Test System

My word processing needs have also changed. Since I gave up trying to make a living as a scholar/teacher, I'm now focused on making my mortgage payments as a musician. I have faxes to deal with, posters and other advertising material to generate and a new CD out which I produced here in my home. I also did all of the artwork for it (thank goodness for digital cameras and the GIMP!) and am producing each unit I sell, right down to the CD tray inserts and shrink wrap. In essence, I've gone from being very text-oriented with a minimal interest in graphics to needing the ability to handle text and graphics equally well. And I've had one other paradigm shift since the Fall of '97; I've gone from occasionally writing reviews and editorials for OS/2 eZine to proofing and editing nearly half of our monthly output before it hits our web space, a job that requires an Internet savvy application. My main tool in the text creation part of this insanity has been my word processor. Unfortunately, WordPro comes up just a bit short.

Installation

Up and Running

You'll notice a number of words blocked in light blue. These are misspellings which WordPro's spelling checker has flagged. A friend of mine who has spent years in front of Word but has never used WordPro took one look at that feature and loved it immediately because the questionable words were much easier to identify.

As with earlier versions of this app, as well as the rest of SmartSuite, most features are readily accessible from the SmartIcons at the top (or, optionally, sides) of the screen. I'm still a 'hands-on' writer, so I don't make use of them very often, but it is nice to know I can sort through them to turn on a feature, if need be.

One of the more pressing tasks that I've faced since beginning my recording project is coming up with the CD tray inserts, those little pieces of paper which show through the clear plastic case to tell you what the heck you're looking at. I had a design concept ready for months, but needed a tool to bring it together. At first, WordPro seemed a godsend.

Advanced Jiggery-Pokery

As you can see, there are quite a few pre-sets to choose from, or you can, as I did, add your own JPEG or GIF to use. Images can be scaled proportionately, tiled and otherwise fuddled with until you get the look you're after. I created frames whose dimensions matched the fronts and backs of my jewel cases and got to work. My initial efforts looked something like this,

to which I added some text, matching font and color as closely as WordPro's palettes would allow.

I continued in this manner until I had created inserts for both the front and back of my CD cases. After printing a few test sheets, I was satisfied with the overall quality and ran a batch of 5, each of which looked quite nice. "Excellent," I thought. "Now, all I need to do is print up another batch whenever I need them." However, it didn't work out that way.

The first problem came when I tried to print more than 5 copies at a time. The print job caused an error which shut WordPro down cold. I tried again with the same (lack of) results. After several more tries, I realized that the problem lay with the number of copies I was trying to run and reduced it until I discovered that the maximum I could reliably do at one time was 5. From that point on, printing didn't cause any crashes but I did get one mysterious and completely insoluble problem. As you've undoubtedly noticed from the screenshots, the background I chose for my CD trays is in color. For some unknown reason, WordPro decided to render the background, and ONLY the background, in sepia tones. It took some time, but checking their web site, which is accessible from the Help menu, proved that this particular behavior is a known bug which has no work around. And, believe me, I tried to find one for it since I had an important convention to prepare inventory for and I didn't want sepia-toned artwork in it. I uninstalled SmartSuite 1.6, formatted the partition it was on and installed an earlier version of WordPro which rendered the background in beautiful gray scale. I uninstalled that version, formatted again, reinstalled 1.6 and got a background in monochrome blue. After two days, I finally gave up and did the entire artwork over with StarDraw. I definitely won't be using WordPro for any graphics-intensive work, particularly if I'm on a tight deadline. Who needs a hassle like this?

Some Better News

[Click image to view full size.]

Fill in the appropriate blank, select your source as either FTP or WWW and, presto! you've got a file to work on. Uploading to the 'net follows the same routine, but I haven't had a chance to use it yet, so I can't report on its viability, however, I see no reason to believe that it wouldn't work just as well. Other goodies? Like its SmartSuite siblings, WordPro comes with a ton of SmartMasters, Lotus-produced templates for invoices, business letters, faxes, booklets, Internet pages, etc., which are very clean, very customizable and very useful. There's a separate SmartMaster for labels which includes support for every label Avery has ever even thought of making. For all of you hard-core retro users that need labels for your 5.25 floppies, WordPro has your template. But don't bother looking for anything which might fit on a DVD or CDR; you won't find it. Believe me; I looked. (I'm still trying to fathom the mind set that seizes upon the need to support media that you can't find anywhere and totally overlooks media that is industry standard. Maybe it's just me . . .)

Summary