of modern GEM features.
What's more I have yet to come across any features I have no use for!

The last version of Papyrus was first available in 1994 and the latest update has taken two years to reach us boasting many features. Among these and probably the most important to font maniacs is Unicode support when used in conjunction with any font format and at least NVDI 4. Unicode gives you access to 16 bit character sets within fonts - yes, that is a full 65535 characters! In addition Papyrus no longer has the 240 font limit the last version had.

The user interface has had a face-lift.
The whole resource has been completely redesigned to support 3D effects and various dialogues have been added while others removed. Alerts are now mostly modal window dialogues and all buttons have shortcuts which can be defined by the user. Listboxes such as in the font panel have real time sliders - the slider arrows disabling when the top or bottom of the list is reached. Pop-up menus have cycler buttons which can be controlled via the mouse or the keyboard. General keyboard shortcuts have been brought in line with the GEM-List standard and Papyrus now supports iconification.
The Menu has been re-arranged and the ruler section has been extended to include a font selector, text size, text style, zoom, page view and mouse mode. The ruler itself has been moved to below the icons for clarity and the tabs are drawn directly in to the ruler. Moving these frequently used features from the menu bar to the ruler section certainly makes working on documents faster than before.


The Multipage view mode gives a general idea of how your document looks.

Text style tags can now be set separately from paragraph tags although a paragraph tag can be linked to a text style tag. Paragraph tags from older versions of Papyrus are automatically linked to text styles with the same name.

Importing images has been greatly enhanced. Using HiSoft's new EFMS colour picture system you can import and display colour images in many different formats from GEM Image through GIF to Photo-CD. This is a great boon for those of us who create newsletters as we now have the independance to include images from many different sources compared to before. Text importing remains the same as before with basic ASCII, Rich Text Format, First Word Plus and Signum recognition. As for printing these documents, the update comes with many new printer drivers and colour printing routines have been much enhanced.

Various bugs have been ironed out making Papyrus a much nicer system to work in.
Wraparound works better for both text and images. If a picture bigger than the page was imported with wraparound turned on new pages were inserted indefinitely. Objects bigger than the main text frame in both dimensions are now ignored for wraparound and can be resized once imported. Stopping the printing of a document works more reliably with the ESC key in the latest version and bus/address error catching is much better.

Version 4 is currently only available in the update form so you need to buy both version 3 and the update disk. This is a bit niggly in my opinion as it entails installing version 3 and then installing version 4 on top. The update consists of one Double Density disk, a 20 page manual to be used in conjunction with the manual for the older version and a free 500 font Bitstream Font CD containing Postscript and Type 1 fonts.

65535 characters in at least 240 fonts... now where did I put that free CD I got with the update?

The update disk contains all the files in self extracting format. I simply copied this to the Papyrus directory on my hard drive and double clicked on the compressed file icon. This extracted the update version and extra files into the necessary subdirectories.

The programmers have not forgotten us users. We can customise Papyrus as much as we want.

I felt that the update manual could have been better especially as it does not contain any information with regard to MagiCMac or even MagiCPC. However much I tried I could not get a printout from my MagiCMac setup, being confronted by various Alert dialogues and having the Macintosh crash on me. I finally thought I cracked it when after trying various printer set-ups Papyrus told me it was printing the document, however nothing came out of the printer. This could be to do with the version of MagiCMac NVDI I am using which is around a year old. Printing from the Falcon was no problem. My investigations continue...

Another minor bug is opening a plain ASCII text file causes an internal bus error making the working environment unstable. A work around this is to create a new document and import the file.

Starting up Papyrus takes a noticeable amount of time, reminding me of the word processor I use at work on a PC. This is forgiveable really as it is an Atari program [grin]. Jesting aside, Papyrus is a large program. I have not personally tested this but have been told by various people that the program is compressed and thus why it takes a while to load. Using Mega-Depack from the public domain sector should cure the problem, but make sure you have enough disk space and unpack a copy of the executable.

All these updates don't seem to add up to two years wait so why take so long? Well, mainly because the whole program has been re-written. Most if not all of the internal routines have been changed and the program itself generally feels faster. In addition there is a version for OS/2 on the PC with NT and Mac versions in the pipeline. It seems that ROM have been working on making the program platform portable as far as the internal code is concerned - it is rumoured that the OS/2 version has the same bugs as the Atari version!

Two years for this update to appear and still no word count function. This is the only ommission which lets Papyrus down but HiSoft have mentioned this feature will be appearing in the next update. In the meantime I will continue using Papyrus and saving the work in RTF or ASCII format to import in to Marcel for the word count.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for - how do I print out from Papyrus running under MagiCMac!

That said, I am very pleased with Papyrus 4 and whole-heartedly recommend it as a top class word processor. HiSoft, please don't keep me waiting two years for the next update...

• Product Name: Papyrus v4 Update
• Publisher HiSoft Systems
• Contact:
  • 01505-718718
  • support@hisoft.co.uk
  • www.hisoft.co.uk
• Papyrus 3: £85.00
• Papyrus 4
  • Update Disk: £39.95
  • (£37.95 if you have HiSoft Silver or Gold support) Price includes 500 Font CD
• Requirements:
  • All Ataris.
  • Minimum 2Mb memory.
  • ST High resolution and higher.
• Pros:
  • Excellent document processor,
  • Many useful features
• Cons:
  • Still no word count
• Rating: 95%