Seeing Type on a Laptop Is Easier With Eye Relief

Laptop computers have revolutionized the way many people work, especially when they are on the road. Laptops may also have added a few wrinkles to the brows of those who have squinted to see the small, often dimly lit text on their little screens.

Now there is a word-processing program to ease working on a laptop computer.

The name, Eye Relief for Laptops, says it all. This $130 software package lets you control the size and spacing of the type on your computer’s screen. If your portable runs the IBM-compatible DOS operating system, Eye Relief will produce easily readable text on your screen, no matter how bad your screen is.

I knew it worked when I put away my bifocals and typed quite comfortably without them, the laptop propped on my knees, as my wife drove us down the San Diego Freeway.

There are four choices of text size. The smallest, which is larger than the normal type on my portable, measured 3/16th of an inch high on my screen. The larger sizes were each about an eighth of an inch taller than the previous size, with the largest measuring a half-inch. (Size will vary according to the size of your computer’s screen.)

In addition to character size, you can vary character spacing. Once the appropriate command has been given, merely pressing the left or right arrow key will space characters out horizontally or squeeze them together. Eye Relief works the same way to adjust the amount of space between lines, using the up and down arrow keys.

The advantage of using a smaller type size is that you can see more of your text on the screen. With the largest size, there were only five lines with three or four words each.

No matter what type size or spacing you use, this word processor always rewraps your text so that it fits within the confines of the screen. Therefore it takes a few seconds when you move from one type size to another for the reformatting.

The word processor is very simple to use. It doesn’t have many commands, so you don’t have much to learn. Yet it does most everything I want to do when writing on a laptop.

One thing you won’t have any trouble finding with Eye Relief is the cursor, that pesky little blinking mark that has a habit of disappearing on most laptop screens. The one in Eye Relief is a large block, and you can choose seven different blink rates, or no blink.

A word count command tells you how much you’ve written. And another command allows you to create “macros,” which are computer-memorized sequences of keystrokes, commands or text--or both--that can be replayed any time you need to repeat them.

All of the commands are available from five pull-down menus arrayed across the top of the screen, or, alternately, can be punched in by hitting the Control key and a letter key such as P for print, F for find and Q for quit. Word processing doesn’t get any easier.

You do give up a lot of features that you may have grown used to with the powerful word processors running on desktop computers. You can’t move text between files. There is no spelling checker or thesaurus. You cannot amplify your words with boldfacing or underlining.

But Ken Skier, proprietor of SkiSoft Publishing Corp. in Lexington, Mass., (617) 863-1876, the author of Eye Relief, designed it so that its files are easily transferred to other word-processing programs for further enhancement.

To do that, Eye Relief works with what are known variously as “ASCII” or DOS or unformatted text files. (ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.) Virtually any word processor can accept such a file.

There is another great advantage to Eye Relief for Laptops. It consumes very little disk storage space, less than 100 kilobytes. Thus any old inexpensive laptop with a single 3.5-inch diskette with 720-kilobyte capacity gives you room to store the program files and the equivalent of about 300 pages of double-spaced text.

Not only is Skier a master at writing small programs, Eye Relief also runs quite fast. Even though it works in graphics mode, which is usually slower, it easily keeps up with your typing.

You can speed it up even more if you can create a small RAM disk (a temporary place in the memory to place programs you are running) and run the program there instead of from the floppy disk.

Eye Relief for Laptops works fine on desktop computers as long as they have graphics monitors.

Persons who are truly visually impaired can purchase another program from SkiSoft--the original Eye Relief, which can magnify text on the screen five times the smallest size and can print it in large type on paper. That program, which has been on the market for about a year, sells for $295.

EYE RELIEF FOR LAPTOPS A $130 word processor with adjustable type sizes.

Features: Four sizes of type, all larger than normal type; cursor blink control; simple word processing with macros and control of printed page layout.

Requirements: IBM or compatible computer with 512 kilobytes of memory, at least one floppy drive, and a CGA or higher-quality graphics screen.

Publisher: SkiSoft Publishing Corp., 1644 Massachusetts Ave., Suite 79, Lexington, Mass. 02173. Phone: (617) 863-1876.