The Commodore Amiga : A Magic Machine

The Commodore Ainiga makes an impressive w machine, able to compete with computers costing several times its price. In this report on the status of Arnigaw, features will be discussed that might well be profitably implemented on other machines. Let me tantalize you, first, by mentioning that it is possible with this package to go from your document in your favorite editor to the first page of your w'ed document in a preview window in about a second of real time and with a single keystroke or menu selection. But before I discuss some of the more esoteric features, let me tell you what the basic package contains and requires. Amigam comes on eight floppies including w 2.9, iniw, I4w, Bibw, preview, over 1200 previewer fonts, and some font conversion utilities. Printer drivers are available separately for the HP LaserJet Plus, standard Postscript printers, the QMS Kiss and Smartwriter, the NEC P6/P7 series, the Epson LQ series and MX series, and some other less popular dot-matrix printers. Plain TE.X will run on a 512K machine; I4TE.X requires a megabyte of memory. A hard disk is not necessary; an extra two megabytes of memory is cheaper and much more useful. Two floppy drives are highly recommended. Three megabytes of memory gives you the best environment. The first question that pops up is, how can a hard disk not be necessary if the package requires eight floppies to distribute? Is it really possible to put an entire environment, including w, the preview program, a printer driver, the editor, previewer and laser printer fonts, and all of the system software onto two floppies and still have room for w source files? Indeed it is. The TJ$ software less the previewer and laser printer fonts requires less than 400K, including even the plain format file and an editor. The key feature that makes a floppy 'l&X environment practical is font caching. Font caching is based on the idea that, of the thousands (literally) of fonts supplied with the previewer and a printer driver, the typical user will need only a few dozens, or maybe a hundred. The idea is to find which fonts the user needs. These fonts should be made easily available. This is easily accomplished. A directory is assigned to hold the commonly used fonts; this directory resides on a single disk that is always in one of the disk drives when …