Dotwriter
Dotwriter 4.0 advertisement from the January 1985 issue of 80 Micro
Dotwriter was a dot-matrix printing utility, described as a “graphics text formatter.” It supported the TRS-80 Model I, Model III, and later the Model 4. Dotwriter was a highly regarded program: it won the 80 Micro Readers’ Choice Award in 1983 and achieved a perfect score in its 1985 review in 80 Micro.
Dotwriter, which was also styled as DOTWRITER and Dot Writer, was written by William K. Mason. The first version, Dotwriter 1.5, cost $69.95 when it was introduced in 1982. It was originally sold by J.F. Consulting of Palm Desert, California and RCM Computers of Buffalo, New York. Dotwriter 1.5 was written in a combination of BASIC and assembly language.
The much better known versions, Dotwriter 3.0 and 4.0, were sold by Prosoft of North Hollywood, California. (Prosoft also sold the Newscript word processor frequently mentioned in the Dotwriter 1.5 manual.) Dotwriter 3.0 was introduced in 1983 for $79.95. Dotwriter 4.0, which was a complete rewrite in assembly language and four times faster than Dotwriter 3.0, was released in 1984. It cost $79.95 for the Model I and III version and $99.95 for the Model 4 version.
At the time, almost all formatters and word processors only used the text modes of dot-matrix printers. Dotwriter instead used the bit-mapped graphics mode, much like modern graphical printers or the Apple Macintosh. This meant that Dotwriter wasn’t restricted to the few fonts and sizes included with the printer. Here is how the manual described it:
This software package formats and prints text, like any other word processor; but it also lets you use a wide variety of fancy and large letters – literally hundreds of sizes and shapes that aren’t built into your dot matrix printer. You can write your letters and headers with the “Editor” portion of your regular word processor, and then print the file using DOTWRITER.
The fancy letters are called “letter sets” or “fonts.” Each set contains up to 96 characters, including a complete alphabet (usually lower-case as well as upper-case), numbers, and special symbols. You can choose whatever letterset you want to use at any particular moment, and you can use more than one of them at a time: in fact, you can use any two letter-sets on the same print line, and use many lettersets on the same page, if you want to!
DOTWRITER can do a lot more than just print fancy shapes: it is a full-function text formatter, with the ability to print right-justified proportional text, centered headings, underlining, page titles, indentation, and vertical and horizontal lines. In other words, it’s a wonderful supplement to your normal word processor. Needless to say, this manual was entirely printed by DOTWRITER.
Dotwriter could work with a number of dot-matrix printers, including the Epson MX-80 with Graftrax, Epson MX-100 with Graftrax-Plus, Epson RX-80, and Epson FX-80, the C. ITOH 8510/1550, the Okidata Microline 84/92/93, the Radio Shack DMP 200/400/500, 2100, and CGP-220, and the Gemini 10X and 15X. Dotwriter could even print in color on the few printers that supported it, such as the CGP-220.
Dotwriter 3.0 advertisement from the February 1984 issue of 80 Micro
Dotwriter, much like the TRS-80 word processors Newscript and Allwrite (and older formatters like troff), used dot commands to control document formatting. For example,
.pp
would start a new paragraph, and
.sk2
would skip two lines.
Dotwriter was intended to be used as an adjunct to an existing word processor, but many people used it as their only formatter.
The Dotwriter package came with a dozen fonts. Prosoft also sold an additional 180 fonts on 25 disks. Each disk cost $17.95 or $24.95 and contained between four to twelve fonts. For those who wanted to create their own fonts and logos, Prosoft sold the Letterset Design System (LDS), also written by William K. Mason. It cost $39.95 or was half-price if ordered with DotWriter.
There were a handful of other programs that supported the Dotwriter font format. For example, the MDRAW high-resolution mouse drawing program and David Goben’s MagicDraw could display Dotwriter fonts natively.
The Print Shop
Dotwriter is sometimes compared to the enormously successful Brøderbund program The Print Shop. First released in 1984 for the Apple II (two years after Dotwriter), The Print Shop was also ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and other computers. The Print Shop was geared more towards creating signs and banners, rather than word processing. Dotwriter has more similarities to the Image Printing Utilities from Image Computing Systems, a MS-DOS utility from 1988.
The success of The Print Shop did benefit Dotwriter users in one way. According to the article “Fonts Galore!” by Gary Shanafelt in the September/October 1993 issue of TRSTimes, Kelly Bates converted a large number of Print Shop fonts to Dotwriter format. You can still find those Dotwriter font sets today.
