TextMaker, Revisited14 April 2003 SoftMaker's full-featured word processor is out of beta testing and ready for purchase. Is it worth the (pricey for Pocket PC software) $49.95? I have a confession to make. I like Pocket Word. After using it for a few years I've found work-arounds for most of Pocket Word's deficiencies and really grown to appreciate the speed and convenience it offers. I still wanted a "real" word processor, something that would handle heading styles transparently -- or at least remember the formatting from the previous paragraph so I wasn't forced to use two returns between paragraphs -- but it needed to be as fast and easy as Pocket Word to win me over. Frankly, that was a problem with the early betas of TextMaker I tried. They were considerably slower than Pocket Word and the user interface wasn't as understandable. The program had all the power I could want from a word processor, but it was still too slow in regular use to be good enough. Fortunately, the folks at SoftMaker in Germany aren't satisfied leaving a pretty good thing alone. The latest revision of TextMaker is close to word processing perfection on the Pocket PC. It's finally as fast as Pocket Word, it fully supports keyboard shortcuts (the first time I hit Ctrl-O and the File Open dialog popped up I about lost my mind) and finally I have a word processor that doesn't force me into that lame "two returns between paragraphs" open style. This works, and works well. Unlike the built-in Pocket PC apps, TextMaker can read documents from anywhere in the file system, not just in My Documents and it's immediate children. This total file system awareness is a bigger deal than it sounds. Instead of having dozens of folders directly underneath My Documents I can now subdivide stuff in a way that makes sense to me. The chapters from the second draft of my current novel are in "\My Documents\Fiction\Saurians\0.2\" and I can keep the first draft chapters in "\My Documents\Fiction\Saurians\0.1\". TextMaker also has a handy feature called QuickPaths that allows you to put your most-used folders just a click away in the File, Open dialog. Current versions of TextMaker fully support Word 97/200/XP .doc files and even allow you to select that format as TextMaker's default. The installation program also allows you to associate .doc and .rtf files with TextMaker on the desktop, device or both and even automatically turns off ActiveSync file conversions for those files to prevent any loss of formatting. The folks at SoftMaker have also addressed the issue of not being able to read and write Pocket Word's .psw files. TextMaker now handles these flawlessly, though you can't select .psw as your default file format. As before, you can elect to render text either with ClearType or without, and ClearType doesn't slow things down nearly as much now as it did in early betas. It's slightly slower than unantialiased text, but that's a given as the Pocket PC has more things to do. Spell checking is built in to TextMaker, and it doesn't rely on the system's spell check dictionary (good news for iPAQ 1910 users!). I tend to leave the squiggly red underlines under misspelled words, but you can turn that off if you find it distracting. Basically, spell checking in TextMaker works exactly the same way it does in the desktop versions of Word. TextMaker fully supports stylesheets, and this makes it so much easier to get your document looking the way you want it to. If I want to begin a chapter with a quote, I just mark it as a paragraph of style "Quote" and it's automatically formatted appropriately. If I decide later that I want to change the formatting in my document (say to change from the single-spaced 10-point Georgia I'm using now to 12-point double-spaced Courier for manuscript submission), I only have to make the change to the style definition and everything else happens automatically. It's worth using TextMaker over Pocket Word for this feature alone if you write book-length documents. Speaking of book-length documents, that's one area where TextMaker still needs work. If you use Microsoft's .doc format as your default format you won't be able to store your whole book in one file without a lot of patience. It took me about 30 seconds to open a 77,000 word manuscript as a .doc file. Oddly, the same file as a TextMaker-native .tmd file opened in about four seconds. I'm using .doc as my default format, but I'm keeping each chapter in a separate file. Load times are quite manageable, but I miss being able to see the aggregate word count for the entire book. Virtually everything about TextMaker is configurable. You can change the keyboard mappings (though the defaults are now very similar to those in Word) and the icon bars to suit your individual needs or tastes. I've streamlined the default toolbar on mine to make room for the spell checker and thesaurus icons, and do everything else with the keyboard. As great as TextMaker is, it does have its downsides. All the complaints I had in my first review have been fixed, but I had to find something to complain about, didn't I? HTML export isn't quite bright enough yet. In Word XP on my desktop, Heading 3 styles are converted to <h3> tags when exported to HTML. In TextMaker, they become <p class="Heading 3">. It does a pretty good job overall, but I have to do a fair amount of retouching before I can publish anything. And forget editing WOYP columns natively. The PayPal JavaScript at the top of the page completely flusters the HTML export engine. A feature missing in Pocket Word as well as both the Pocket PC and desktop versions of TextMaker is autocorrect. This isn't really a con, since I'm not sure I want this feature enough to accept the additional size it would surely require, but it would be nice to have common typos and words with difficult to type characters (like µBook) corrected on the fly. Overall, I'm impressed. TextMaker lives up to the hype as few applications do, and provides unprecedented word processing power on pocket-sized screens. There are a few applications that I feel are worth the purchase of a Pocket PC if you don't already own one. µBook is one. So is the Pocket PC's Inbox application. Now TextMaker joins them in my list of Pocket PC "killer apps." Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |