John Lettice finds that a new word processor for the IBM PC involves him in an eight-hour Sunday nightmare...

A package called Volkswriter might just give you pause for thought, and its Californian origins, if anything, makes things worse. The title is actually based on Volkswagen, and it's billed as the people's word processor.

Since the IBM PC's launch quite a few people have had a stab at ousting Wordstar as the industry-standard word processor, generally with little success. Many packages, such as Easywriter, have taken the 'easy to learn' approach to breaking the monopoly, but this approach is its own downfall. Sure, you can make a word processor easy to learn, but once users have got the hang of it they're going to be looking for more powerful facilities, and they'll soon realise their user-friendly program is only a fairweather friend.

Volkswriter has responded well to the 'forget the manual, stick it in, see if it goes' approach. It comes as a program disk and a tutorial disk, but after gambolling around in it for a few days I found myself unqualified to evaluate the tutorial. The menus are clear enough for you to reach yourself without using it, so it's more a demo than a tutor.

As far as easiness to learn is concerned, Volkswriter is comparable to Easywriter, and it's a lot more flexible. It comes configured for drive A for the program and B for data, but it's a doddle to alter this using the "CONFIGUR" applications program. Even without reconfiguration, you can boot it up from any drive you like, and it will run almost, but not quite, true.

If you're using a number of drives, floppy or hard disk, it's possible to specify the data drive by prefacing the filename with B: or whatever, but in general the last drive you used is taken as the default. This review, incidentally, was partially written with Volkswriter recongifugred for use with drive C: of a removable hard disk unit, and it proved possible to use all the program's facilities from C:.

Easywriter, on the other hard, is configured for drives A: and B: so if you get a hard disk you find yourself having to upgrade your software. And it's not just hard disks that are poorly catered for in standard packages. The Microsoft RAM disk is also badly served because it reconfigures the PC to think of it as drive C: and many packages won't cope with this.

So charging about to whatever drive I fancied came as a breath of fresh air to me, as indeed did the ease with which I could move the entire program across to the hard disk without winding up in a mess of barbed wire. Any protection apart from the licensee's name being nailed to the title screen went completely over my head.

An incidental to this is that the program will actually edit itself. You can retrieve data, COMM and EXE files at will, although I don't give much for your chances of making sense of the strange flashing mess of the lass two.

There's a similar facility for reading other people's files - Volkswriter files are completely ASCII - so it's quite feasible to move files from other programs, or even other word processors, and edit them. For example, you can read Easywriter files, while Wordstar won't even believe they're there. One slight disadvantage with reading Easywriter files is that margins and carriage returns aren't recognised, so they turn out as massive blocks. And as Volkswriter, with no margins, assumes a default of something like 250 columns, that's an awful lot of horizontal scrolling...

Once you've loaded the program you get the aforementioned licence message with a window at the top showing 12 single key commands. Hit D and return and you'll get a directory of the current default drive, while specifying a drive before return gives a directory of that drive. You can also allegedly specify (and save to) a sub-directory (handy if your disk is crammed with 101 different printer drivers) under PCDOS 2.0, but my DOS didn't want to know about that, so I couldn't check it.

You don't automatically get a disk directory when you're in command mode - as you do with Easywriter - but if you're using sub-directories this may not be a bad thing. All commands are single key entry from the command mode, and at most levels the program is pretty intelligent on error-trapping. If you've been editing something and haven't saved it, for example, and then try to exit the program, you'll get an opportunity to save it before you go. But if you've just saved it you won't, because you don't need it.

Retrieving a file from disk automatically puts you into edit mode, where things get particularly pleasant. F1 is the standard help screen toggle, but this one scores heavily over its rivals by giving you practically every command you'll need as combinations of function keys and Ctrl, Alt and Shift.

Producing underline, bold, superscript and subscript involves sticking markers at the start and end of the word(s) in question, so it's easy to see what you get. The Volkswriter comes with 21 printer drivers attached, ranging from IBM and Epson to 'typewriter with automatic linefeed'. Before you can say 'what in heaven's name is a Lexington' you can have the program tailored to your printer.

The printer driver is selected through a menu which also allows you to specify line spacing and lines per inch, page length, number of columns and so on. You can save this as a format file, and by embedding a pointer to this at the start of your deathless prose you can associate particular formats with particular files. This means when you load the file you automatically load the format. Embedded commands for headers and footers are also catered for, so ideally you'd end up with a whole range of header files with associated format files, and plug them in at will...

Now the bad news. Until the previous paragraph was tapped out, Volkswriter was running like a dream. But your correspondent has just emerged from an eight-hour nightmare repairing the damage done by a bomb-out which corrupted the system and program disk, and perpetrated some kind of nightmarish text-merging operation on the data disk.

Sometimes when you're tapping away at a fairly long piece of prose the PC apparently starts to go wild, drives swtich back and forward rapidly, and the screen goes blank. The first time this happens is worrying, but you soon get used to it, and that's the devilish cunning of the program!

Normally you get a message on the screen telling you you're close to the maximum document size, and suggesting you save the file and start another file, or get yourself some more memory. I can't get potato chips, never mind the silicon variety, at 11 o'clock of a Sunday night, so when it happened this time I tried to save the document - and it wouldn't get itself onto the disk.

"Missing sector on drive A," it claimed. "Reinsert disk. Try again? Y/N." Hit Y, same message. Hit N, you get the notice telling you to go out and buy a bag of RAM chips again. Another go and this time I got a glimpse of the message "File stored" flashing by. I checked this by retrieving the file, and saw the first third, followed by two thirds of empty file, sail by just before the PC crashed, leaving both disks in ruins.

A small postscript to the above is that next day my Easywriter disk bombed as well, but took only one small file with it, so Volkswriter is still well ahead on Nagasaki points. It really is disappointing to see something as easy and as powerful as this strike out. I'm not sure why it did so, and maybe I was just unlucky, but the mayhem the program caused suggests the error-trapping could be faulty.

Features 4/5
Documentation 3/5
Performance 3/5
Usability 4/5
Reliability 3/5
Overall Value 3/5