So farewell then Sprint...
Feb. 26th, 2004 12:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffuturesFor a very long time my word processor of choice has been Borland's Sprint, a DOS-based WP with some nice features that were well ahead of its time such as multiple documents open, no obvious limit on document size, auto spell check as you type, auto save and recovery from crashes, etc.
But Sprint is pretty old now, most of my WP ends up as HTML, and it's inconvenient to use a DOS program for this purpose; the sequence was "save as text, ctrl-tab to windows, reload in browser, curse horribly, get back to Sprint and fix the errors". It also seems to run into more and more problems with each new PC; it won't run full screen under Windows 2k or Windows 98 SE, for example. Accordingly I've gradually been moving my long-term documents over to other software; mostly Notetab Pro, Word, and Wordpad, and in a couple of instances spreadsheets. The last straw came last night, when I put a printer server onto my home network, discovered how ***ing horrible the printer port capture routine is under Windows XP, then found out that Sprint tries to drive the hardware directly and hangs if you try to print to a captured printer port.
The upshot is that I'm retiring Sprint, and will probsably never use it again. It's a real shame, because for a long time it was easily the best word processor around. I'm going to miss it.
But Sprint is pretty old now, most of my WP ends up as HTML, and it's inconvenient to use a DOS program for this purpose; the sequence was "save as text, ctrl-tab to windows, reload in browser, curse horribly, get back to Sprint and fix the errors". It also seems to run into more and more problems with each new PC; it won't run full screen under Windows 2k or Windows 98 SE, for example. Accordingly I've gradually been moving my long-term documents over to other software; mostly Notetab Pro, Word, and Wordpad, and in a couple of instances spreadsheets. The last straw came last night, when I put a printer server onto my home network, discovered how ***ing horrible the printer port capture routine is under Windows XP, then found out that Sprint tries to drive the hardware directly and hangs if you try to print to a captured printer port.
The upshot is that I'm retiring Sprint, and will probsably never use it again. It's a real shame, because for a long time it was easily the best word processor around. I'm going to miss it.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-27 02:11 am (UTC)For creative work that isn't going on to paper I prefer a minimalist word processor with as much of the screen as possible showing the document. Sprint was excellent in that respect, only one line of a 25-line text screen was used for information etc., and all editing commands were pop-up menus with keyboard short-cuts. Wordpad doesn't have a lot of Sprint's functionality, but is fairly minimalist for a Windows program with the toolbars turned off.
I paste into NoteTab Pro for spell check and final conversion to HTML - it has shortcuts for all the common HTML formatting commands etc. The exception to this is for my RPG design, where there is so much HTML in the document that I might as well work in NoteTab throughout.