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Applix Words is easy to customize, knows how to handle most Microsoft Word documents and has a powerful macro capability.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Applix Words: Linux word processing with power and flexibility


Oct. 27, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©1999, Al Fasoldt

   Add another word processor to the list of top performers on Linux PCs.
   I've already raved about StarWriter, the word processor built into StarOffice. StarWriter is a virtual clone of Microsoft Word 97, and anyone who's used Microsoft's word processor would feel comfortable right away with StarWriter.
   But StarWriter has a substandard font display, is slow to load and, like the rest of Staroffice, seems more than a little buggy at times.
   A better choice if you're concerned about display quality, speed and stability is Applix Words, an outstanding word processor that's built into the Applixware suite of programs from Applix. The Applixware suite costs about $100 and includes a spreadsheet, a database, a presentation program, a Web page editor, a relatively simple e-mail program and what Applix calls the "builder," which lets users create database applications. (Demos of what Builder can do on the Applixware CD are very impressive.) You can find out more about the Applix suite from http://www.applix.com/.
   Applix Words has a gorgeous display, using TrueType fonts that it installs automatically. Windows open quickly and documents load much faster than they do in any of the other word processors I use under Linux or Windows. I wasn't able to trip it up no matter what; it never faltered in extensive testing, even when I loaded a document that was 3,600 pages long. (That's not a misprint. Applix Words holds the record as far as I'm concerned.)
   But Applix Words is much more than a fast and stable word processor with a good display. It's quite possibly the most adaptable word processor you can get for Linux apart from the arcane and unthinkably difficult program called Emacs. (Emacs can do anything, but it's not a graphical word processor the way Applix Words is.) I'm mentioning how adaptable Applix Words is right away to keep you from tossing the Applix CD out the window the first time you run Applix Words. If, like me, you have no interest in learning new and different ways of doing such plain-jane things as cutting and pasting, you'd probably be just as horrified as I was to discover that Applix Words uses F4, F5 or some other function keys in place of the nearly universal Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V combinations for cut, copy and paste. I was so frustrated when I first saw this that I uninstalled Applixware and put the box back on the shelf.
   Later, after a chance visit to the Applix Web site, I learned that every program in Applixware can be customized. Menus can be added, menu items can be removed or changed, new actions can be assigned to keystrokes and current key assignments can be changed. I ate crow, quickly reinstalled Applixware and got to work right away changing basic key assignments so that cutting and pasting and other functions worked the way I wanted. This is an easy operation, requiring no knowledge of programming. (Lest you think I'm even more of a dolt than I actually am, I'm sure I would have discovered how flexible Applixware is by intention, rather than chance, before long, since I have an old and honorable habit of trying to figure things out for myself. But serendipity is a stronger force sometimes.)
   Everything that happens in every Applix program is done by a macro -- a small program that simulates keystrokes or mouse clicks. When I learned how to program macros for Microsoft Word 6 a few years ago, I discovered with great delight that Word 6 operates solely through macros; every keystroke and every menu option is done by a macro. In a properly designed program, this is a gift from heaven for accomplished users. As long as these macros that do everything can be recorded, written or edited, as long as new macros can replace the stock ones, you can customize such a program in literally hundreds of ways.
   The Applix macro editor works with words and phrases that will seem familiar if you've done any kind of simple programming. (If you've ever written a DOS batch file, for example, you've done simple programming.) But Applix does not make direct use of these text-based instructions. Instead, the macro editor changes the text macros into computer code -- it compiles them, in other words. This makes them run very quickly.
   With compiled macros that are text-based, you have the best of both worlds. You can write or edit macros without needing to learn much that's new -- after all, how hard is it to paste in a term such as "GOTO TOP"? -- yet the program will run at normal speed at all times. Macros cannot slow it down. (Because everything is done using macros, adding new ones has no effect on the speed. It's already using hundreds of them without any effect.)
   The Applix macro recorder is unlike most other macro recorders I've seen because it records everything you do, not just your menu choices or keystrokes. If you pause many times while figuring out what to do next while recording a macro -- in other words, if you type like I do -- the sequences that are recorded will contain those pauses. You can delete them in the macro editor.
   Because Applix macros are so complete and powerful, power users should try creating some that work with the Applix Builder component. Builder is a program that gives you a way to create new programs out of modular code. These programs do not need to be related to word processing or spreadsheets or other typical office (and home) applications. They can do practically anything. (One demo showed a program that picks up stock quotes and displays them within a table. Another showed a graphically perfect map of southern New England dotted with the locations of huge power generators. Every now and then one of them would light up red to display a change in status. Both demos were fascinating.)
   If you're using a word processor that doesn't use macros, switching to Applix Words would open a powerful new view of the tasks you do every day or every week. What previously took a lot of work turns out to be a quick keystroke. Here are some examples from my own use:
   -- I write my articles in Applix Word, then change them to HTML documents. Applix has an excellent HTML editor that will do this automatically, but my Web site uses a specific style that avoids all HTML-type paragraphing. So I need to create my own paragraphs using HTML tags (a kind of code) that provide slight amounts of blank space in front of every paragraph. (HTML normally doesn't do this. It keeps everything pushed over to the left and sticks a blank line between paragraphs, which I find unacceptable.) I created a macro that searches for the normal text paragraphs in the original document and changes each one to the HTML code that I use. It then scrolls to the top of the document and inserts a large block of HTML code required for all my pages. After that, it scrolls to the bottom and inserts a smaller block of HTML code. Then it saves this document as an HTML file without changing the original. The macro I created does this by running four simpler macros. I used the building-block technique. (Remember that any macro can run another macro, many levels deep. So create complicated macros by making simple ones and listing them one by one as the contents of the master macro. It's easy once you try it.)
   -- I like the way StarWriter, the word processor in StarOffice for Linux, lets me delete everything from the current cursor position to the end of a document, so I made a macro that gives Applix Words the same functionality. (Actually, Applix Words does it faster, but I'm not sure why.)
   You don't have to write or edit macros, however, if all you want to do is change the key assignments or menu labels. All aspects of the menus in every Applix program can be altered. This is unusual if not unique in a consumer-level suite of programs for any operating system. Entire menus can be hidden away or disabled, menu entries can be renamed, keyboard equivalents can be changed and functions can be added to menus. Operations can be assigned to keystrokes in addition to or in place of the assignments built into Applix programs, so that, for example, "Save document" can be activated by Ctrl-S and by another key combination. (I have used Shift-F10 for "Save document" for so long that I always look for ways to incorporate it into a word processor. This was easy in Applix Words.)
   The macro and menu editors appear on the Applix menu of every Applix program. This is a "system menu" to the left of what is normally the first menu in a modern graphical program, the "File" menu. The Applix menu contains entries for all the programs in the Applixware suite along with the main utilities. (Minor utilities and configuration settings can be opened from an intermediate screen.) Inexplicably for such a thoughtfully designed suite, the Applix menu appears under a dirt-ugly asterisk instead of an iconic logo. (It doesn't need a logo. I would have been happy if the Applix menu had "Applix" on the top.) Using an unattractive and unimaginative asterisk in place of a menu logo or menu title in such an advanced program makes no sense. (C'mon, Applix engineers. An asterisk?)
   Applix Words is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processor that handles text boxes, images, drawn graphics and basic text formatting without a problem. It saves documents in its own format but can import and export in other formats, including Microsoft's. Applix Word uses a set of filters when importing Microsoft Word documents, asking you to make choices if you don't want to use the defaults. This is awkward and unnecessary. StarWriter does just as well importing Microsoft Word documents, without asking the user to make choices. (This is always bad. We all expect the programmer to have figured out how to do things before we ever sit down at the keyboard. Asking the user to make arcane choices is pointless.)
   Fortunately, you can import MS Word documents without a problem using the defaults. Pressing the Enter key is all you need to do when asked to make choices.
   The Applix spelling checker is disappointing. Linux users will find the spelling checker in StarWriter smarter and a little more intuitive to use. StarWriter ranks higher in another area, too: It has a real-time spelling checker that works just like the one in Microsoft Word 97, whereas Applix Words has only the standard after-the-fact spelling checker. Applix Words comes with a thesaurus that seems well designed. I've never been a fan of the one used by Microsoft, so the fact that I like the way Applix looks up alternate words and meanings might say more about my reaction to the Microsoft method than anything else. But I have found the Applix thesaurus very helpful.
   Applixware installs its own TrueType engine and a small selection of TrueType fonts. Another standard feature is a font viewer that runs as a separate program. The font viewer apparently provides a way to install other fonts within Applix -- or it might give you a way to install Applix fonts within your Linux system so other programs can use them. I'm not sure what it does. It's hard to use, hard to figure out and, on my system at least, unnecessary. (Applix fonts showed up automatically within the rest of my Linux system, and I'm not sure whether I enabled this intentionally or not. I'm not complaining; the fonts are very good.)
    Strangely, however, Applix does not provide an option to scale the supplied TrueType fonts to any size. Font sizes are limited to old-fashioned steps (8, 10, 12, 14 points and so on). This was not a problem for me, since I write for electronic publication (on the Web) and for newspaper editing systems (which don't care what size or shapes fonts are in incoming articles). But it could be a problem for you.
   Applix Words comes up short -- or narrow, actually -- in another area. I was not able to find an easy way to create an editing gutter on the left. This is a space along the left margin where your mouse pointer operates in a slightly different mode from the way it works within the text. Clicking once in this editing gutter in a typical word processor selects the entire line, for example. StarWriter has an editing gutter, as does Microsoft Word. Applix Words does have a gutter at the left along with one at the right, but they are not editing margins. They're just voids off the printed part of the page.
   Since StarWriter has a better spelling checker and excels in some other important ways, why am I so enthusiastic about Applix Words? Part of the answer is related to Applix Words and the rest is purely a matter of the way StarWriter works. I'll explain.
   Applix Words has a neat and uncluttered look and has a much better display than StarWriter. In months of trying, I was not able to get a single font among the dozens and dozens in the StarWriter menu to look even passably good. Helvetica, which looks gorgeous in the KDE desktop and in programs that use the KDE font selection, was a joke in StarWriter. (I'm a newspaper page designer as well as a writer, and I admire Adobe Helvetica very much. Finding out that the display of "Helvetica" in StarWriter was so bad turned out to be a huge disappointment.) Most word processors have one font that serves as a good choice for normal writing, but StarWriter lacks that one good font. Its version of Times probably is least objectionable, but all the others seem below the level of bad. Fonts display quite well in Applix Words, so going from StarWriter to Applix Words is a pleasure.
   (That's not to say I would stop using StarWriter just because the fonts look bad. If StarWriter held up in at least one other area -- more on that in a minute -- I'd keep using it happily instead of grudgingly, along with Applix Words, while searching for a font that looked good in StarWriter. There must be one out there.)
   Applix Words runs in its own window. That's the way it should be. That's the way programs should work in a graphical interface. Somebody needs to tell that to the programmers who created StarOffice. Most people who use (or who have tried to use) StarOffice will say the same thing: The single biggest problem with StarOffice is the way every part of it runs within the same general window. If you've never seen this kind of program behavior, my explanation might not make much sense. Here's how it works:
   When you run StarOffice the first time, a window opens up the full size of your screen. Inside that window are the StarOffice "desktop" and a smaller window showing operational tips. StarOffice's programmers knew quite well how users react to a window showing tips, so they give you a checkbox that turns it off for good. But they were dining on LSD when they designed the single-window desktop, because you can't turn that off. No way. Nada. No StarOffice program is allowed to run outside the master window. And the master window is StarOffice itself, all the multi-megabytes of StarOffice itself. In other words, you cannot just run StarWriter. You run StarOffice, and StarWriter appears within the StarOffice window.
   Blech. An option in StarOffice makes this even stranger, so I'll explain that little piece of craziness, too. You can tell StarOffice to make its desktop YOUR desktop. When you run StarOffice, it takes over the entire user interface. It has a Start menu with your other programs listed. It has drag and drop operations on its desktop. It would be a wonderful idea if no one who uses Linux had a real desktop -- if no one used KDE or Gnome, for example. But both KDE and Gnome are far better desktops than the one StarOffice imposes on you, in too many ways to mention. But that's not the real point. The guts of this problem come down to only one issue: Whether programmers should ever mandate such an interface in en era of modern windowing systems. And the answer, of course, is as loud and resonant a "NO!" as we can muster. Star Division, the company that created StarOffice, needs to rethink the entire interface.
   So when you run StarWriter, you're forced to accept the single-master-window interface. All is not lost, because StarOffice can be told to remember part or all of its settings each time you shut it down. Have it do that -- my choice is for StarOffice to remember window sizes and positions and which documents it had open -- and make StarWriter the maximum size possible within a relatively normal-size StarOffice window. In other words, make the StarOffice window the size you'd like the word processor window to be, run StarWriter and maximize it, then make sure you've changed the options so that StarOffice remembers the way you've adjusted things. And then shut down to force it to save the settings. The next time you need to use StarWriter, it will be, more or less. within a more-or-less normal window. The more I work with the abysmal interface that StarOffice has the more I despise it, but the software itself (all of it, not just StarWriter) is too good to pass up, so I keep struggling. The world is full of "if only" laments and we don't need any more, but I'll add just one more: If only StarWriter could run by itself, without the horrible StarOffice "desktop window" interface, thousands of Windows users could be enticed away from Microsoft Word instantly.
   So the StarWriter interface keeps it away from contention as the word processor of choice for many Linux users. But Applix Words would be an excellent choice whether StarOffice had the world's worst interface or not. Applix Words is easy to customize, knows how to handle most Microsoft Word documents, can save its files in Microsoft Word's own format and in many other formats, has a powerful macro capability, integrates well with other Applix programs, accepts huge documents without complaint and offers such minor but handy features as customized (and repeatable) window sizes and positions and auto macros that can run when you start and exit Applix Word.