★ LITTÉRATURE ★ ENGLISH ★ ADVANCED LOCOSCRIPT ON THE AMSTRAD PCW COMPUTERS|8000 Plus) ★ |
| Advanced Locoscript on the Amstrad PCW Computers | Littérature English |
The Ian Sinclair bandwagon rolls on. This jolly little pot-pourri is aimed at Loco users who have graduated from the manual and want to explore the world of text files, external drives, mailmerging, spellchecking and 'Advanced LocoScript PCW owners must be fed up of reading and hearing the mantra-like phrase this does not work with LocoScript 2. The book only goes as far as version 1.4, but most of the content applies to Loco 2 as well, given the few key changes between the two changes. Simple enough, but changing keys can be a tedious business, as any music copyist will tell you. There are three chapters devoted to LoeoMail and LocoSpell, While a whole chapter on LocoSpell makes rather heavy work of a quite simple package, a straightforward description on the mailmerger is quite welcome in view of the manual's turgidity, and this section is nicely done with some amusing examples. Chapter 3 describes hooking up to other machines and the use of other printers (daisywheels, for example) in fairly rigorous detail from the physical setting up and connecting of the parts to the organisation of the text files onto the final printed page via CP/M. (The new LocoScript, of course, dispenses with all this Heath Robinson business and prints direct to a daisywheel if required, so this chapter is mostly irrelevant to the new version). Potentially the most important chapter is the first, on text files, describing how your machines can enjoy intercourse with other wordprocessors via electronic mail; there's also a bit on fitting 5 V drives. Good stuff, but brief - it would have been nice to see a more substantial treatment of all this. Apart from that, there's a collection of odds and sods about layouts, cutting, pasting, and coping with the trauma of full discs; clearly presented and all good pot-boiling stuff, but surety otd hat by now, Reading yet another essay on the pitfalls of Find and Exchange has atl the excitement of hearing people in pubs reciting the Monty Python parrot sketch. In fact the book doesn't reatly tell you anything you couldn't readily find out by leafing through one of the various excellent magazines for PCW owners now on the market (or even one of the awful ones). The kind of person who would get much out of Advanced LocoScript will have bought LocoScript 2, so ifs a rather badly timed publication. At £8.50, it's really for Ian Sinclair completists only.
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