Until the release of
TextMaker from the German software house, SoftMaker,
there was nothing resembling a true word processor for the Pocket PC. Microsoft's offering of Pocket Word is nothing short of a wind-up toy by
comparison - in fact, if the truth be told, it's not really a word processor at all when compared to any contemporary standard. One wonders how this Mega
Corporation who professes to have such faith in the Pocket PC platform could have so little belief in its ability to handle a full-featured word processor
application. The fact is they just seem to have given up on the idea of allowing
Pocket PC users to do anything more than type text and apply a little formatting. Forget any hopes of inserting pictures,
tables, page numbering - they are simply not supported. And if you think you can create all the fancy stuff in Microsoft
Word on your PC and simply copy it to your PDA, you will be sadly disappointed, ActiveSync will just strip out all your hard
work, leaving you with pretty much the basic text and some formatting.
Enter TextMaker
- the new breed of Pocket PC word processor. After installing TextMaker (it uses an unusual looking
installation program that installs both the Pocket PC and at the desktop versions at the same time - more on this later)
and running it on the Pocket PC, you get the distinct impression of "a serious application". This is not some half-hearted
attempt - like many other Pocket PC programs - it is a full-featured word processing tool, with just about every truly
useful feature that you could possibly want, whether on a desktop computer or a Pocket PC. Yes, I know this sounds too
good to be true, but believe me, you won't believe me until you try it for yourself!
Feature Set
Let's look at some of the features of TextMaker in greater detail.
I guess the first thing that struck me, was the fact that it was quite happy to open Pocket Word files with no loss of
formatting but I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by this, there is really not much to them anyway. The really exciting
stuff doesn't become obvious until you start to explore the menus. These are extensive and include: File -> Edit, View, Format, Insert, Object
, Table, Extras, Recent and Help.
 The File menu (
Right) provides a glimpse of the deep feature set offered by TextMaker, for example, the Properties... item allows you to create a Summary of your document
information, i.e., Subject, Author, Keywords, etc. You can change the View options and colours, alter Internet settings
, and of vital importance to any writer, access full information about your document. This includes the following: Keystrokes, Characters, Words, Sentences
, Paragraphs, Chapters, Sections, Lines and Pages. Info about Objects is also included.
All this is presented in a tabbed format in a vertically scrolling window that allows the Pocket PC to present literally as much
information as required. If anything bothered me, it was the fact that the Info tab is the fifth tab across. I would really like
to be able to get information about the number of words in my document a quickly as possible - and I am not really that interested in knowing how many keystrokes I have as the first
item on the list. Nevertheless, it's great to have this feature.
The Edit menu contains all the functions you would expect, such as, Undo, Cut, Copy
, Paste, Redo, Search, Replace, etc., plus some other goodies, including: Go to... , Go to Link, Sort and Evaluate.
The
View menu includes all the document views you would expect, including Actual Size, Zoom and a highly
configurable set of Control strips, including a floating option.
The Format menu (following page) provides everything you
would expect from a contemporary high-end word processor, including a Link option, which allows the user to define links to a URL or file name.
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