What is Mariner Write?

Mariner Write 1.3, the new word processor from Mariner Software, has a split personality, temporally speaking. Installing Mariner Write is like taking a stroll into history. Here’s a program that ships on two floppy disks and comes with a manual that’s 100 or so pages long. The full installation of the program occupies 1.8MB on a hard drive (one-tenth of what Microsoft Word 6 takes up). The program has an equally small RAM footprint, using only 1.9MB of RAM on Power Macs and ~ 1.3MB of RAM on Macs of the non-Power variety. Using Mariner Write, however, is anything but a trip into the past. Despite its small size and terrific responsiveness, Mariner Write packs all the power of a modern word processor. It not only includes the basic formatting features you’d expect (fully stylable text—including strikethrough, boxed, super- and subscript—plus adjustable line spacing and justification) but also packs more advanced formatting features, such as multiple columns, support for importing pictures (PICT, EPS, GIF, JPEG) as in-line eraphics or objects with text wrap- ping, and colored text. Mariner Write also sports standard editing tools such as a spell checker, full search-and-replace capabilities, and drag-and-drop editing.

Still, standard features aren’t what set a word processor apart from its competition. Mariner Write boasts a few points that push it above its text-bending peers. First, it's AppleScript savvy. In the Edit menu, an AppleScript menu item lets you choose one of several pre-installed scripts (such as Strip Linefeeds and Show In Finder), or you can write your own scripts and put them in Mariner Write’s Scripts folder. This is a real boon for people who need to do a lot of repetitive editing on documents. PowerBook owners (especially those with older models) will love Mariner Write not only for its small memory footprint but also for its bold cursor option (which makes the cursor easily visible) and its Faster option (which limits hard drive access, keeping power consuniption to a minimum).

Through DataViz translators, Mariner Write opens and saves in Word, WordPerfect, RTF, and SimpleText formats. This function is vital to Mariner Write’s success, because users won’t switch word processors unless they can read and write other file formats, specifically Word. Opening our Word files in Mariner Write was easy. They opened with dispatch, and the translation was accurate. However, saving files in a Word format and opening them in Word presented some formatting problems. Line spacing and font selection weren’t always preserved, and sometimes the files were empty. Although we were unable to track down the source of the problem, it may have been an extension conflict. The translations worked fantastically on a PowerBook 170 with minimal active extensions. 

Mariner Write is a perfect word processor for anyone with memory or hard drive constraints, or for PowerBook owners. Any useful program that occupies less than 2MB is quite an accomplish- ment. It's also powerful enough—and quick enough—to replace a desktop word processor. Take all that, add file translation and a great price, and Mariner Write is a winner.

Reynolds, David. (January 1997). Mariner Write 1.3. MacAddict. (pg. 72).

 

Registration for Lite v. 1.0.x:
Name: ANGEL
Code: EU15325

Serial number for 2.0.4: US200-01-2001
Serial number for 3.x: MW300-KY-001-010019

See also: Mariner Write for Mac OS X

Download Mariner Write for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 10.5

Compatibility notes

Minimum Requirements

• MC68020 processor
• 2 MB RAM
• System 7.0

Versions 1.x - 2.x are for 68k (68020) & PPC processors and Mac OS 7-9
Versions 3.0 and 3.5.1 are PPC carbonized for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II