◾ The old Perfect allowed you to delete from wherever the cursor is to the end of whatever sentence you’re in; the new one lets you do that, of course, and also lets you cut to the end of whatever paragraph you’re in—or an entire paragraph, if you’re at its beginning.
◾ Now you can delete not only the next word ahead of your cursor but also the word behind it—a small thing but amazingly handy.
◾ You don’t have to delete text before you copy it. (However, the process is more complicated than it used to be.)
◾ You can flush right material on screen—useful for the what-you-see-is-what-you-get feature.
◾ You can more or less paginate on screen—although this instruction is only good for the what-you-see-etc. editing; it’s useless for the document-design mode (@@ commands).
◾ You can use the “Search” function to search not only the document you’re working in now but any and all other document files on your diskette. This strikes me as amazingly handy for editing multiple documents when you can’t remember what the name of the other document is or where the reference is you’re thinking of. For example, suppose you’re writing to Joyce Davenport and you want to add a paragraph from a letter you wrote to James T. Kirk but you can’t remember more than that it was about artichokes. You would invoke “search document”; the prompter then asks you what you’re searching for, and you say, “Artichokes.” Pretty soon you have a list of the documents the word “artichokes” appears in, and you can then call up the one you want for multiple-document editing.
◾ Similar to this is something new the main menu offers: you can compare two files, and Perfect Writer will show you their differences—useful for comparing edited and unedited versions of a report.
◾ If you have a color monitor, you can “paint” the letters and backgrounds of the up-to-seven files you’re working on different colors (eight background and sixteen letter colors), so as to tell them apart. For me, this falls into the “who cares?” category, but some may like it; and I have to admit, you can get some very pretty (though not always easy on the eye) combinations.
◾ Perfect Writer now has the printing option “End at page X.” Shout hallelujah, brothers and sisters!—the new Perfect at long last has caught up with the dinosaurs like WordStar.
◾ Some of our old favorite document-design commands have been renamed, usually for the better. And we have one absolutely dandy new command: @@need. @@need makes sure that there’s enough room left on the page for a chart or similar material. If you’ve just written a 15-line poem that can’t be broken between pages, immediately after the last line of your poem, type in @@need{15 lines}; if there isn’t going to be enough room on the page, your poem will automatically be “forced” to the following page. Hot diggety!