Protext

Protext was a British word processing program, developed by Arnor Ltd, of Peterborough in the decade following 1985. Originally written for the Amstrad CPC464, it was later sold for the Amstrad PCW series of word processors, the Atari ST, the Acorn Archimedes, the Commodore Amiga and PC.

After the closure of the firm in 1995, the program was taken over by a group of enthusiasts and relaunched with a new version for the PC. A companion database program Prodata is also sold.

Protext features all the usual word-processing features, such as a dictionary and thesaurus, autocorrection, good printer support, etc, etc, and was very popular in Britain before the days of Microsoft Windows.

What made Protext unusual for a word processor was its merging of word processing and programming. Perhaps not obvious bedfellows, the simple to learn, intuitive but powerful features resulted in an addictively powerful writing and publishing tool that was - and in many respects still remains - far ahead of its time.

As an indication of this, a text such as a letter can read names and data or text from a comma-separated text file or Protext's companion database, Prodata, merging them into an overall text and outputting to printer or file. While this has become quite a common operation, the ease with which Protext performs complex calculations if required, or requests input from the user, is certainly not common.

Repetitive editing steps of any kind whether very short or very long can be recorded and then repeated by pressing a single key combination. This 'learning' actually writes a macro, and any number of macros can be created, edited, stored and called up again. While a similar macro feature is found in a number of other word processors, the ease of implementation in Protext makes the recording and re-use nearly instantaneous and means it is used all the time.

For users who want to type quickly, keyboard cursor controls and formatting commands keep fingers over the keyboard. While it is a first rate word processor, users can be confident there is a rich feature set behind it. For programmers, a very useful feature is the easy manipulations of characters outside the alphanumeric range. Printer drivers include several Hewlett Packard Laserjet models. Equally, Protext may not need to print directly, but be used to write a webpage, generate a webpage from stored data, or to create text for export and final formatting to a WYSIWYG word processor or DTP desktop publishing programme.

Overall, Protext remains many users favourite everyday writing tool for its speed, directness, and powerful features.

External links

* [http://www.glinton.prodigynet.co.uk/protext/ Protext home page]

Update July 2008: Announced by the authors that Protext together with manuals and technical information will be released and freely-downloadable, in formats for PC, Amiga and (all being well) for CPM.