A modern take on PaperClip II, for Linux and Windows
A word processor where you type plain text and the screen shows exactly what you typed. The layout lives in the text, on lines that start with a checkmark, and happens when you preview or print. Fast, all from the keyboard, and very good with tables.
The welcome document, as you edit it. The yellow lines are layout instructions, and the little symbols are the switches for bold, underline and italics.
How it works
TiePaper is a post-formatting word processor, the way PaperClip II was on the Commodore 128 and 64. There is no hidden markup and no moving text under your fingers. You see what you typed, and the page appears when you ask for it.
Write plain text. A line that starts with a checkmark is an instruction, such as margins, justification, a header or a footer. Type a backslash at the start of a line to get the checkmark.
Press Ctrl+V to see the formatted pages on screen, with page breaks, headers and page numbers where they will fall. Press Enter to jump back to the spot you are editing.
Press Ctrl+O to send the pages to a PDF, a plain text file or your system printer.
✓lm10:rm70:ju on ✓vp4:hd2:My Report,,<> ✓ft2:,,Page <> Type your text here. Paragraphs end where you press Return.
A first document: margins at 10 and 70, justified, a title in the header and the page number in the footer.
Preview shows the finished layout: margins, justified text, bold, underline and italics, headers and footers, and page numbers. Zoom in, step through the pages, and drop back into the editor at exactly the line you were looking at.
When the preview is right, the output matches it.
Columns and sums
This is where PaperClip II shone, and TiePaper keeps all of it.
Numbers line up on the decimal point, whatever their length, so prices and quantities read straight down the page, in the editor and in the printout.
New in TiePaper
Output goes to a PDF for printing and sharing, to plain text, or to your system printer. From the command line, tiepaper --pdf in out.pdf formats a document with no window at all.
Ctrl+Shift+Y checks spelling through your system: hunspell, aspell or enchant on Linux, and the built-in checker on Windows.
Accents, the euro sign and curly quotes all work, in a proper TrueType font. The window resizes, and the line length follows it, or is fixed per document.
Select with Shift and the arrows or with the mouse: drag, double-click a word, Alt+A for everything. Then type, delete, copy, or make it bold. Undo and redo, and the system clipboard.
They show as you edit, on Alt+B, Alt+I and Alt+U, and in the preview colours you choose, as on the C64.
TiePaper asks before it throws changes away, and saves through a temporary file, keeping a .bak of the one before.
Faithful to the original
Press F1 for the key reference built in. The key bindings follow the original manual, and where a key only existed on a Commodore keyboard, a PC key stands in for it.
SpellPack’s own dictionary (spelling uses the system checker), form letters and mail merge, telecommunications, disk-drive commands, sequential data files and printer files. Output goes through PDF instead.
Get TiePaper
TiePaper is an early version, 0.1.1. It has been driven headlessly on Linux and under Wine, but not yet tried on a real Windows machine, so reports are welcome.
One AppImage (6.6 MB) with everything it needs inside. Make it executable, then run it.
Download for LinuxA 64-bit program with a setup (2.5 MB). The setup is not code-signed, so Windows may ask you to confirm. The text may look soft at display scaling above 100%.
Download for WindowsBuild it yourself with Free Pascal 3.2.2. The code, the notes and the key reference are on GitHub.
See it on GitHubThe downloads come from GitHub, where the latest release is always listed.