Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!vu-vlsi!cgh!paul
From: paul@cgh.UUCP (Paul Homchick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Sprint
Summary: SPRINT is Final Word, Not WYSIWYG
Keywords: Sprint, Final Word, Borland, Emacs, Scribe
Message-ID: <741@cgh.UUCP>
Date: 4 Jul 88 21:07:28 GMT
References: <398@csed-1.IDA.ORG>
Reply-To: paul@cgh.UUCP (Paul Homchick)
Organization: Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Radnor, PA
Lines: 61

In article <398@csed-1.IDA.ORG> krantz@csed-1.IDA.ORG (Alan Krantz) writes:
>Specifically, has anyone heard much about sprint? ... is it good for law
>briefs? (Lines have to be numbered).  What's the going price for this product?
>product?  How does it stand up against products such as word perfect,
>MS word[.], >PcWrite ... in terms of price/performance ratio?

As has been mentioned before, Borland's Sprint is really Mark of the
Unicorn's Final Word II with some (significant) Borland improvements. 
The most important thing to note about the product is its family tree:

             EMACS    SCRIBE          (unix & dec)
               |        |
             MINCE   SCRIBBLE         (cp/m)
               +--------+
                   |
     Final Word + FinalWordFormatter  (ms-dos)
                   |
                 SPRINT               (turbo-land)

This product started out as a very powerful extensible programmer's
editor coupled with a very nice document formatting language.  It has
stayed that way.  Can you say WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)?
Good: that isn't SPRINT.

SPRINT is a multi-buffer, multi-window, highly configurable, macro
editor.  It's sort of the word processing equivalent of the Brief
programmer's editor.  With enough time, you could write a macro to make
it behave almost any way you want.  In fact that is how Borland has
managed to make the 'user interface' changeable.  They simply wrote a
series of macros.  It can look like WordStar, Multimate, Word Perfect,
or Word.  (And probably others, that is all I remember).  But it is not
an integrated editor/printing environment.

You don't get on-screen formatting, or dimensioning in picas, or preview
using a bit-mapped mode, or anything like that.  If you want something
to be centered you put a @=() around it.  If you want an indented list,
you say @begin(list) at the beginning, and @end(list) at the end.  If
you want numbered lines you probably say @style(legal) (I'm making this
one up, guys) at the beginning of the document.  Personally, I don't
find a thing wrong with this approach, but to some folks this is apt to
seem a might strange.

Sprint (a.k.a Final Word) is absolutely GREAT for producing large,
structured documents with footnotes, a table of contents, chapter
headings, cross-references, and an index.  It interfaces to a jillion
printers, and it does a fantastic job with a postscript device.  And if
you have any SCRIBE documents laying about, just feed them to the
formatter, and out they will come, just like the real $megabuck$ SCRIBE. 
I have used FW II for years, and I have a copy of Sprint on order. 

The list price is $199, so I would expect the street price to be about
$140.  Borland has an introductory offer to Borland customers where you
can get a copy for $99.  If you are looking for a cheap clone of Ventura
Publisher, don't look here.  But if you are looking for a powerful,
programmable document preparation system that can easily handle monster
manuals, then Sprint is a steal at the asking price.  (It makes a pretty
good programmer's editor, too).

-- 
Paul Homchick                     {allegra | rutgers | uunet} !cbmvax!cgh!paul
Chimitt Gilman Homchick, Inc.; One Radnor Station, Suite 300; Radnor, PA 19087