Personal Write word processor for Amiga

 

Shortly after writing of my experiences with Amiga word processors, I found another Amiga word processor that was not included in the previous article. I had previously experimented with Final Writer 5, WordPerfect 4.1, and AmigaWriter 2.0. The actual article was written primarily in WordPerfect 4.1 for Amiga, exported to WP format for MSDOS, loaded into LibreOffice on Linux Mint, then copied and pasted into web forms for my blog and on the forums at Amigaworld.net.

The other word processor that I found for Amiga was Personal Write. I had encountered it somewhere on the Internet during my previous experiments. In my search, and after running the program, I discovered that it was last updated by Cloanto back in 1995. I was trying to find a copy of Personal Write when I eventually discovered that it was available on AmigaForever. Since I have a legal copy of AmigaForever, I eventually found Personal Write on my emulated Amiga under Work:Software/AmiToRTF as PWrite.

So I double-clicked on the PWrite icon, and the program actually launched and loaded. I explored PWrite to figure out the program, and there was not much to discover in order to get starting writing. For a basic word processor, I thought PWrite did a good job. In some ways I thought PWrite was a little better, for my tastes, than WordPerfect. The font in PWrite could be easily changed while in WordPerfect, I never really figured out how to change the default font.

Personal Write had some oddities. One such oddity is that the vertical window scroller is actually a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the screen. It is the only Word Process that I remember to have a vertical scroller at the bottom rather than to the right of the text. Another oddity was that I couldn't get the window to go full-screen. There may be a setting for this but I have yet to find it. And a final oddity in relation to most word processors, the keyboard shortcut to save a document is A+\ rather than the typical A+S.

One important thing that Personal Write is missing is a spell checker. I did not find a way to manually run, like in WordPerfect, a spell check on a document. Another drawback is that Personal Write is limited to the number of file types that documents can be saved as. The available common file types are IFF-FTXT, ANSI, and ASCII. Even though there are few file formats, other Amiga word processors can read these files.

The word wrap does work well in Personal Write. PWrite kept up with WordPerfect in regards to word wrapping as you type and when inserting text on an existing line. One thing that Personal Write can do that WordPerfect cannot is utilizing the Amiga clipboard. With Personal Write I was able to copy a block of text and paste it into another word processor, such as Final Writer. I have not been able to do this with WordPerfect 4.1 for Amiga.

I'm sure Cloanto is stretched thin these days, but with a few updates to Personal Write, including a spell check feature and a few more modern file types, such as RTF or ODF or DOCX, Personal Write would be a nice program in which to write. However, the program AmiToRTF will convert an IFF-FTXT file created in Personal Write to an RTF file. So really, adding a spell check to Personal Writer should probably be the first update to PWrite, in my opinion.

So this was my experiment with Personal Write for AmigaOS. Other than the images, this article was written using Personal Write.