This addressed performance issues and added dozens of features that made it one of the faster and most feature-packed word processors on the platform.
The company made it clear ST Writer was being offered only as a stop-gap solution while a graphical user interface (GUI) program was being developed, known as GEMwrite.
[1] For reasons unknown, the company contracted GST Computer Systems of Cambridge, UK to port their Sinclair QL products to the ST.
1st Word Plus version 2.0 credits Mike Bees, Howard Chalkley, Phil Champ, Martin Dickens, Chris Scheybeler, and Alun Gladman.
Also priced at £92, with an upgrade from the earlier version costing £45, the software was regarded as not providing any "giant leap forward in capability" from similar products on Acorn's 8-bit computers, but nevertheless made the activities of such a "simple system" easier to accomplish on the more capable hardware, lending itself to efficient use of dot-matrix or daisy wheel printers.
It was also considered a useful companion to Acorn Desktop Publisher - a derivative of GST's Timeworks software - making a "neat system" for users with 2 MB of RAM.
[10] In contrast to the Macintosh, the ST did not normally work in a multi-font environment, and required the separate GDOS device drivers to be loaded from disk to do so.
Although dot matrix printers could produce any font or size by outputting them as graphics, as was the case on the Macintosh, this was slow and offered limited quality.
Most word processors on the ST thus used whatever font was directly supported by the printer, outputting the text as ASCII and using control characters where appropriate.
It included search and replace as well as the ability to place up to four markers within the program that could be quickly accessed from the menu, scrolling the document to that point.
The original 1st Word was otherwise quite limited, lacking support for common features such as double-spacing, multi-line header and footer text, date and time, and footnotes.
[10] Among the many new features was a spell checker with a 40,000 word dictionary, although lacking many American English terms,[11] a mail merge program, footnotes and semi-automated hyphenation.
They note that its wide distribution made the .DOC format a de facto standard, saying "you almost have to have 1st Word because it is the program you are most likely to have in common.
"[14] Having moved from all-text programs to a GUI with some hesitation due to performance, they are happy that "Text entry is smooth and straightforward; no matter how fast you type, 1st Word keeps up and never drops a character."
They were not so happy with the documentation, saying it was too detailed to make it easy to skim for users already familiar with basic operations on the ST, and lacking an index.
They also knocked it for lacking any keyboard controls, even for common operations like cut and paste or moving about using cursor keys.
It concludes "I would recommend it as an ideal word processor for students because of its spell checker, footnote ability and flexible margins for indented quotations and bibliographies.
The first review, for the 3.0 release in 1998, noted a number of changes to the command-key layouts and the ability to move the displays of these keys and the character set.
On the plus side, the program finally added command key shortcuts for many common functions, improvements to the spell checker and a host of other additions.