BIG Word Processors for A8?

[+Larry]

Are there any WP for the Atari that will load and edit files 70-80 KB?

 

All I've used is AW Plus set up for the XE and will do around 50 KB (or so).

 

Thanks,

Larry

 

 

[+Stephen]

By far the best WP out there is Last Word by our own flashjazzcat. On an extended RAM machine, you can have up to 10 files open at once, each 16kB. What is even more awesome, is the WP is smart enough to "chain" a single large file across multiple banks.

[+Larry]

Thanks, I'll try it with the 70+ KB text file I'm working with.

[Heaven/TQA]

Yeah one of the most modern Atari software imho. And as VBXE user I like the native 80 collum mode.

[tschak909]

This was why back in the old days, authors would split their documents into chunks.

 

AtariWriter has a facility to link documents together for printing.

 

-Thom

[+Larry]

Yes, I thought about splitting it into a couple of segments. But if I can pretty easily deal with it as one file, I'll likely do that. I'm parsing a big text file for specific key words so that I can make a comma-delimited data file that can go into a database or spreadsheet.

[flashjazzcat]

The published version of TLW allows the automatic splitting of large files into consecutive banks (and concatenation of banks when saving), but although the process may be smoothly automated using macros, this whole splitting across banks business never seemed a satisfactory solution. AtariWriter Plus at least allowed the manual redistribution of text between banks following edits (an effect you could simulate in TLW simply by cutting and pasting from one bank to another if edits caused a bank to run out of space), but as things stand, splitting documents up into sub 16K chunks is the easiest thing to do. I frequently pondered the issue of creating a text editor which could treat an unlimited number of extended RAM banks as a single contiguous buffer, but at some point, simply moving from the top of the file to the end will become a time-consuming operation with files of enormous size. TLW - since it uses a gap buffer - actually moves the entire file to the top or end of the buffer when the cursor travels the full length of the document, and one can imagine how much slower it would be when either end of an outsize file has been paged out of the main buffer.

 

Anyway: to make life easier, TLW allows not just "chaining" of documents for printing, but inclusion of documents, so you may have a master document which is simply a list of chapter files, and the print processor will work its way through the whole lot. Print preview and "Where's the cursor" also reference the entire compound document when working out page breaks, etc.