WordSmith Parts I-IV

I initially thought there was no way to change the display font of Doc files. I considered this a major deficiency in WordSmith. However, in the latest version, 1.12, you can set a display font in the screen that lists the Doc and WordSmith files on your Palm using the Options|Display Font menu item. You cannot change the font from within a specific document or from any other screen in the application. I found this counter-intuitive, and even though I tried to look at all of the menus in the application, I missed this one. I would like to see this options menu available in the view mode as well as in the file list screen.

The other major problem is that WordSmith requires a lot of free memory to open Doc files. You must have more than three times the size of the file you want to open free. WordSmith wanted 1130K free to open a 369K Doc file. In this day and age, it isn't at all uncommon to have Doc files of 1MB or more. Needing 3-4MB free to open these files severely limits your use of the Palm for other things.

Unfortunately, if you do find yourself in a situation where you try to open a file without enough free space, WordSmith does not exit gracefully. There are actually two stages - the memory needed to open a file and the memory needed to edit a file. If you do not have enough memory to meet the first threshold, WordSmith pops up a message box telling you how much memory you need to open the file and exits back to the list of files. However, if you meet the minimum threshold for opening the file but not for saving any of your changes, you are given a warning and then the file is opened. A progress bar appears and the document is slowly loaded. In some cases, the file loads. In others, it crashes at some point in the load process. If this happens, a remnant file is left on your Palm called WordSmithOp. This file can be removed using pz, Z'Catalog, or Filez.

WordSmith does have a read-only flag, but it cannot be set globally. I would really like to be able to set all Doc files to read only mode. Setting a document to a read-only mode doesn't have much impact on the amount

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