Lauren S. Thompson
What was once a small club is turning into a crowd. WordPerfect's family of products, code-named Envoy, is the most recent entry in the cross-platform, portable-document arena, joining others such as Farallon Computing's Replica, No Hands Software's Common Ground, and Adobe's Acrobat family.
Earlier this year, Farallon released the first Mac version of Replica, which joined the company's Replica for Windows, released last year. At press time, WordPerfect planned on releasing the first Windows and Mac versions of WordPerfect Envoy in June.
Three components make up WP Envoy: a printer driver for creating portable applications from all Mac and Windows applications (support for Power Mac and Unix applications is planned for later this
year); a viewer for viewing, annotating, manipulating, or printing WP Envoy files; and a run-time file that combines a WordPerfect Envoy file with an embedded viewer to create a self-opening portable document.
WordPerfect is also making available an SDK (software development kit) that lets developers customize the look of the interface that's presented to someone who's reading a document such as an electronic brochure or catalog. "Publishers don't want their electronic book to have the same interface as their competitor's book," says David Harkness, director of electronic publishing tools at WordPerfect.
Based on use of a prerelease version of Envoy for Windows, WordPerfect's program appears to combine some of the high-end features of Adobe's Acrobat family (e.g., font substitution for TrueType and PostScript Type 1 fonts) with useful group-collaboration tools not currently supported in Replica or Common Ground (e.g., hypertext links and the ability to consolidate annotations and other comments
from several reviewers of a document into a single master file).
In contrast to No Hands' Common Ground run-time reader, which lacks support for searching and text exporting, WP Envoy's run-time reader is identical to the full WP Envoy reader--except that it cannot send files directly to mail via VIM (Vendor-Independent Messaging), MAPI, or AOCE (Apple Open Collaborative Enviroment). Replica's run-time reader, however, is extractable and offers all the features of the full Replica reader, including scrolling, zooming, support for the Rich Text Format when copying text to the clipboard, and tools that let you copy individual elements of a vector graphic to the clipboard.
While WordPerfect works on finishing Envoy, its competitors are busy adding features to their next releases. No Hands officials say the next versions of Common Ground, slated for release later this year, will add support for hypertext links and annotation. Farallon says the next versions of Replica will likewise add support for h
ypertext links, as well as the ability to consolidate multiple annotations into a single document.
And sources say Adobe will announce in August a new version of Acrobat that features support for third-party extensions by means of a plug-in architecture; security (e.g., password protection and the ability to set read-only privileges); a trimmed-down reader; and the ability to search across multiple PDF (Portable Document Format) files. The portable, electronic document arena should see plenty of action as companies improve their programs.
Table: Portable Document Highlights (This table is not available electronically. Please see July, 1994, issue.)
Illustration: One use for WordPerfect Envoy is to let several people review and annotate a single document. A thumbnail view of the document appears at the top left of the screen.
WordPerfect Enters Paperless-Document Arena
