Word Processing With the Big Dogs

TextMaker

Pocket Word's days are numbered.

TextMaker is a new word processor for the Pocket PC made by the SoftMaker Software Corporation in Germany. Originally designed for the Handheld PC, it's now been ported lock, stock and spell-checker to the Pocket PC, and it's a completely different experience than Pocket Word. Basically, it's everything Pocket Word should have been. Heck, it's everything WordSmith should have been. TextMaker is the most impressive word processor I've ever seen for a mobile platform.

I almost don't know where to begin. It's really that impressive. First off, it's got all the standard stuff that Pocket Word has. It has bold, underline, italics, bullets, etc. You can do everything with TextMaker that you could do with Pocket Word, including saving documents as RTF and Word Doc (in the final version, if not the beta).

TextMaker shines on all things Pocket Word doesn't do. Want tables? Got 'em. Footnotes? Headers? Tables of contents? Styles? All that and more. But rather than go on ad nauseum about TextMaker's extensive feature list, I thought I'd focus on the features that make it such a joy to use, and the =93features=94 that ensure that while Pocket Word's days may be numbered, they aren't over. At least, not yet.

The Good

The first thing I noticed was the on-the-fly spell checking. Just like he desktop version of Word, TextMaker put a squiggly red underline under all questionable words. This is done in real-time, as you write. While Pocket Word is quite capable of checking your spelling, this is a little more fail-safe in that you don't have to remember to check the document. Of course, if you find the splotches of red distracting in first drafts, you can turn it off. (One of the great things about TextMaker is that almost everything is configurable.)

Another nifty feature I didn't even notice at first is automatic hyphenation. When used with full justification (something else Pocket Word can't do) this gives your documents a really slick, professional look. TextMaker is also the first mobile word processor I'm aware of to provide smart quotes. Features like these are emblematic of the polish and attention to detail throughout the whole application.

A feature present in the Handheld PC version of Pocket Word that's sorely lacking in the Pocket PC version is outlining. TextMaker takes care of this shortcoming as well. Outlining works just like it does in Word on the desktop. When working with longer documents, the ability to compartmentalize the document into a hierarchical structure really helps to keep your ideas coherent and organized.

Another mighty handy feature for long documents, one that Pocket Word can't match... (wait for it...) is styles. Yes, headings can stay headings. Tables of contents (which TextMaker can generate on its own) are easy to generate. You can completely control how text looks simply by specifying what kind of text it is.

And, for those of us that eventually publish to the web, TextMaker supports HTML 4.0 output. I'm not thrilled with the fact that it uses upper-case tags-- I'd prefer XHTML-compliant lower-case, instead of -- but it does a pretty good job of serving as a WYSIWYG HTML editor.

The Bad

As good as the good is, it's not all good. TextMaker has a few warts to overcome.

The first major annoyance-- one that I would hope won't make it out of beta testing-- is that it can't actually read and write Pocket Word files on the Pocket PC. It reads and writes .pwd files, the Handheld PC version of Pocket Word. The Pocket PC version uses .psw files that TextMaker doesn't know what to do with. You could work around this by saving to RTF, but why should you have to?

The second problem is more of an annoyance than anything else. If you use a keyboard, you'll find that the keyboard accelerators-- while TextMaker does have them, unlike Pocket Word without third party help-- are totally non-intuitive for English speakers. I freaked out the first time I typed Ctrl-I and got the search dialog. Fortunately, TextMaker provides the ability to map your own key mappings, so you just have to map your own and make them the default. It would be nice if the final product-- this is a beta, remember?-- included such a mapping.

I suppose this last point in this section should be obvious, given all TextMaker does, but this is a honkin' huge piece of software. It takes up 6MB of storage space, and occupies another 3MB of program memory while running. This probably won't phase those of you with 64MB devices, but lots of Pocket PCs-- including soon-to-be-my-beloved T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition and the forthcoming Viewsonic $299 beauty-- are limited to 32MB. TextMaker could be a style-cramper on such devices.

The Ugly

Like any software, I expected TextMaker to have pros and cons. If the above quibbles were the limit of its downsides, I'd switch from Pocket Word in a heartbeat. However, TextMaker, or a least the beta I used, has a fatal flaw.

It is almost unbearably slow.

I found myself frequently outpacing the beta while typing, dropping characters and sometimes entire words while TextMaker tried in vain to keep up with me. Moreover, overall system performance took a nosedive while TextMaker was in RAM, even if TextMaker isn't the active application. This dramatic lack of responsiveness made the application fine for editing and review, but unusable for actual writing. It's relatively common for beta software to be slow, as such software is still in development and often hasn't been optimized properly yet. I hope that's the case here, and I'll certainly give TextMaker another look when the final version is released.

For now, though, Pocket Word isn't quite dead.