Word Processing Tools Contents: -----Outliners -----Translation -----Poets' & Writers' Tools -----Envelope Addressing -----Other Tools -----Diary/Log Programs ============== -----Outliners [EF12] EasyFold 1.2 (Michael Reiss; $49) is a combination text editor and outliner. As you type, you can press a key to "fold" a section of text up so that only the first line shows. Menu options as well as folding/unfolding can be executed quickly with a mouse or keyboard. Professional features of the editor include macros (for keyboard and mouse), undo's, edit up to 250 files at once, splitscreen editing, search-and-replace, and SVGA support. [IDEATREE] Idea Tree (Mountain House Publishing, Inc.; $69) is a non-resident thought processor or outliner that uses a tree or "organization chart" type of approach rather than the usual "outline" look. Personally, we think that the standard outline approach is more compact and easier to grasp at a glance, but Idea Tree is easy to use and has a very professional look to it. "Pull-down" menus at the top of the screen means that you can use the program almost without looking at the on-disk documentation. You can use Idea Tree as a business tool as well. You can record customers by products with names, address, phone numbers and a brief commentary, make organization charts with descriptions and assignments, and develop project schedules. Other features include a word processor, output preview, a composition organizing system, and more. [KAMAS] Kamas (Kamasoft; $39) is an outline processor. Kamasoft claims to have originated the genre in 1984. Our highly subjective opinion is that Kamas is a hair less intuitive, less slick and less powerful than other outliners we have seen, such as PC-Outline. On the other hand, it costs about 10 times less and does do a reasonable job for a low-end outliner. As best as we were able to determine from the limited documentation, it will not function as a TSR (pop-up), but with the growing popularity of task switching programs such as SwapDOS and DESQview, any program can be made into a "pop-up" whether it was written that way or not. [MFA] Micro Flowchart Aid 1.0 (Wayne-Tech Software; $25) is a text based program that will help you organize thoughts and ideas in the form of a flowchart. The work space consists of six cells across and 99 down. Any of 30 different symbols and lines can be entered into a cell at the press of a key. Text can then be added to the symbols, such as inside a decision box. [OUTLINEP] OutlinePlus (Toliver, David E.; $25) makes the creation and management of outlines and other structured text easy. It has built-in decimal and classical labeling notation that automatically adjusts to changes in the structure. It feels like a text editor with such features as full screen and file navigation; the ability to delete and restore text; search and replace; the ability to reformat paragraphs and the document; definable margins and more. Files are saved as ASCII text. Data can be imported and exported. We found the program to be intuitive and easy to use. [OUTLINE] PC-Outline (Brown Bag Software; $195) is an outlining program that can be used in resident or non-memory-resident modes. While originally designed for writers to use in outlining ideas, it can actually be used as a kind of free-form database program. After storing information about a subject, you can hide the information so that only the subject line remains visible. This way you can see several topics at once and view the next level of only the one(s) you choose. If you are writing, you can export the finished outline to your word processor. If you have never tried an outlining program before, you really ought to give this a try. In the resident mode, it uses a minimum of 80k of RAM. [RAVITZ] Ravitz Editor (Ravitz, Cary; $25) is a combination outliner and text editor. That is, lines can be hidden to make it easier to work on the structures of programs, outlines and documents. A trash buffer temporarily preserves modified lines. It is very powerful, with integrated outlining and overviewing. It uses a command line, function keys, menus, and has mouse support. It is configurable, programmable, and DESQview compatible. It will let you view two files or parts of the same file at once. A change tracking system lets you review new and modified lines. The program uses XMS upper memory blocks, 42K of the XMS high memory area, and 64K of EMS memory. [THOTPLN] ThotPlnr (THOTSystems, Inc.; $30) is for brainstorming and outline generating. It will allow you to record ideas and group similar ideas under major categories, assign priority in outline form, and realign them according to the perspective in which you wish to consider them. -----Translation [CROATIAN] Word Translator Croatian Edition 3.52 (Software Technologies, Inc.; $69) is a pop-up English-Croatian-English translator and dictionary. It features bilingual spell checking, grammar help, word-by-word document translation inside your text based word processor. Requires a hard drive with 3.5 MB of free space. [DANISH] Word Translator Danish Edition 3.52 (Software Technologies, Inc.; $69) is a pop-up English-Danish-English translator and dictionary. It features bilingual spell checking and word-by-word document translation inside your text based word processor. This edition contains 10,000+ English to Danish translations. The program (and the two following programs) requires 2.5meg each of disk space and EGA/VGA. [EFTT1, EFTT2] English-French Translator Traveler (Softechnics, Inc.; $107) translates English to French. It recognizes idiomatic and polite words. It conforms to French grammar and punctuation. It contains over 40,000 root words, a built-in 12,000+ verb conjugator a French word processor, and international measurement conversion. It is compatible with PC-Write, and Microsoft Word. Requires 1.5Mb of disk space and DOS 3+. [ENG_JAP] English-Japanese Dictionary 1.4 (Breen, Jim; $0) is an English-Japanese (kana & kanji) translator. You type in the word or phrase you need in English and the program displays the Japanese equivalent in kana and kanji. Requires the ability to read at least hiragana and katakana. [GERMN_NK] Word Translator German Edition 3.52 is a pop-up English-German-English translator and dictionary. [SPANISH] Word Translator Spanish Edition 3.52 is a pop-up English-Spanish-English translator and dictionary. [RUSSIAN] Word Translator Russian Edition 3.52 is a pop-up English-Russian-English translator and dictionary. [PORTU] Word Translator Portuguese Edition 3.52 is a pop-up English-Portuguese-English translator/dictionary. -----Poets' & Writers' Tools [1001TOPS] 1001 Topics for Composition (Raker, Richard; $20) helps you select a topic about which to write from a list of 1358 topics arranged in 21 major categories. It is intended for students who are searching for a topic for composition. The topics are suitable for many different types of writing (i.e. journals, essays, research papers, free writing, compare and contrast, argumentative, process, description, etc.). [AVSCRIPT] AVscripter (Schroeppel, Tom; $40) prints two-column audio/visual scripts. That is, the output is in two columns on the page with the action (video) in one column and the corresponding sound/script in the other column. You can also generate scene lists and logs sorted alphabetically conforming to the first video line in each numbered scene. [BUDDY] Buddy 1.2 (Chatfield Software, Inc. ASP; $20) is a tutorial on writing technique. It consists of eight lessons on language, spelling and punctuation. An Artificial Intelligence program is used to teach the lessons, so you can ask the program questions and get an answer back or just trade insults if you are feeling frisky. [COUNT] Count (Wind, Jon; $0) counts words and lines in a text line. What makes this one interesting is that you can tell it a series of files to sum using DOS wildcards or naming the files individually on the command line. So if your book, for example, is broken into files by chapter, you can easily get a total count of words and lines in all the chapters. An optional switch lets COUNT ignore blank lines. [C_CHAOS] Creative Chaos 2.1 (Lunde, Evan; $12) pulls together pieces of text from script files in a controlled but randomized way, leading to unpredictable and potentially interesting results. It can be used to break through writer's block to get ideas for a story or even to generate lottery numbers or create "interesting" menus. [EZCOUNT] EzCount (Conkey, Don and Conkey, Sharyn; $10) is a fast, accurate, flexible, fully-documented word counter you can use on Wordstar 3.XX and ASCII files. [FILE_IT] File-It (Rabinowitz, Chip; $20) is a quick-reference bibliographic tool which maintains and retrieves an indexed database for you. [INVENT] Invent 2.1 (Crew, Louie; $7) helps writers invent fresh metaphors. It prompts the user to supply nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. It randomly scrambles the entries to provide novel arrangements. In testing it did display a list of metaphors, but it ended with "ERR 5 AT PGM-CTR: 1916". [LCNT] LCNT 3.0 (Eyer, Bob; $0) is a very fast line counter for small to very large files. LCNT uses the linefeed character to identify line terminations, rather than the usual carriage return, which provides a more accurate count with some word processors' files. [MACRO1] Macro1 (Hogshead, Tom; $0) contains six QEdit macros to make it easy to convert macros to and from text/binary using the QMAC macro translator from SemWare. [MARKV] Mark V. Shaney (Strack, Stefan; $?) is an unusual device for re-processing text files in an "almost" artificial intelligence manner. It reads in a text file and builds a "word probability table", then using a Markov chain, recreates sentences from these probabilities. While a lot of the output is nonsense, some of it can be truly hilarious. This is based on an article featured in Scientific American. [MY_AGENT] My_Agent (Crew, Louie ASP; $15) is a tool for the professional writer for keeping track of publishers and manuscripts, printing manuscripts with various types of page headings, and printing form letters to publishers. [POEMPAD] Poem NotePad 2.3 (U.S.D., Inc.; $30) allows you to keep track of, review, modify, and print your poetry. A text editor and a document generator are included. [POETRIO] PoeTrio (Chatfield Software, Inc. ASP; $20) instructs you on writing poetry in free verse, syllabics and cantona. Each style is taught with a separate program that has an editor included for writing your own verses. [POETGEN] Poetry Generator (R. K. West Consulting ASP; $10-$15) creates poems from a vocabulary of thousands of phrases and several different formats which are randomly chosen and combined by the program. For the most part, the words are organized into short phrases which are then combined into poems of four to twelve lines. The underlying structures of most of the poems are based on the author's original work. Personalized poems can be produced. [QUICKIE] Quickie 3.24 (Pruitt, Fred; $20) is targeted at business users, students, government offices, anyone who has to compile reports from more that one document. It lets the user page through multiple files and mark text excerpts for retention in an output file, which can then be imported using a word processor or editor. It can read pure ASCII files with lines terminated by carriage returns, Wang WP, pfs:Write, Wordstar, and OfficeWriter 5.0 document formats with no external translation. Also the output file can be stored in a form with hard carriage returns only at the end of paragraphs for easier importing and reformatting in various word processors. [QUIKLTR] QuickLetter 2.1 (Gregory, Timothy; $10) makes it easy to send the occasional form letter to someone. Using the built-in editor, you can create a form letter with name, address and any other variables you want built in. When you are ready to send a form, you select the form you want loaded; the program prompts you for data for each of the variables; and creates a letter with the data inserted in it. It appears that only one variable is allowed per line. While this works like a mail-merge program, it actually competes with forms management software. It is fast and easy to use for its intended purpose. [REFLIST] Reflist (E.J.Shillitoe; $25) allows you to create reference lists for scientific and technical manuscripts. [WHATFMT] WHAT?format (Boots & Pepper; $15) identifies the program used to create a specified file. It can distinguish among 30 of the most popular word processors, including different versions of the same program. It can also identify ASCII, EBCDIC, PostScript, PCL, etc., as well as database, spreadsheet, graphic, archives, Windows fonts and other formats. If you have ever come across a data file and did not know what type it was, this is the utility for you. WHAT?format will also set errorlevel for use by a batch file. A batch file is included that shows you how to use this utility to sort different types of graphics files into different subdirectories. [WRDQWIK] WordQwik 1.11 (Abraxas Research Service; $10) tells you which of two or more similar words is correct. It can help you decide when to use "it's" or "its", "too" or "to", "imply" or "infer", etc. When you select a set of words from the list, definitions and illustrative sentences are provided. (When we quit the program, the screen colors were set to black on black. You will have to blindly enter "MODE 80" to restore white on black.) [WORDS] Words generates an alphabetical listing of words in a file along with the number of times each word was used. [WORDSEF] Words (Floyd, Edwin T.; $0) is a fast word extractor program. It will extract a list of unique "words" from an input file, or several input files, and writes them to an output file, one per line. The program recognizes a number of options for: Set operations on multiple files, case sensitivity, high-order bit stripping, alphabetic output sort, and defining the characters comprising a "word". Possible uses for such a utility could be to create a word list file for a spelling checker or to create a list of variable names used in a program, [WP_ASCII] WP_ASCII (Hidalgo, John R.; $5) converts a wordprocessor document to an ASCII format. The wordprocessors supported are WordPerfect, WordStar, and Microsoft Word. [XWORD] XWord (Gans, Ronald; $15) is a general file format transformer that converts files from one format to another. -----Envelope Addressing [ADDRSIT] Address-It (Vision Unlimited; $17) is a TSR envelope print program. It takes 8k of DOS RAM and has many features. You can capture an address from the screen, edit or change it, and print the envelope while running your word processor, editor, or any program. It can also read and print a set of addresses from a file. It supports five standard and one user-specified envelope sizes, up to eight fonts for selection at print time, any 80 column display, and parallel ports LPT1-3 and serial ports COM1-4. Address-IT has two related utilities with it: DWNLD.EXE is a download utility program that includes in the display of available download files, all of the data necessary to customize Address-IT font selection for any non-standard font (the built-in selection lists include the printer built-in fonts, HP standard SoftFonts and many of the popular Bitstream fonts). It will also download a portrait font file as landscape font. CONVPL is a program that creates a landscape download font file from a portrait font file. [ADRSNVL] Adrsnvlp 1.0 (Sawada, Dr. Masaaki; $10-$20) is a utility that addresses envelopes and labels captured from database programs. Options include the ability to indent, space, center, justify. Epson compatible printer required. [EZ_DEX1] EZ-Dex 1.1 (HFK Software ASP; $20) is a 10K TSR which automatically types names and addresses into running word processors, or other text oriented programs, upon user command. It also prints labels and envelopes directly and dials phone numbers. -----Other Tools [CFS] Column Formatted Sort 1.20 (Schmehl, Steven L.; $0) sorts column formatted text files on up to 9 keys. Key fields are selected from a field mask displayed on the screen. [DOCL11] Document Cleaner 1.1 (David Leithauser, reg. fee: $5) converts word processor files into ASCII files by converting tab characters into spaces, stripping out non-text control characters, adding hard carriage returns, and adding margins. [FLDOS] Finish Line for DOS (Innovative Designs; $49) automatically learns your vocabulary and writing style as you write, then pops up a window with a list of likely words to finish a phrase or sentence. A Windows version is available in the Windows section of this CD-ROM. [INDEX] Index (Haley, Greg;) automatically creates an index for any text file using a list of words that you provide. [LASERLTR] Laser Letterhead Plus 3.5 (Consultant Pharmacist Services, Inc. ASP; $25) will print letterhead stationary and envelopes on an HP LaserJet. A letterhead can be designed for personal or business use in three basic styles with 10 variations. You can select lines, boxes, and shading, using whatever cartridge fonts or soft fonts you have available and prefer. A logo, slogan, and watermark may be added anywhere on the page. You can design an "Only Logo" letter head, which may be comprised of a PCX image. Images and text may be placed using inches or centimeters. Your word processor may be placed on the Main Menu and you may run it from inside Laser Letterhead Plus. Envelopes can be automatically printed in a matching style. Business standard, legal, or executive size paper can be used along with business, monarch, or personal size envelopes. A dBase compatible address database lets you easily address envelopes or export a list to most major word processors for mail merge. A built-in memory manager utilizes extended and/or expanded memory efficiently. [PAGEIT] PageIt 1.0 (Amans, R. L.; $10) imports a text file, sorts the pages into the proper logical order for booklet printing, and saves the result back to disk. You may then print the file at any time on the front and back of pages to create a booklet. Options include right or left leading pages and multiple column output. [PCWLASR] PcwLasr (Gibson, Don Phillip; $0) tells how to make laser printer definition files for PC-Write. [REFTEK] ReferenceTek 2.0 (Fabian, Roderic; $15) is a bibliographic database management system that will quickly and efficiently store and retrieve reference citations. Data entry is free-form, which allows for the entry of many different types of references without further modification of the program, but precludes automatic reformatting of entries for export to other files. Records can be retrieved using any word that appears in them or in a user-supplied list of key words or subjects. [RJ] RJ (Kallal, Tom dba TK Software; $0) right-justifies lines in text files by embedding blanks between words. Files must be straight ASCII without word processing control codes. [HEAVEN] Writer's Heaven 5.0b (Simple Productions; $10) is a set of key macros that make PC-Write easier and more efficient to use. A help screen is included, and there is support for laser printers and "almost-compatible" computers. The program is also compatible with MorePerfect, the WordPerfect add-on. Requires PC-Write 3+. -----Diary/Log Programs [CDIARY] Cumberland Diary 1.3 (Cumberland Software, ASP; $24) makes it easy to keep a diary. Entries can be printed singly, in groups, as a book, or imported into Cumberland Story. Searches may be made by date or heading. Each entry can be up to nearly 7000 words. Security options include password protection and data file encryption. Requires a hard disk and at least 450k of free RAM. [CSTORY] Cumberland Story 1.2 (Cumberland Software, ASP; $24) helps you write a book about your life or the lives of your ancestors. In addition to ideas and suggestions, it contains a chapter and topic outliner, a word processor with cut and paste, and the ability to import data from the Cumberland Diary genealogy program. [ODAY401] OMNIDay 4.01 (Unicorn Software Limited ASP; $30) lets you create your own personal electronic diary. Up to ten different users can access the program. Passwords protect individual privacy. Entries can be up to 5000 lines, with word wrap and scrolling, and common word processor commands. You can easily page through entries and print the entire diary or selected dates. [WORDZ] WordZ (Unicorn Software Limited ASP; $25) is a blank book that you fill in with anything you wish to keep track of such as your personal history. It handles up to 10 chapters, with separate PassCodes for each. It offers encryption and multi-user support. You can print all or part of the book and "thumb" through entries. [WORDJRNL] WordJournal 1.0 (Brett Burgeson, reg. fee: $23) helps you manage many separate journals. It may be used for personal diaries, research notebooks and meeting minutes. It features an easy to use word processor and password protection. [XYPOWER] XyPower Add-Ins for XyWrite (Baehr, Timothy J.; $40) includes add-ins for XyWrite III+ 3.55 or later. It includes a shell program that allows point and shoot file maintenance from within XyWrite; a search utility that turns any text file into a data base; a utility that captures and restores information about all the files currently open in all the windows and allows you to return to every file; keyboard shortcuts and several other utilities. Requires a hard disk.