Juiced On Writing

As a person who has made their living on computers, I’ve never quite understood the need of some writers to work on typewriters, or to reproduce the typewriting effect on a computer screen. For those who do have this requirement, I previously looked at software which would give you typewriter sound effects on typing on a computer keyboard.

Now I’ve discovered a product which not only gives you this, but puts a typewriter onto your screen also. Visual Typewriter comes with other features also, making it possibly a worthwhile investment for those looking for the tactile experience of using a typewriter to tap out that masterpiece.

Visual Typewriter is available as a trial download which lasts for 15 days. The download is 11.3 MB, and comes down as an exe. If happy with the product you can license it for $19.95. There are additional stationery packs available to download for registered users also. These are in a romance pack, classic pack or postal pack. The papers from these packs go into the visual typewriter interface.

The demo version of Visual Typewriter unfortunately suggests that it is available only for zero days and that some functions are not available until you register. The help file included suggests the demo version lasts for 15 days, but with some limits to functionality – including the ability to save your work.

First up, I changed the wallpaper. The software comes with four wallpapers but with the ability of browsing to other directories to locate your own images.

I then went into setup. The program goes to large measures to recreate – virtually – the typewriting experience, including giving the typewriter a random to aggressive option on the quality and strength of typed letters. Just like my old typewriter which always got caught on random plonks of the keys. Some of this setup is necessary to get a workable system – the option to automatically word wrap is by default turned off, for instance.

Unlike any true word processor you have less control over headers and footers, of course. The Page tab in Setup does give you some ability to set default page headers and page numbers for printing and exporting. There are options towards the spellcheck also – the program has both an American-English and British-English dictionary included. There is a mail option also, via your normal email system, or via SMTP server setup.

In typing you are given the ability to overtype incorrect words, or ‘X’ them out for later. At the point of printing, you can set an option to clean up these overtyped or Xed words.

Documents produced in Visual Typewriter on the stationery pages can be exported as PDFs, HTML, or images to retain the page look. If you are just after the text, then a text export is available. However, there is no import function.

You have four sounds you can choose to hear or not, including the normal key click sound on letter typing, and a carriage return ratcheting effect or a sound for when you are inserting new stationery paper.

Visual typewriter also comes with voice files – to read your text to you. In the demo version there is only one to try out, and I never worked out how to do this, although did find the speaker option under the view button. On the right hand side there is also an option to throw – which literally throws your page out of the typewriter. You can retrieve this from the trash bin (not crumpled) from the View button also. The interface in this respect is quite easy to work out.

When using the typewriter, the buttons to both sides disappear, leaving you with only the typewriter and background. This is quite effective when you resize the program to full screen. However even then, the page room on the actual stationery page being typed onto appears more limiting than that found on a normal page size in a word editor.

The demo version allowed me to export to PDF format, and produced this relatively quickly. However the overtypes and crossouts on all my errors came out – the default of not having a spellcheck or options on to deal with this caused this problem for me. Once I’d properly set this, the export worked correctly, with overtypes of the correct word making an appearance. But I can’t work out how to delete xxx crossouts of entire words without overtyping them. Another point to consider is that onscreen, with so many typos going on, it became difficult to tell whether I had corrected every problem. And I had to play around for some time with page margins in setup to get a document which looked reasonable.

The font size – using a typewriter font, on the PDF export is large, however – and I would not consider submitting any work of mine in this format. The export does an interesting job in exporting to text, with carriage returns to the next line on the stationery also producing the same line breaks in the text file. Once auto wordwrap is on, you can get to a more natural block look of text.

One of the options available is to feed in a new piece of paper once you get to the end of the page (or notecard stationery). This will give you multiple pages of text. For the small antiqued index card stationery this actually produces a nice graphic within a PDF export.

I’ll stop with my review there. From my own personal perspective the interface and functions found in Visual Typewriter are beautiful and interesting, but not that useful for my writing practice. However if you are after some nice visual documents and are prepared to print out the PDFs or images, Visual Typewriter may be of interest. The text files can be useful for movement into a word processor or other text editor, and the pure beauty and sounds of this program are certainly an attention getter. If you are prepared to use Visual Typewriter in public, then you should ready yourself for some attention from those around you.

LinkMe : Visual Typewriter

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