MobiSystems Docs 6

Finally, there's a new word processor in town.

For the longest time, the PalmOS word processor market has consisted of two 500 pound gorillas. One was WordSmith, and the other was Documents To Go. There were plenty of text editors, but if you wanted real word processing, you were going to go with one of these.

Neither was perfect. WordSmith was wonderful back in 2001, but now it's really showing its age. It still has excellent font rendering and supports some things no one else does (comments, footnotes), but it's missing one crucial feature. In this age of connected devices, the lack of native Microsoft Word or RTF formats is a killer. As great as it is, it just doesn't do any good to me if I can't share my documents with others until I get home and sync.

Documents To Go, especially with the new version 7, is very much like having Microsoft Office on your handheld. It has full support for Word and Excel files and can even read native Powerpoint. Sounds great, right? And it would be, if it worked reliably. Everyone I know that uses Documents To Go comments on its "quirkiness". On my friend's Tungsten T5, a device that ships with Documents To Go, it frequently refuses to open documents. On my Zodiac, it crashed so hard at the end of a find and replace operation that I had to do a hard reset to get the system working again. I'll forgive a lot a of software quirks, but data loss is where I draw the line. If you had a program on your PC that made you format your hard drive after doing something that should have been benign, would you keep it? Plus, I was always a bit resistant to Documents To Go because of its limited font rendering. If you're using anything other than Times or Arial, you're stuck looking at the stock PalmOS font. Feh. Georgia, Tahoma and Segoe UI are far more readable.

After the two 500 pound gorillas, we had one orangutan. Quick Office claims Office compatability, but Quick Word isn't really a serious word processor. While is supports basic RTF formatting, it has no support for paragraph styles or other advanced document features.

Fortunately, those are no longer the only options. MobiSystems has released Docs 6, a new word processor that compares favorably to the competition. This is the closest I've seen on PalmOS to the full-featured goodness of TextMaker on the Pocket PC. (or it will be; see below)

Docs 6 isn't actually new. It's a renamed update to MobiWord, a word processor that I put in the same "work in progress" category as Quick Word. This is a major update, and I expect Docs 6 to be my workhorse word processor in the foreseeable future (but not quite yet).

What makes Docs 6 so compelling? Let me count the ways.

First, it has full support for native Microsoft Word and ASCII text files. This goes a step further than Documents To Go in that while Microsoft Word is widespread, ASCII is universal. Microsoft Word format support seems relatively complete, including more features than Documents To Go (like page formatting, margins, gutters, etc.) and I haven't noticed it deleting anything, like Pocket Word on the Pocket PC.

Font support in Docs 6 has to be seen to be believed. TrueType font support in Docs 6 is easily as good as WordSmith's FineType, if not better. I've converted my favorite fonts and they look amazing on the Zodiac's half VGA screen. You can install as many fonts as you want, and you even get the bold, italic and bold italic variants. A friend of mine thinks I get too attached to font rendering, but it makes a difference if you want to see how your document will really look when you send it out.

Speaking of which, Docs 6 does something I haven't seen any handheld word processor do (maybe TextMaker, I don't remember). It comes with a full page preview mode. You can get a bird's eye view of your page layout on the handheld. And while the text is often too small to read in this mode, it's fully editable, so you can move paragraphs around until they look right on the page. Pretty nifty, especially if the next stop for the document is email or a Bluetooth printer.

Another nifty feature is the file manager. Documents To Go and WordSmith both support storing documents on the card, but that's where they go: the card. With Documents To Go, all your documents end up in \Palm\Documents\ no matter what they relate to. If you're looking at them from Documents To Go you can separate them into categories, but you're looking at a jumbled mess if you pop the card into a laptop. In Docs 6 you get a tree view of all the cards in the system on the left or top of the screen (drag it where you want it). On my Zodiac, I see the system RAM, both SD cards and the internal "card". Instead of categorizing my documents, I created a folder tree for my various projects and dragged the documents into them. On my Zodiac, they're in the internal virtual card so Hotsync will back them up, but you can use external cards as well, and everything still syncs, or is supposed to. You can also drag folders to other folders or tap and hold on a folder to bring up a very Office-like copy/cut/paste/delete pop-up menu. Organize your documents any way you like, Docs 6 can handle it.

Spell check is amazing on Docs 6, nearly identical to Microsoft Word. Misspelled or unknown words sport a squiggly red underline, and spell checking pops up suggested corrections. If you're using a stylus rather than a foldable keyboard (ach!), you can even turn on configurable word complete based on the spell check dictionary.

Speaking of keyboards, Docs 6 brings its own. Command-k brings up your choice of keyboards, from standard QWERTY with big keys to a more crowded QWERTY with numbers and punctuation, Dvorak and regional variations to my favorite, a character map for those rare glyphs you forgot how to make in Graffiti.

All your standard formatting is here. Several different kinds of bullets and numbering, image and table support, highlighting, even the ability to create hyperlinks that will open in the Palm's web browser. Like any serious word processor, there's a word count feature and it works great. Find and replace also works very, very smoothly, easily accessible from the keyboard via command-f. Like Word on the desktop, Docs 6 supports timed auto-save, although I've found this is a little slow saving to a Word document on a relatively slow SD card. And yes, Mike, it has Go To Top and Go To Bottom commands.

Like Documents To Go 7 and WordSmith, Docs 6 supports full screen view, doing away with the title bar and/or the toolbar to get more text on screen. When I'm typing on my PalmOne keyboard, I tend to turn off the title bar but leave the toolbar on. You can also adjust how much text you can see by zooming in or out. Unlike the competition, which both give you just three preset view sizes, Docs 6 can zoom in or out anywhere from 10% to 200% actual size. 75% is the default, which is just about right for mobile screens, 12 point type appearing just about the same size as the PalmOS system font. When typing, I adjust it up just a bit to 80% which is a little more readable at arm's length.

The desktop component of Docs 6 is average, better than WordSmith or Quick Office but not as good as the Documents To Go desktop. You can add or remove multiple documents at a time, and it has a Word menu plug in to do much the work direct from Word. But it's not as easy to make changes to the category or file type to a group of files as it is in Documents To Go. But Docs 6's desktop is adequate, and seems to sync reliably.

Fantastic so far, right? Any downsides? Actually, yes. Docs 6 is a wonderful update to MobiWord, but it's still obviously a work in progress. It feels like a beta. A stable beta, but a beta, nonetheless.

For example, there are still typos in the help and in the system. When it's copying a file to the card, it brings up a dialog that says, "Coping to card". Okay, I'll cope.

While you can categorize documents in RAM just like you would in other applications, this doesn't work very well. Category names get truncated, and the categories aren't sorted alphabetically. Oddly, the documentation includes a screenshot of a category dialog that would allow you sort them manually, but the category screen in the actual software is the standard PalmOS screen.

Speaking of the file manager, however, I'd love it if it would remember my sort order, or just default to alphabetic sorting. As it stands now, it seems to sort in random order for each folder. A tap on the header by which you want to sort fixes this, but it's a pain. More vexing is that there seems to be a problem with folder support and syncing, at least on my Zodiac. If I install new documents from the desktop, they show up in RAM. I'm supposed to be able to just drag those files to folders on the card. I do, and they still have the little Hotsync icon in color. However, the next time I sync, the files show up in RAM again. It's like the conduit doesn't know they were moved to the card. This may be Zodiac specific problem, since I have three cards in my system, but right now between this bug and the zonky category support, I just have everything in one big list in RAM.

There is a strange limitation in native document handling. While Docs 6 can sync and save .mwd files anywhere in the system and can edit text and Doc files in internal memory, it cannot sync text and Doc files unless they're stored on a card. To determine whether a file syncs or not, tap on the HotSync icon next to it in the file manager. A gray sync icon won't sync, the familiar red and blue will. Word documents stored in RAM are fixed on gray, and will not change to red and blue. Hopefully this will be addressed in an update.

I should note while Docs 6 fully supports binary Word documents, it does not support RTF files posing as .DOC files. Open an RTF file with a .DOC extension, and you get to see the backslashy jumble that is RTF encoding. I think this is an artifact of Docs 6's ASCII support; regardless the file extension, it's recognizing that RTF files are just marked-up ASCII under the hood and displaying them as such. I'd like to see RTF support in future updates, especially since many in my writer's group are Mac/Linux users that prefer RTF mail attachments.

Another curious omission is support for PalmDoc files. These are ASCII text files compiled into compressed 4k record chains that PalmOS can handle. Every PalmOS word processor supports PalmDoc as a lowest common denominator format except Docs 6. That said, there are programs that can convert PalmDoc to ASCII and back on the Palm, so you can work around this, but would it have killed MobiSystems to have included PalmDoc support?

Like other applications that roll their own UI (nothing about Docs 6 looks very much like PalmOS), Docs 6 doesn't interoperate with non-standard system extensions very well. While it supports the PalmOS (lousy rotten stinkin') 1K clipboard, it does not support CutPaste5, a prefs panel I use to copy and paste up to 32k of data. This means while I can attach a document easily to an email message, I can't easily copy the text from Docs 6 into the body of an email to post to the blog (for which I'm sure some of you are thankful, since you don't have to deal with blog entries with hard returns). I'm betting a lot of the tools in pToolSet wouldn't work well in Docs 6 either, but I'm hesitant to try since pToolSet is generally quirky on the Zodiac as it is. Why can't someone just write an OS5 extension that changes the system clipboard to 32k rather than adding new clipboards? But that's a rant for another time.

On the whole, these are trifling issues in an excellent word processor. It's not Microsoft Word, but it's not running on a $2,000 tablet, either. For handheld writing, Docs 6 is a good fit. As for me, I'm sticking with WordSmith for a little while longer, and I'll have to just copy and paste my text into emails for now. But I'm keeping my eye Docs 6. This is going to be big.