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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.
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Tempus-Word NG
in all its glory.
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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.
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Not all that
pretty to look at, but all you could need. Perhaps
more than you would need!
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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.
![[Screen-shot: Tempus-Word text effects]](images/twng03.gif)
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!
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A picture within
a picture.
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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.
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Database alert!
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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".
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Hmm, now what
was I doing on 6 September. Now there
are no excuses. Presenting the Tempus-Word
calendar.
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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
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Name:
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Tempus-Word
NG
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Authors:
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Claudio
Kronmüller, Dirk Beyelstein
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Web
site:
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http://www.tempus-word.de/en/index.htm
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Requires:
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Any
ST with double-sided
disk drive
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Price:
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100 Euros - demo version available.
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Pros:
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- Super fast and
stable.
- Verging on DTP
functions.
- A writer's word
processor.
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Cons:
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- Slightly
old-fashioned/unfriendly table calculation and
database facilities (but they're there!).
- Interface a little
dated.
- Limited import
and export functions.
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Rating:
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