Sprint word processor

[Bernard Goldsmith]

Help! Anybody out there with some experience in using Sprint word
processing program by Borland?
It received fairly good review by Personal Computing magazine last month.
The price seems right. It seems to emphasize the features thare DDDt are most
important to me.
But before I spring for the price, I'd really like to hear from some
actual users.
What comments and/or suggestions are you willing to share?

bg...@andrew.cmu.edu

[Jim Henderson]

I've used Sprint, and have found it to be a really good program -
particularaly if you are used to another word processor, like WordPerfect,
Wordstar, and Multimate. It will emulate these different programs, and also
will read/write even more different formats (I don't have a list of them
handy; we keep those at work). If you are looking to go from using a
different word processor, it's a good one.
Of it's features the one I found to be really useful was the "Quick Card"
command. Basically, this lets you print a summary card of all of the commands
that are defined. Other features include Auto-save (and if you turn off the
computer before you save, it will ask you if you want to recover from the
auto-saved file), macro capability, and a flexible user-interface. If you
don't like the fact that WordPerfect has help on the F3 key, (in 4.2), I don't
believe it can be changed. In Sprint,t is easy to do.
All around, it's one of the best I've seen. The only thing I'd like to see
(I haven't heard if it's in the current version) is emulation for WP 5.0 and
Word 5.0. The one I tried didn't have these two compatibilities.

Jim Henderson, j...@pnet51.cts.com
"Don't ask me how it works or I'll start to whimper." - Arthur Dent
DISCLAIMER: "I speak for myself, and only for myself." (Except where noted.)

[Mark A. Verber]

Sprint is my favorite WP for the PC... in fact it is just about the
only word processor for the PC I like. If you have used the EMACS
text editor and Scribe/LaTeX and liked it, Sprint is for you. I
suspect that Borland purchased FinalWord, which was the supported
version of Perfect Writer, which was a Scribe/Emacs clone.

For writing large documents it would be hard to beat Sprint (other
than using real LaTeX which I prefer). Sprint really understands
the idea of sections, chapters, etc. Not on this using style sheets,
divisions, etc. Just say @chapter(ChapterName) and you have a new chapter,
in the style you like, automatically numbered, running footer/headers
changes to reflect the new chapter name, and a table of contents entry.

Since it is basically an EMACS editor things can be completely customized
to reflect your editing style. I leave it in Emacs mode, but many people
make prefer the WordStar/MS-Word/MultiMate/etc user interfaces.

The only down side of Sprint is that it's translator to other formats
isn't the greatest (if works, but all the formating isn't perserved.

--
Mark A. Verber
System Programmer, Physics Department, Ohio State University
ver...@mps.ohio-state.edu
(614) 267-5979