Sprint (word Processor) - Features

Features

Crash-proof: Sprint had incremental back-up, with its swap file updated every 3 seconds, enabling full recovery from crashes. At trade shows, demos were made with one person pulling out the power cord, and the typist resuming work as soon as the machine restarted!

Spell-as-you-type: With this feature, Sprint could beep at you in real time when detecting a typo. (Microsoft Word needed almost ten years to have the red snakes under the suspect words.)

Multilingual editing: Sprint included dictionary switching, support for hyphenation, and spelling and thesaurus dictionaries that have yet to be matched by the competitors.

Separate formatter and programmable editor: These have been very useful features for corporate environments aiming at standardizing documents or building "boilerplate" contracts. In France, for example, sophisticated applications were built for Banques Populaires (loan contracts) or Conseil d'Etat, while some local government agencies created specific applications for tenders and contracts.

Powerful programming language: Programming in Sprint was done with the internal language of the word processor - a language which is very much like C. Programmers have the ability to "get under the hood" and to add modifications and extensions to an extent not possible with other word processors. Once written, Sprint programs are compiled into the interface, and run at full speed.

Interface switching: Modifications and extensions to Sprint can be saved into separate interfaces which can be easily and quickly switched. This is very useful for people working in different languages, as the keys can be mapped to the accents and characters of each language, depending on the interface.

File handling: Users could work in up to 24 files at once. All open files could be saved on exit or not -- and nevertheless automatically reopened as left, including each file's cursor position, cut and paste buffer contents, and spell check status. Because this behavior was accomplished using the crash-proof swap file (see above), it allowed an "instant-on" behavior using the saved state from the previous run; this was unusual for its time.

Handling large documents: Sprint has the ability to publish very large documents (hundreds of pages) with strict formatting consistency and automatic table of contents, index generation, tables of figures, and tables of authorities. These features made Sprint a leader in the production of technical documents - and Borland itself did all its manuals on Sprint, for years.

PostScript capabilities: Sprint could print in-line EPS images with dimensioning, and also had the ability to add in-line PostScript procedures. This made the product rather popular in the printing industry. For example, making a 200-page novel fit into 192 pages was simply a matter of changing the point size from 11 to 10.56. Sprint could size by 0.04 increment and scale the line spacing and kerning accordingly. (The 192 pages size is important in the printing industry, where the number of pages often has to be divisible by 32. A 200-page book would have to be printed using 224 pages, the extra 24 pages being empty.)

Consistency with familiar environments: The default editor key bindings were a subset of those provided by EMACS, and the mark-up language was a subset of Scribe_(markup_language), making it easy for people familiar with those tools to use Sprint.

Read more about this topic:  Sprint (word Processor)

Famous quotes containing the word features:

    It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.
    Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)

    Art is the child of Nature; yes,
    Her darling child, in whom we trace
    The features of the mother’s face,
    Her aspect and her attitude.
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

    These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.
    Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)