** 2 page review (maybe only 1.5 pages) / 1050 words **

Papyrus five alive!

** PAPYRUS.GIF here **

Goodbye Papyrus 4, good buy Papyrus 5? Michael High investigates...

The Birmingham Atari show during April 1997 was full of surprises. With Papyrus 4 only released a few months earlier I didn't expect to see Papyrus 5 quite so soon but within minutes of paying my entrance fee I had upgraded to Papyrus 5. Is it worth the money or should you wait for Papyrus 6? The answer depends on your equipment and the type of documents you want to produce.

Colourful Papyrus 4
Most of the improvements in Papyrus 4 were aimed at anyone using colour monitors and printers. It was an expensive upgrade by Atari standards but the bundled BitStream font CD containing 500 TrueType fonts partly made up for this. The revamped 3D interface, colour image import and print facilities were certainly of little interest to me and my mono STe based system connected to a black and white laser printer.

Serious Papyrus 5
In contrast to Papyrus 4 this version offers plenty for serious black and white types! In exchange for your upgrade fee you get two disks and a twelve page "upgrade manual" - there's still no online help system.

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Room for improvement 
The manual only tells you what has changed with no guidance on how to put the changes to good effect which was disappointing.
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There are twelve new features listed, plus some very handy interface improvements. None of the new features are particularly impressive in themselves, but taken together they do deliver a significant productivity bonus - especially for serious wordsmiths.

For writing business or academic papers the new itemised paragraphs offer plenty of flexibility. Paragraphs and sub-paragraphs can be given any combination of number, upper and lower case letter and upper and lower case roman numeral enumeration. There are also counters for tables, pictures and two user defined styles - which hints at the possible inclusion of an "outline" mode in the next upgrade.

Arguably the most powerful improvement is a combination of a new text feature and an interface change. Typing [Alt]+[Enter] generates a line break without ending the paragraph and it's possible to set the style of the next paragraph in the Paragraph style dialog - put the two together and you have mouse free letters!

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fig one
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Let me explain, figure one shows a letter template which opens with the cursor at the end of the date. This is the "file save date" which doesn't need changing manually so long as the file is saved before output. The toolbar and ruler have been turned off using the [Alternate]+L keyboard shortcut freeing up the extra space for text display. The paragraph style "Date" specifies the next style as "To", complete with its paragraph offsets and text style. On pressing the [Return] key the address is entered with a line break between each line. Pressing [Return] after the last address line steps through "Dear", "Heading" and "Normal" paragraph styles for the remainder of the letter. Finally [Control]+R performs a spell check followed by [Control]+S to save and [Control]+P to print and the document is complete. Using this approach entire documents can be set up and created without accessing a menu or touching the mouse.
The revised dictionary has a better similarity search, but for some reason seems to be missing all the two letter words but it's not a major chore to add an, as, at, be, by and so on manually.

Graphically better ...
Text objects can now have lines round them and can be rotated to any angle which is much easier than create boxed text manually in an external program and importing them as graphics.
Similarly images can also be framed with lines - all that's missing is a shadow feature.
New vertical and horizontal guide lines used in conjunction with the snap facility makes precise alignment possible.

** P5FILE_L.GIF **
** P5FILE_S.GiF **
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Take one font selector then just add pixels
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For anyone running larger resolutions the ability to size dialogs should appeal, the longer font selection fits onto an 800 pixel high screen.

Better by design
Mail merging and building an index or table of contents is easier using the new has been made "create" function. Papyrus 5 now makes extensive use of "tab dialogs", like those used in Thing, - after opening a main dialog you can select from a series of sub dialogs. The main dialogs are non-modal, which means they don't have to be closed and can be left open on the desktop while you carry on typing - or switching to another application.
Context sensitive popups are another new feature, right click anywhere and you'll be presented with a selection of relevant options.
The options vary from weak, for selected text, to comprehensive, for images which reveals a menu with all the attributes and useful things like "Send to back" which saves accessing the menu bar, and although most of these options are already available as keyboard shortcuts it's a feature I'd like to see expanded in future versions.

That's the main changes covered but there's one final feature I want to mention. If you've ever ever created a "template" document containing lots of custom styles then forgot and turn off the autosave or to use Save as instead of save? For anyone who has lost an original document the new "Open as template" option is almost idiot proof.

The verdict.
If you need a text editor try Everest, Edith and the others reviewed in AC#4, if you need to produce a typeset magazine take a look at Calamus or DA Vector, but if you want a powerful but easy to learn program to produce fist class documents printed documents Papyrus is unbeatable.
** Product boxout **
Product: Papyrus v5.15
Publisher: ROM Logicware
UK distribution: HiSoft Systems, The Old School, Greenfield, Bedford, MK45 5DE
Tel: +44 (0)1525 718181
Fax: +44 (0)1525 713716
Email: papyrus@hisoft.co.uk
URL: http://www.hisoft.co.uk/
RRP: £149.95 (Bundled with Twist 2 database - first time buyers via HiSoft). Upgrades £30.
Requires: All Ataris with 2.5Mb or more memory, plus hard disk drive.
Pros : Productivity gains, improved interface, especially worthwhile for owners of colour capable systems/printers.
Cons: Disjointed documentation, no online help
Score: 86%
** End of boxout **