Date: 8 Jun 82 20:37:53-EDT (Tue)
From: decvax!harpo!presby!aron at Berkeley
To:   info-micro at mit-ai
Re:   Perfect Writer
Article-I.D.: presby.168
Via:  news.usenet; 8 Jun 82 20:11-PDT

A while ago I posted a request to get more info on Perfect Writer, a
new word processor for CP/M micros.  I recieved the following replies.
The first may seem overly biased, but the substance of his message
seems to be confirmed by a review in this weeks Infoworld. (the sender
requests anonymity to avoid a deluge of mail)

I.
     I am the chief programmer for the Perfect Writer system.  I think
that it's absolutely fabulous. The editor is like (MIT) EMACS and the
formatter i like (CMU) SCRIBE. There are extensions and limitations,
most of which have to do with the fact that the system is meant to be
run on a dink machine (CP/M and 56K). There is a menu system for
beginners which can be disabled when you get 'expert'. there is a help
system. There is a facility for rebinding the commands to any keys you
want WITHOUT ANY PROGRAMMING or patching. support is for terminals
ranging in size from 9x51 to 60x132. printers supported include most
popular daisy wheel models, and nearly any plain printer. the
formatter allows true proportional spacing without patching the
printer drivers with code you have to write (a la W*).

    Perfect Speller is integrated with PW, allowing in-context spelling
checking and correction. PS has a 20,000 word dictionary and strips
one prefix and two suffixes (if applicable) thereby extending it's
usable vocabulary. both the affix table and the dictionary are user
modifiable. the dictionary itself is stored as a hash table thereby
reducing it's size and increasing the speed of the checker.

    PW compares favorably with W* in speed and PS is as fast as SpellGuard.

II.

>From houxs!hansen Mon May 17 17:12:39 1982 remote from harpo

I saw Perfect Writer demonstrated at a recent micro show. It is an
Emacs clone, with a documentation preparation language (very!) similar
to Scribe and a built-in spelling program, written by a couple of
people who went to (where else?) MIT. It's price is around $200-300,
with an extra $130-200 for the spelling system, depending on who you
buy it from.

It is supposed to work on any CP/M based system. It allows editing of
multiple files/buffers with one or two windows and has its own virtual
memory system built in. It is no very modifiable; you can buy the
source for parts of the system (it's written in C), and modify that,
but that's as close as you get to writing your own commands. I think
it requires 48k, but I'm not sure.

Overall it looked like a fairly good system for a micro, it you can
stand Emacs and Scribe (no flames, please, I use them both) and have
the memory to support it.
