From another perspective, it is striking that we still tend to view official or academic electronic documents (as opposed to e.g. Indeed, still represent by far the majority of book sales, at least in the US. Sales of physical books have hardly been affected by those of e-books. It is striking, for instance, that despite the ready availability of e-readers, the printed book has remained an attractive proposition. This paradigm may well be with us for some time to come. While the look and feel of word processors today may be state-of-the-art, the essential paradigm has not in fact changed much at all since the late 1980s, as a comparison of the following screenshots shows: Martin, still use 1980s software written for MS-DOS for their writing. Many writers have found this helpful, to the extent that some, including, notably, George R. It enables the writer to focus on what s/he wants to say first, without needing to worry about its final appearance, which can be decided later. Nevertheless, the separation of meaning and form has advantages in the writing process. In considerable measure this was because it was simply not possible technologically at that stage in time to bring the two together in real time. This is to say that text would be composed independently of the specification of its final appearance. However, before its arrival, software for writing would generally separate meaning and form. The arrival of the WYSIWYG paradigm for word processing in the 1980s represented a revolution in the way that we interact with the process of writing. In so doing, the word processor gives us the illusion of an experience akin to physically writing. In this way, the word processor brings together meaning and form in much the same way that we would if we sat in front of a piece of paper and began writing and/or drawing. The essential component of what we would now call a word processor is a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which displays your work on screen as it will look on the printed page, in real time. Indeed, the modern incarnation of the word processor, such as Microsoft Word, was by no means an inevitability, and could, in principle at least, have taken a different form. Yet the tool we use for this activity, namely word processing software is, of course, like the personal computer on which it depends, a very recent innovation in the story of the written word. In computer systems with the OS CP/M, the standard text mode is 80×25 chars.Word processing has become such an essential part of our daily lives, particularly for those of us who write for a living, that we tend to take its presence there, and indeed its existence as an activity in itself, for granted. That was a reason to sell cartridges for a 80-char-mode for the C64. The text mode of 40×25 has the disadvantage, that a C64 may only show a half of an A4 page. Later computer systems like the C128 used a text mode of 80×25 chars. the address can be also copied and input into a data base for printing serial letters, and diagrams and data tables can be inserted from a spreadsheet program into the word processor.Ī C64 used 40 chars in each of 25 lines - 40×25 chars. The benefit of this is that the data can be easily transferred between the applications of the office system, e.g. The modern word processors also often integrated into an office system (software suite). In older word processors the number of written chars is limited, because the RAM in old computer systems is also limited! This is also one of the reasons to publish some word processors on cartridges. Modern word processors may also integrate a macro function for text snippets, a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) screen, or a spell check, which features can also be bought as a plug-in or seperate program routine on extra floppy disks in the earlier years of word processing. The formatting text is also printed as it shown on the screen. bold, underlined, cursive), size (in points (pt) or pixel) and type and sometimes adding pictures in the document. The advantage of a word processor is the easy and comfortable handling of long text formatting the font in style (e.g. This application has more features and functions than a text editor. A word processor is an application for writing and editing natural-language text.
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