THE   AUTHORING  TOOLS  ...a   WindoWatch  series


   WordPerfect's   ENVOY 1.0

   A Review                                      (C)  1994   by Paul Kinnaly

   If you read the October ‘94 Preview Issue of WindoWatch , you have already
   had a look at Envoy.  Published by WordPerfect, a division of Novell,
   Envoy 1.0 is a Windows authoring tool and represents one of several
   operating system formats used to publish WindoWatch electronically.

   As a result of a series of critical comments about the WindoWatch
   Announcement issue, it was suggested that if I really had the need to
   critique I should put this latent talent to work and review the Envoy
   product for WindoWatch readers. I tried to demur, but soon found a
   package in my mailbox containing one write-protected 1.44mb diskette and
   a trifold document entitled "Envoy QuickStart Card".

   Having been victimized too often by ill-behaved Windows programs, I
   backed-up my system, scanned the diskette for viruses, and took the
   leap...

   The installation of Envoy proved to be simple and straight forward. The
   near standard setup program politely informed me that installation would
   take 1272kb of disk space in the program directory and a further 288kb in
   the Windows directory. Setup asked for my name, company, and license
   number, allowing each to remain blank, and then proceeded to install itself
   on my system. There were no options or choices other than selection of
   drive and directory.

   The completed installation gave me the "WordPerfect Envoy" program group
   containing icons for the Envoy Viewer, several sample documents, and an
   on-line user’s guide, itself an Envoy document.  The sample Envoy
   documents were apparently produced by such varied applications as Excel5,
   CorelDraw 4, and several word processing and desktop publishing programs.
   One further icon featured the ubiquitous Readme.Txt file, which I promptly
   selected. This was a very pleasant surprise: a truly useful listing of
   information. There were sections on topics such as System Requirements,
   Troubleshooting, both during and after installation, Compatibility,
   Customer Support, as well as a section detailing the uninstallation of the
   program. This section contained a listing of every file installed on the
   system, where it would be found, and what its purpose was - an excellent
   feature I wish more developers would copy!

   The on-line user's guide was somewhat sparse; while it made use of Envoy's
   hypertext links to take you from a subject list to a topic, the information
   provided was brief and assumed a degree of knowledge. As a supplement to a
   manual it would be ample, as a substitute for one it is weak. Telephone
   support is also available for the program using either a toll-free number
   with a $25 per call service fee or on a no-fee basis for a toll telephone
   call to Utah.

   From a user's perspective the installation was simple and swift.
   Technically, however, it left something to be desired as it modified -
   without asking - the WIN.INI file heavily, adding lines to the [Windows],
   [PrinterPorts], [Ports], [Devices], and [Extensions] sections. Not only
   didn't it ask, it didn't make a backup copy of the ile before altering it.
   Thus, the detailed directions for uninstalling the program became not just
   a "nice touch", but a necessity.

   The raison d'etre of this and other authoring tools is the ability to
   create hypertext links within a document. Those who viewed the WindoWatch
   Preview issue saw these in action; a mouse click on the highlighted name
   of the author in the table of contents would jump the reader immediately
   to the article itself. This feature allows the reader to jump through an
   electronic document viewing only chosen sections without tedious scrolling
   through the entire document. From an editorial and layout standpoint, it's
   important that the creation of these hypertext links be easily understood
   and appropriate - while still flexible.

   Envoy loaded rapidly and presented me with a screen with standard Windows
   menus at the top, a button bar, a large white area covering most of the
   screen, and a status bar at the bottom. I found that merely placing the
   mouse cursor over a given button caused a brief description of the button's
   function to appear on the status line. Generally, as is true of most
   Windows applications using such a button bar, functions available there are
   duplicated in the Windows pull-down menus.

   Creation of Envoy documents (.evy) is done in a manner similar to that used
   by many PC fax programs - Envoy installs itself as a standard Windows
   print driver. One merely "prints" the desired document to Envoy instead of
   to a hard-copy printer. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Envoy
   simplified the process even more. The File menu contained an Import
   selection. A click here brought up the standard Windows file selection
   menu. A double-click on the desired file name launched a whole sequence of
   events: Envoy started my word processor, Word for Windows, loaded the Word
   document, "printed" it to the Envoy driver, shut down Word, and presented
   the resulting Envoy document on the screen. Elapsed time - less than a
   minute. Simple and quick!  I was impressed.  Envoy's printer driver may
   be customized to allow specific PostScript or TrueType fonts to be
   "embedded" in the document. This feature ensures that the reader will see
   the document as you created it, even if some fonts are not on his system -
   but it greatly increases the size of the resulting file.

   Within this Envoy document, I could utilize any of the three authoring
   tools built into the program: annotations, bookmarks, or hypertext links.
   What I could not do, was add to, modify, or rearrange any of the text!
   This work must be done using a word processing program before importing the
   file to Envoy. This struck me as a strange limitation for an "authoring
   tool".

   Creation of a hypertext link is simple; the program leads you step-by-step
   through the process. After selecting the hypertext tool from the button
   bar, the key word(s) that will form the "source" of the link are
   highlighted using the mouse. A message appears on the status bar directing
   the author to now highlight the destination of the link. As soon as you
   begin to highlight this area, a new message appears on the status bar
   telling you to click the right mouse button to select the link properties
   - such as text color or underlining.

   Rather than highlighting text as the source of a hypertext link, the author
   may highlight a blank section of the page and have Envoy place a "button"
   there. Several different icons are provided to use as buttons including
   arrows and the "information" icon (an "i" within a circle). These buttons
   may be dragged around the page to place them where desired.

   Envoy also features another potentially useful form of annotation through
   the creation of "bookmarks". The author selects the icon for bookmarks
   from the Button Bar, highlights an area of text, then types a label for the
   bookmark. Upon receiving the document, the viewer merely clicks on the
   bookmark icon on the status bar to get a list of all the bookmarks in the
   document. Clicking on any one of these takes the viewer to the appropriate
   section marked by the author. Envoy's third main authoring tool is "sticky
   notes". A click on the "Note" icon, followed by a click on the appropriate
   section of the document places a yellow "sticky note" there, within which
   you may type comments, corrections, etc.

   Saving a document in a compiled and Windows ready format was as easy as
   selecting File | Save As from the menu. The dialog box that appears offers
   the choice of saving as an "editable" Envoy document (.evy) - which is only
   usable if the full Envoy program is on the system, as a text file (.txt)
   - which could be copied to the clipboard, or as a file incorporating the
   Envoy run-time viewer (.exe) - which can exist as a stand-alone application.
   The dialog box also contains a button for "Security" which allows setting
   a password to access the document and controls the degree of access a user
   will have to the document: Unrestricted - i.e., annotatable with Envoy's
   authoring tools, read and print access only, or read-only access. For
   those systems with electronic mail access using either the VIM or MAPI
   standards, Envoy can activate your mail program to allow electronic
   transmission of the newly created document. This is a particularly useful
   feature in a workgroup environment.

   The biggest drawback of creating a stand-alone application is the size of
   the Envoy run-time viewer which gets packaged with your document. A 41kb
   Word for Windows text document was a whopping 399kb Envoy run-time file.
   Curiously, when I repeated this process with a large 397kb Word newsletter
   - replete with graphics, the resulting Envoy run-time file was only 416kb.
   Clearly the program stores the data (including graphics) in a very compact
   form; only the viewer itself is large.

   Some of the buttons available on the Button Bar are usable by both the
   author and the reader to move around the document and customize the view,
   even in restricted access documents. These include Page Forward and Page
   Back, Return to the source of hypertext link , Zoom In, Zoom Out, etc.  A
   particularly nice touch is the File | Preferences | Main View dialog
   allowing the reader to choose their own default view. Onefinds choices of
   fitting the document to the width of the window, to the height of the
   window, the entire page in the window, or a specific percentage zoom
   setting. Envoy allows selection of  nine 'standard' zoom percentages
   using the Zoom In/Out buttons or from the menu. Another button lets you
   return all of these to the default settings.

   A concern of many these days is the amount of resources a program takes
   during its operation. This can be a significant consideration in a
   multi-tasking environment - particularly for an author. Envoy acquitted
   itself well in these areas. Norton’s SystemWatch showed that Envoy used
   only 2% of GDI and 7% of User resources. Exiting the program freed up the
   User resources, but not the GDI. Restarting the program, however, did not
   further deplete GDI, so apparently whatever is left by Envoy in the GDI
   heap remains available to it when it is re-run.

   Overall, despite my proclivity towards criticism, I found little to
   criticize here. My gripes about its actions on installation and its
   inability to add or modify document text were counter-balanced by the ease
   of use and the flexibility of the software. While we at WindoWatch did not
   utilize its capabilities given the content and the targeted reader, the
   program certainly has good potential in an authoring environment. The
   combination of hypertext links and bookmarks provides the author with a
   readily accessible means of leading the reader through a complex, multi-
   part document with ease. I'd recommend its consideration by anyone in need
   of creating such distributable - but protected - documents.

   PAUL KINNALY is a Management Analyst with the Department of Veteran
   Affairs. He has been involved with personal computers since buying an
   Apple ][+ in 1978 and is a regular contributor to the ILink and RIME
   Windows conferences. He can be reached for comment and questions at:

   paul.kinnaly@channel1.com