EasiWriter and TechWriter

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Structured word processing for RISC OS

Introduction

EasiWriter and TechWriter are structured word processors for RISC OS offering compatibility with industry standard file formats (most notably, MS Word RTF, DOC and DOCX formats and the ODT format as used by OpenOffice.org). TechWriter has all the features of EasiWriter plus additional maths typesetting capabilities. EasiWriter and TechWriter were originally published by Icon Technology. You can find the original web site here for reference.

New features in version 9.1

Improved MS Word (.docx) import

• Headers and footers
• Cropped images
• Subscript/superscript
• Hyperlinks (to bookmarks and to external URLs)
• Paragraph borders and background colours
• Automatic fields in headers and footers (page number, number of pages, file/leaf name, date/time)
• Correct vertical positioning of inline images
• Correct application of Normal style
• The Reflect margins option in page setup
• The Do not spell check text property
• Improved table import:
  • Column widths are imported
  • Multiple text paragraphs in a table cell are imported (previous versions ignored all but the first paragraph)
  • Table cell borders and background colours
  • Alignment of floating tables

HTML4 export with CSS

• Better separation of content and style via editable external CSS stylesheet
• Much closer representation of document styles (e.g., font size, line spacing, space before/after paragraphs, borders, backgrounds, etc.)
• Various other improvements, e.g., correct output of smart quotes and Greek/maths symbols, various structural corrections for HTML3 output

Further improvements:

• New header/footer visibility option All non-title chapter pages

Upgrade prices and ordering

New features in version 9.0

Cross-references

• No more worries keeping references within a document up to date, for instance:

  See section 2.3, "Requirements" on page 17.

  According to figure 3 on page 5 ...

• Cross-references can pick up the actual text, autonumbers or page numbers of other parts of the document
• Optionally, references can act as hyperlinks
• Updating all the cross-references in a document is a matter of a single mouse click

Improved foreign file format support

Easi/TechWriter 9.00 imports ODT files with text formatting properties and styles. This is still incomplete since not all formatting properties are supported and there is no support for graphics, but a big step ahead compared to version 8.90, which imported ODT files as plain text only.

Further improvements:

• Hyperlinks are exported to Word .doc format
• Cross-references are imported/exported from/to Word .doc format and imported from .docx format

New features in version 8.9

.docx and ODT support

One of the main strengths of the EasiWriter family is its wide-ranging support for native RISC OS and industry standard files: Most notably, it is the only RISC OS program that can read Microsoft Word .doc files with advanced features (styles, tables, pictures, footnotes, headers and footers etc.), and this capability is one of the main reasons for its popularity. Time has moved on and usage of the old Microsoft Word .doc format has been declining. Starting from Word 2007 it has been replaced by a new open format called Office Open XML, saved with the extension .docx. At the same time, the ODT format, another open word processor file format pioneered by the open source OpenOffice.org package has gained importance as well. Up to now, neither .docx nor .odt files could be imported by any RISC OS word processor.

Easi/TechWriter 8.9 is finally able to import MS Word .docx files. Please bear in mind that the overall .docx specification is huge, so the current implementation is only partial and still far from being as comprehensive as the existing .doc import capabilities. Nevertheless, it allows typical .docx documents to be rendered in a useful way, including paragraph and character styles and very basic table and image support.

Work on supporting the OpenOffice.org ODT file format has started as well, though this is not as advanced as .docx support. Easi/TechWriter 8.90 at least imports ODT files as plain text.

Open recent menu

Just as ArtWorks the latest version of Easi/TechWriter now has an Open recent menu that gives quick access to the most recently loaded files.

BeagleBoard compatibility

Starting from version 8.91, EasiWriter and TechWriter are fully ARMv7 compatible, so they run on the Cortex-A8 processor used in the BeagleBoard.

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