Reviewed by Todd Blayone
Media North

Papyrus is among the most powerful, versatile and user-friendly bibliographic programs available for the PC. Moreover, a progressive licensing policy, and a price-tag of only $99.00US make it an exceptional DOS-based package.

The printed documentation, which consists of a 170-page workbook and a 250-page concept/reference manual, is excellent. It is well-designed and contains a sufficiently detailed index. Not only is the text easy to read, but indented matter provides informative and sometimes quite witty elaboration. The high quality of this documentation makes up for the meagre level of on-line support.

Recognizing that IBM/PC users have the freedom to choose between several operating environments, Papyrus comes equipped to run under the MS-DOS 5.O multitasking shell, DESQview and Microsoft Windows 3.x. Besides well-documented setup procedures for each environment, a PIF file and an elegant icon are included for Windows users.

The Papyrus user-interface, like many other DOS-based bibliographic programs, is inconsistent. The main menu is a stationary centre-screen box. Beyond this menu are other menu-boxes (e.g., search screen), plain-text screens (e.g., delete reference screen) and, in one case (the edit screen) a "modern," intuitive, pull-down menu interface. It is this latter interface that should, in future versions, become the standard program interface. While Papyrus provides mouse-support, mouse-commands are poorly integrated. This is owing mainly to the inconsistency of the interface. A macro feature, which could be used to speed up program navigation, is not supported.

Data Entry/Editing

Papyrus supports many "standard" word processing features, e.g., word-wrap, flexible cursor movement, and field move, copy and delete. Accented (and other extended ASCII) characters can be entered using key combinations or a pop-up window. Unfortunately, absent are features like: 1) block move, copy and delete; 2) search and replace (within a reference); 3) restore field edit; 4) global edits; and 5) flexible record duplication. Since only information from the immediately preceding record can be automatically duplicated, users are advised to enter all similar entries (e.g., essays in a single volume) simultaneously.

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System Requirements:
PC, DOS, hard disk, 470K or more of memory. Works with the OS2, Windows 3.0, 3.1, NT, and 95 clipboards.

Version:
Latest: 7.0.15 (Includes support for MS Word 8/97 and WordPerfect 8.0)
Reviewed: 7.0

Availability:
Commercial software available at retailers and from the publisher. Directly from RSD: $99.

Demo:
Not Available.

Screen Capture:
(Click for larger image)

View 1: Papyrus Menu

View 2: Edit screen with pull-down menus