HX Write Offers Unique Combination Of Word Processing And DTP Features

HX Write from HanMac Software of Korea is marketed as a solution bridging the gap between word processing and full-fledged desktop publishing (DTP) applications. HanMac knows DTP well as a developer of QuarkXPress XTension programs. HX Write is designed to work cooperatively with DTP heavyweight QuarkXPress through the HX Filter XTension which is bundled with the program.

The HX Write application is in English, but you can process both English and either Korean or Japanese (Japanese versions are called I-Write and HanMac Word-J) with the proper Language Kit installed.

HanMac Software was established in 1993 as a developer of software products for the Macintosh. HX Write/HanMac Word started selling in Korean market in 1995, and Elex Computer, the exclusive Apple distributor in Korea, bundled HanMac Word with every Power Macintosh computer sold in Korea during 1995, establishing HanMac Word as the standard Macintosh wordprocessor in Korean market.

The Japanese version of HanMac Word, I-Write, was developed as the result of an agreement with WinningRun Software in Japan to localize and distribute HanMac Word. I-Write was introduced at MacWorld Tokyo in February, 1996, and quickly became the 5th best seller among more than 20 Japanese wordprocessors and is now distributed by Software Too.

HX Write is available in a full software version with a print manual and the HX Filter XTension, or shareware versions called HanMac Word-K and -J, the latter with a very friendly price of $35 -- a lot of value for such a powerful application .

I have tested both an evaluation copy of HX Write 2.0, and the shareware HanMac Word 2.0.6, and found them to be essentially similar in function, however the manual that comes with HX Write is excellent, and I would think key to getting the best out of HX Write's advanced features. The program combines many of the best features of MS Word, Nisus Writer, WordPerfect, and AppleWorks, along with some cool ones of its own.

If you will pardon momentary digression, I really MISS the comprehensive print manuals that used to ship with almost all software applications. For example, my copy of MicroSoft Word 5.1 that I bought back in 1993 came with I think six separate manuals, including a basic one of over 1,000 pages. I am a bookish person, and I detest being obliged to use the online help that is supposed to be a substitute for manuals these days, except for perhaps when you want to reference a particular point quickly. I like to sit down in a comfortable chair with a manual and study it at my leisure.

The same deterioration in print support afflicts hardware as well. My original Mac Plus came with a collection of excellent manuals. My 1993 LC 520 was less well-endowed, but had at least decent manuals. By the time I bought my PowerBook 5300 in 1996, the rot was setting in and manual situation was getting pretty rudimentary, while the thin little pamphlet that came with my WallStreet PowerBook last January is plain pathetic. End of rant.

Anyway, the HX Write manual is nicely done and easy to follow -- quite similar in format to the manuals Claris used to supply with MacWrite Pro and ClarisWorks; not as prolix and detailed as the old Word 5.1 manuals, but clearly and concisely covering all the bases.

HanMac Word features include in summary:

• Multiple (non-contiguous) text selection : You can select multiple text and apply a menu or keyboard command to reformat whole selection at once.

• Fast find/replace by text and/or character attributes.

• Footnotes, multiple headers, and footers.

• Frames : You can create frames with text, picture, graphic, table or memo content. Frames can be inline or position-fixed and text can wrap around a frame or picture outline.

• Very powerful and convenient table editor that makes it easy to create a table using the mouse or from text. You can merge or split cells, or move cell borders to change the table structure. All formatting features are applicable to cell contents.

• HX Write's Document DB feature allows you to automatically maintain a database organized with document summary information. You can view, search, and open documents from the DB window, and classify documents using user defined tags.

• A really slick HTML editor converts or saves your document to HTML format with text attributes and styles are retained as much as possible. You can specify background color and pattern, text color, or link text color. Picture frames and graphics are processed with text wrapping around them. Tables are also converted. Hypertext Link can be specified with bookmark or URL address. The converted result can be previewed with a user selected browser program.

• Internet mail: If you have the Eudora email client on your hard drive, you can send document via email from within the HX Write application. You can also queue your mail in Eudora's outmail box. A file can be attached to the mail with or without compression.

• HX Write's Library allows you to store frequently-accessed graphics, text or tables for easy insertion in documents.

• Floating palettes for styles, text attributes, tools, symbols, and shortcuts. The shortcuts palette can be changed to a toolbar.

• Near DTP features include unit precision; you can specify size or position in 1/1000 of a point, cm, mm, inch, or Q.

• Variable, multi-column support up to 8 columns, plus multiple sections. Each column width and gutter size can be adjusted independently.

• Using the included HX Filter XTension, you can open an HX Write document directly from QuarkXPress or import text along with anchored frames at the current insertion point. All character attributes and paragraph formats are maintained intact.

• Long document support allows you to divide a long document like a book manuscript into several files while retaining consecutive page and section numbers.

• Index and TOC generators.

• Text formatting : Character spacing and horizontal character scaling are supported. You can also specify various types of underlines, dot marks, text border, background color and patterns, and Rubi.

• Style based formatting : Text formatting is done based on paragraph styles. Custom styles are defined with character attributes, paragraph format, paragraph border specifications and tab definitions. And you can choose relative or absolute line spacing for each paragraph.

• Frames : Multiple frames can be grouped and handled exactly the same as a single frame. You can link text boxes positioned on different pages to flow one story.

• Multiple sections : You can divide a document into several sections, and specify number of columns, header, footer, or page number independently for each section.

• Sort : You can sort selected paragraphs in ascending or descending order of a key field.

• Link file : A link file is made of document file names to create a TOC or Index with consecutive section numbers and page numbers as if they were a single document.

• Library : You can maintain library files of frequently used text, text frames, pictures, graphics, or tables.

• A small, object-oriented draw program is included for creating and editing graphics.

HX Write is small -- the entire application folder (PPC installation) is only 3.1 MB (the application itself is 2.4 MB), and it will run in a 2000k memory partition (2,500k recommended) with Virtual Memory or RAMDoubler activated. As my regular readers know, my general preference is for small, efficiently-coded, unbloated applications even on fast computers, and HX Write feels fast and nimble in contrast to, say, Word '98’s groundshaking ponderousness.

HX Write comes in a smart fat binary installer. You can install versions for either PowerPC, 680X0k, or both. HX Write requires 68020 Macintosh computer or higher, and System 7.1 or later.

You can optionally show or hide the various HX Write toolbars (rulers, text, HTML, DB, and Mail) and palettes very much in the mode of the way WordPerfect's toolbars work.

Using HX Write

The program is highly customizable. A maximum of 20 shortcut icons can be loaded into the Shortcut toolbar or the Shortcut palette. You can change shortcut icons and rearrange the display order.

An Open Recent submenu allows you to quickly reopen any of the 12 documents most recently worked with. If you don't recall the exact document name, you can find it using the document summary information you entered with the Summary Info command.

A convenient feature is HX Write's Reverting a Document command. You can give up the changes made since you last saved, and revert to the penultimate saved version of the document. By choosing Revert in the File menu, the current document in the memory is wiped out and the document saved on the disk reopens.

HX Write's page interface will make Claris/AppleWorks, Mariner Write, and MacWrite fans feel right at home, although it has its own distinct personality. I find it quite attractive and intuitive. With the View Facing Pages command you can display and compare two adjacent pages on the screen at the same time.

HX Write supports Apple's Drag & Drop Manager, which allows you to move or copy selected text with a mouse operation. You can copy the selected text by holding down the Option key while you use the mouse. If the Drag & Drop Manager is installed and the Enable Drag & Drop option is checked in the Application Preferences, you can import any readable file or text clipping file from the desktop by drag & drop.

Like Nisus Writer, HX Write supports multiple uncontiguous and simultaneous text blocks selection. Any editing or formatting command changes the selected blocks of text all at once. To make Multiple Selections, hold down the Control key and serially select blocks of text

HX Write also allows you to select text in a rectangular form, especially convenient for handling columns of text in a table form. If you hold down the Option key and drag, the text contained in the box you draw is selected and highlighted. A rectangular selection is a special form of multiple selection in which blocks of text of the same width on adjacent lines are selected. You can mix multiple selections and rectangular selections.

In HX Write, Bookmarks may be used to mark text positions so that you can locate them easily or set up HTML hypertext links from other text. You can locate a bookmark and display the marked text on the screen by either choosing a bookmark name from the bookmark list at the end of Bookmark submenu, or holding down the Command key, pressing the document title bar, and choosing a bookmark.

You can change text color to highlight the title or specific text. You can also specify a background pattern for the selected text using the Style- >Background Pattern command. With HX Write's Paragraph Borders Dialog Box, you can place several types of borders around selected text, including patterns round rectangles, and multiple borders.

By specifying the character spacing value, you can change the space between characters in the selection. Character spacing is specified in percentage of the standard character width for the used font.

With HX Write, you can Find and Replace Text on the basis of a specified word or phrase or character attributes, including Invisible Characters or Character Type.

Memos in HX Write are special position-fixed text frames that you can insert anywhere in the document using the Memo tool in the Tool palette. You can hide Memos, or collapse a memo leaving only an icon which indicates its position. You can also collect the contents of all memos, and print or create a document file. Another Memo feature is the ability to record and play back sound messages.

HX Write includes a powerful table tool, and a drawing graphics module. While a graphic is selected, the Picture menu appears on the menu bar and graphic commands are enabled.

HX Writes's Styles commands let you set definitions of character attributes, paragraph formats, paragraph border specifications and tab settings that control the text appearance. Custom styles facilitate consistent paragraph formats and allow reformatting of paragraphs by simply changing the style definition. Internal styles are predefined for body text, header, footer, footnote, Index and TOC.

A very cool feature in HX Write is a document database which consists of document summary information of all document files. Whenever you save your document, the program automatically updates the database information. You can find your document more easily from the database rather than searching folders. To classify your document files in more orderly way, you can define and attach tags to each document in 2-level hierarchical structure. These tags may subsequently be edited.

You can search the document database to find document files containing specified summary information.

One of my favorite HX Write features that I've been using every day since last spring is the program's slick and fast built-in HTML editor. Almost all of the news stories I post to Applelinks are converted to HTML in either HX Write or HanMac Word. You can edit and save documents in HTML format, as well as preview them in a browser to check how it looks as you edit. You can also save pictures in JPEG format.

Another interesting HX Write wrinkle is its ability to send email messages from within the program as long as you have a Eudora email program on your HD. The freeware Eudora Light works fine.

To send an email from within HX Write, Choose Tools->Mail->Edit Mail or click on the Mail toolbar to make the Edit Mail dialog box appear. The mail information will be loaded initially from the document summary information. Enter or modify mail information. You may enter one or more receiver addresses separated by a comma. If you have a file to attach to the mail, click Attach. You can also click StuffIt to compress the file before sending. Click OK to close the Edit Mail dialog box.

To send the mail immediately, choose Tools->Mail->Send Mail or click on the Mail toolbar. Eudora will launch automatically and sends the document in ASCII text format to the receiver address along with the attached file. To send the mail later, choose Tools->Mail->Queue Mail or click on the Mail toolbar. The document will be stored in Eudora's outmail box until you want to send it.

HX Write also has long document handling tools and both Table Of Contents and Index generators.

HX Write and HanMac Word also come with a few file translation filters of its own for importing and exporting text, PICT, EPS, MacPaint, TIFF files, and also supports the Claris XTND System.

For a summary of more HX Write capabilities, see Appendix I below.

HX Write is obviously a capable word processing program. It has a very precise, finished, polished, unbuggy feel about it. So what did I find not to like? Well, the installer is a bit clunky, and it took me several tries to get the program installed, but it worked fine after that.

I also find that files -- even those saved in the HX Write/HanMac Word native format, are relatively slow to open on slower Macs like my PowerBook 5300, although this is not an issue on the G3 WallStreet.

Another annoying glitch is that HX Word's preferences become corrupted every time the Mac crashes and has to be force-restarted, and must be trashed and the program restarted in order to get things working properly again.

However, my main complaint with HX Write isn't a flaw, but rather an omission, namely the lack of a spellchecker. Grammar checkers I can happily live without, but not spellcheckers.

HanMac Software, Inc.'s Product General Manager, Mr. SukSang Yoon, tells me that a spellchecker is under consideration for HX Write's next version upgrade, and I encourage him to put it on the top of the priority list.

In the meantime, the workaround, at least for the HX Write application, is to use Casady & Green's very powerful and versatile free-standing Spell Catcher spell check program, which appears in the HX Write menus and can be called up as conveniently as a built-in spell checker. Unfortunately, I have been unable to get the Spell Catcher control panel to recognize and add the shareware HanMac Word 2.0.6 application .Please see Appendix II below for more information about Spell Catcher.

If HX Word interests you, but you're not sure about it, I recommend downloading the HanMac Word-K shareware version from the HanMac download site or TuCows. You won't have a manual, but you should be able to get a first hand idea of how the program works. If you like it, you can pay the Shareware fee to Kagi, or order a full-fledged copy of HX Write from the HanMac or Media-Network (details below)

Moore's Views & Reviews Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5

Cool:

• Small and nimble, but powerful

• Somewhat unique combination of features

• Cool HTML editor

• Attractive and intuitively functional interface

• Published by a Mac-only developer

• Shareware version's price is right -- a bargain

• Great print manual

Needs Work

• No Spell-Checker

• Clunky Installer

• Preferences Easily Corrupted in Crashes and Lockups

• Price For Full Version A Bit Steep by today's standards

• File opening sluggish on slower Macs

System Requirements for HX Write and HanMac Word are:

68020 Macintosh computer or higher; HanMac Word is provided in FAT binary format

System 7.1 or later

2.5M bytes of application memory

QuickTime Manager

Drag & Drop Manager

Claris XTND system

The U.S. English version of HX Write is available from Media-Network for $162.00. A free demo is also available. The International English version is $203.00. For more information, visit:

http://apps2.media-network.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/XTDisplay?ProductID=235 (order)

For more information on the shareware versions of HanMac Word, go to:

http://www.hanmac.com/english/hwordkinfo.html

http://www.hanmac.com/english/hwordjinfo.html

For further information on other HanMac Software products, please contact HanMac Software at following address:

HanMac Software, Inc.

Dongwoo Bldg. 4F

784-13, Yeoksam-dong, Kangnam-ku,

Seoul, Korea 135-080

Tel: 82)2-3452-7235

Fax: 82)2-3452-7238

Web Site: <http://www.hanmac.com>

email:

____________

Appendix I: More things the HX Write can do:

Character Formatting

• Font size : from 2 to 1000 points in unit of 0.001 points

• Font style : plain, bold, italic, outline, shadow, various underlines and strike thrus, reverse, superscript, subscript, superior

• Dot marks over selected text

• Character spacing : from -100% to 200% in unit of 0.1%

• Horizontal character scaling : from 20% to 200% in unit of 0.1%

Paragraph Formatting

• Prevent orphan or widow line

• Support full, half, or quarter size em space

• Word wrap with breaking and non-breaking space

• Option to calculate line spacing unit for selected paragraphs based on font size and lines per page

• Option to calculate character spacing unit for selected paragraphs based on font size and characters per line

Editing text

• Convert characters command (eg: UPPERCASE/lowercase)

• Edit text using uninstalled fonts

• Paragraph border : offset, color, pattern, width, and line type

• Apply styles with keyboard equivalents or style palette

• Copy styles from another document or a style file

• Copy a style by copying and pasting text

• Find and replace using uninstalled fonts

• Find and replace in current frame only or in linked text frame

Editing documents

• Variable column width and gap between columns

• Section : independent page number, number of columns, header and footer

• Left- and right-facing pages

• Footnote : at the end of text, page, section, or document

• Optional footnote mark and format, auto numbering, specified symbol

Working with frames

• Transparent or opaque frame

• Offset of text from frame border : internal, external

• Set frame position or resize frame by entering values or mouse operation

• Resize text frame automatically fit to contents

• Frame anchor : position fixed, inline frame

• Text wrap around the frame border or outline of contents

• Paste an inline frame in the vertical center of the line

• Align multiple frames horizontally or vertically

• Lock frame position and size

• Fit to grid when moving or resizing a frame

Working with tables

• Draw or resize table by mouse operation

• Justify cell contents by character

• Sum cell contents

• Resize cell automatically fit to contents

• Apply character or paragraph format or a style to multi-selected cells

• Convert text to table or vice versa

File Management And Long Document Handling

• Open recently used files

• Preview on Import File dialog box

• Link documents

• Create TOC from linked documents

• Print linked documents with consecutive page numbers

• Set a password

• Mail merge

• Save document in compressed format

Tools

• Palettes : tools, styles, character, shortcuts, symbols, table

• Insert object from library by mouse click

• Replace current word with object in library

• Sort selected paragraphs

• Insert/Remove a Return at the end of each line

• Insert paragraph number or bullet in front of each paragraph

• Toolbars : text tools, DB tools, HTML tools, mail tools

Printing Documents

• Print even or odd pages

• Print in reverse order

• Link section number and page number when printing linked document

• Option not to print pictures or memos

____

Appendix II: Casady & Green's Spell Catcher

Casady & Green's freestanding Spell Catcher spell check program is designed to be compatible with almost any application or desk accessory - even e-mail programs. Spell Catcher waits and watches while you type, alerting you when a mistake is made and instantly offering spelling corrections. The Shorthand Glossary lets you create keystroke abbreviations for commonly-used phrases and Spell Catcher types the full phrase. Punctuation and capitalization checking, along with Custom Dictionaries, are some of the tools provided by Spell Catcher.

Spell Catcher's Ghostwriter feature will save all of your keystrokes to disk, even if you've forgotten to save, so sudden power outages or crashes won't cause you to lose your valuable work.

You can also speed up your typing and avoid typos by using Spell Catcher's shorthand. With the Shorthand Glossary, you can abbreviate your commonly used phrases.

Spell Catcher 8 works with most programs (regrettably not with the HanMac Word 2.0.6 shareware version) utilizing a single set of reference files, so if you buy it you can use ti to check spelling in other programs like Tex-Edit Plus or email clients as well.

For more information about Spell Catcher or to download a time-limited demo, go here:

http://www.SpellCatcher.com/

Charles W. Moore

.

October 07, 2008