Word processing on classic amiga?

[the_leander]

Would be interesting to discuss also about any possible compatibility with Microsoft *.doc.

Wordworth 6 and 7 had RTF compatibility, as did FinalWriter97.

As to the OPs question regarding what would run on an unexpanded 1200... I (briefly) ran Wordworth 4.1 that way, but I have to say it was a deeply unpleasant experience and offered no real way of exporting files to other word processors beyond .txt.

I have to say that I prefered Wordworth, but then my needs didn't really extend to the things offered by FinalWriter.

[save2600]

Any love for Pen Pal? I just loaded that into my A1000 and am about to see what it's all about. It's an early Softwood product. Ads from old mags, its own packaging and thick manual sure look pretty slick. It's even got a Spell Checker and some DTP capabilities by the looks of it.

[Jose]

Wordworth doesn't support 24 bit pics. FinalWriter 97 is great:)

[ferrellsl]

Pen Pal was really good and so was Excellence!

[TheBilgeRat]

I used Final Writer 2 my first year in college with an epson color dot matrix.  It worked awesomely.

[beller]

Well, I got through a graduate degree using WordPerfect on an A1000 before 2 MB of RAM were even available for it; you can't get much more classic than that! As far as capability, I still think WordPerfect can do more than 99.99% of users will ever need in a lifetime.

I used WordPerfect exclusively on my A2000 and was part of their Amiga beta team.  As I recall, when AmigaDOS 2.0 was released WordPerfect had issues and never really got them fixed before they dropped support.  

I used Scribble and Excellence for most of my Amiga writing work....

Bob

[DBAlex]

Wordworth 6 and 7 had RTF compatibility, as did FinalWriter97.

As to the OPs question regarding what would run on an unexpanded 1200... I (briefly) ran Wordworth 4.1 that way, but I have to say it was a deeply unpleasant experience and offered no real way of exporting files to other word processors beyond .txt.

I have to say that I prefered Wordworth, but then my needs didn't really extend to the things offered by FinalWriter.

Personally I always liked Wordworth... infact we used to use WW on floppies (a LOT of swapping!) and printer driver was included IIRC... Could have scalable graphics etc, all on a stock A1200.

I have WW6 on CD.. not installed it yet though.

Can't remember what the latest version of WW is, not sure how to get it either.

[the_leander]

Personally I always liked Wordworth... infact we used to use WW on floppies (a LOT of swapping!)

Oh yes I remember that, and woe betide you if you dared to change font...

and printer driver was included IIRC... Could have scalable graphics etc, all on a stock A1200.

I could never get it to print though.

Can't remember what the latest version of WW is

Wordworth 7 was the final release, although it required a patch to actually be usable due to some cockup on the installer. The patch was present in AmigaActive CDs.

, not sure how to get it either.

The full program? Ebay or by some other, more nefarious method.

[Crumb]

I have a copy of Final Writer 97 but it wont run. I guess I'll wait with that until I get my accelerator card in the mail, and look for an older version until then.

Any preferences between Final Writer and Wordworth ?

I used Wordworth7, IIRC it required some fastram to work. My friend CMIS prefered FinalWriter97 and it looked damn good but I never used it much.

With A1200 there was some pack that included certain Wordworth version, I guess that will work.

[the_leander]

With A1200 there was some pack that included certain Wordworth version, I guess that will work.

The Magic pack, as released by Escom included Wordworth 4SE. Tbh though you are in for a whole world of hurt if you run even that version without a hard drive and at least some extra ram.

[redfox]

@runequester

OS 3.1 should be fine for Final Writer 97.  Not sure how much RAM is required.  My manual is from an earlier version and says "Final Writer will work on any Amiga with at least 2.5 megabytes of available internal memory."  For sure, it requires a hard disk.

I used Final Writer on my A2000HD with 5 megabytes of RAM and no accelerator card (using the stock 68000 CPU).  I went through a few upgrades to Final Writer 97 and it worked fine.

---
redfox

[runequester]

@runequester

OS 3.1 should be fine for Final Writer 97.  Not sure how much RAM is required.  My manual is from an earlier version and says "Final Writer will work on any Amiga with at least 2.5 megabytes of available internal memory."  For sure, it requires a hard disk.

I used Final Writer on my A2000HD with 5 megabytes of RAM and no accelerator card (using the stock 68000 CPU).  I went through a few upgrades to Final Writer 97 and it worked fine.

---
redfox

thats propably the problem, as I have so far only 2 megs of ram, and the hard drive install eats into that.

[TomJ]

I started out with Kindwords. Later I got Pagestream 2. It only required 1 Megabyte and seemed to work a little slow(A500), but was capable of a lot. Eventually, sick of switching floppies and wanting to speed things up and having no hard drive. I created a workbench disk that would have me insert all the floppies copy the needed files to Ram and use the renamed ram disk. to speed things up. I just can't remember if it was before or after I got 4 megs of ram.

[TomJ]

I started out with Kindwords. Later I got Pagestream 2. It only required 1 Megabyte and seemed to work a little slow, but was capable of a lot. Eventually, sick of switching floppies and wanting to speed things up and having no hard drive. I created a workbench disk that would have me insert all the floppies copy the needed files to Ram and use the renamed ram disk. to speed things up. I just can't remember if it was before or after I got 4 megs of ram.

[madcrow]

I got a copy of Kindwords with my A500 and it works. IIRC, Kindwords is basically a cut down "light" version of Wordworth, but if it works on an A500, it should work on an A1200 with no issues at all.

With that said, I really like FinalWriter 97. I run it on eUAE and it's great: it has nice support for long, structured  documents and the interface is great. It comes with a nice selection of fonts which play nicely with both PostScript and lower-end printers.

[Gulliver]

I still use Wordworth 7 every now and then. The feature that I found really great, is that unlike FinalWriter, it had a feature to "Learn" spelling and easily create custom dictionaries, which was really good for using the spelling corrector under other languages.

Later I also used AmigaWriter 2.2 which was good, but somehow not really what I expected.

I still have Antiword and DOCdatatypes, for some MSWord reading and convertion capabilities