BREEZE through your text files
			  Robert Parson

     I do an awful lot of writing.  Poor Michael Gray, the Editor of
International Online.  The first time he heard from me I had uploaded four
articles for him to look at.  Then he didn't hear from me in some
time.  Suddenly, there were three more articles sitting on the
harddrive of the International Online home board.
     This is in addition to the other writing projects I'm working
on.  Three novels, a short story and a comic book script.
     I don't have any need for desktop publishing or advanced word
processing commands.  Most everything I write is in plain ascii.
That way my writings can be imported into nearly any wordprocessor.
As you can imagine, I usually use a simple text editor.
     Even though I'm quite happy with VDE (shareware), I'm always on
the lookout for something new.  The editor I've been playing with
lately is called BREEZE, and it comes from Australia.
     Be forewarned, if you are used to using the WordStar command set,
you may have a tough time learning BREEZE.  It does use control and
alternate key commands, and it very conveniently pops up the commands
on a menu at the bottom of the screen after you hold down the ctrl or
alt key for a few seconds.  It also has a menu bar that will pop up
after pressing F10.  But it is fairly easy to learn the BREEZE
command set.
     As a writer, there are two features I've found quite handy.
     One is the spell checker that can be loaded in memory with
BREEZE and will beep when you misspell a word as you type.  It also,
of course, checks entire documents.  The spell checker does have a
minor quirk, though.  Because the author is from Australia, he uses
Australian spellings, which are similar to British spellings.  It may
occasionally not recognize an American spelling of a word.
     It also has a readability analyser.  It uses the Flesch index to
determine how easy a document is to read.  The higher the number on
the scale, the easier it is to read.  I'm using BREEZE as I write
this review and so far it has a Flesch index of 71 out 100.
     Need to break your document into two columns?  No problem.
BREEZE will do the trick.  How about an index?  It's a little rough
to learn the indexing feature and it only indexes single words
(Robert Parson, for instance would be indexed as two separate words)
but it will auto-index and do it quickly.
     BREEZE will sort numerically and alphabetically. It will even
provide statistics on columns of numbers, such as number of elements,
sum total, and standard deviation.
     But quite possibly the most interesting feature is the
capability to turn your text files into executable files, complete
with a menu system.  Jump from main menu to the chapter you want, a
powerful search command, configure the colors any way you wish.  You
can have a title bar with the name of your document and can even
enable or disable the print function.  It's similar to using LIST,
but with menus.
     I've touched on some of the functions that are unique to BREEZE,
which the author touts as one of the easiest word processors to use.
It of course has the standard block and edit commands that are
necessary for writing.
     It is an easy word processor to use.  But I'm not planning on
changing soon for one simple reason only.  The paragraph reformat
command is messy.  Because it ends each line with a hard carriage
return, it often merges two or more paragraphs into one when
reformatting.  This is a common problem I've had with text editors
and is why I continue to use VDE.  If that one problem were
eliminated, It's quite possible I might put VDE to rest and use
BREEZE on a regular basis.  As it is, I'll only use BREEZE for it's
.TXT to .EXE converter.
     The author is Kevin Solway of St. Lucia, Australia.  Registration 
is $40 Australian (which is roughly $30 U.S.).