What is Ragtime?

Orange Micro’s Ragtime has what integrated software on the Macintosh should have: a spreadsheet for crunching numbers, a capable word processor for editing text, and page-layout features that take advantage of the Mac’s graphics and fonts...

Unlike PageMaker, Ragtime works on the concept frames. You draw a frame on the page and then specify whether the frame holds text, a spreadsheet, or a picture. Mere you encounter the primary difference between Ragtime and other integrated packages: spreadsheets from Jazz or Microsoft Works appear in separate windows, requiring a cut-and-paste operation to include spreadsheet data in a text document. With Ragtime, however, the spreadsheet is part of the publication; changes in the figures are automatically reflected in the word processing document.

Ragtimes approach to rellowing edited text over columns or pages is efficient; you create pipelines between separate frames by clicking a palette icon and then drawing a line between the frames. Subsequently, Ragtime automatically routes carryover text as you edit.

Only Solo also has a Ragtime feature that should be included in every publishing program: a search-and-replace command for fonts and type styles, which makes short work of changing a publication s overall appearance.

Ragtime has fewer publishing features than other products; it lacks precise typographic controls, automatic hyphenation, an extensive palette of patterns, and the ability to import formatted MacWrite and Word documents. But Ragtime is easy to use and suitable for producing documents with calculations or tabular information brought in from its spreadsheet.

Heid, Jim. (January 1987). New on the Desktop. Macworld. (pgs. 114-115).

Download Ragtime for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 7.0

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• Macintosh 512Ke
• Hard disk drive recommended

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac