by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1996 by Michael Finley

What happened was, I made a suggestion to CompuServe's online support people for Lotus WordPro, the team oriented word processor, and they acted on it, and it's available now for download to the whole world. My idea!

Let's back up. I probably spend a half hour of every day talking to online support groups. Why? Because nothing I buy works. I'm a whiner, I'll admit it upfront. I'm told I am the tech support equivalent of jury duty, the customer they pass on to newest volunteer, as a rite of passage.

But at Lotus WordPro, I found not resistance, but friendship -- and ultimately collaboration. I've had WordPro 97 for four months. It's a dense application, and hardly the coin of the realm that rival Microsoft Word is. But it's powerful at team documenting and desktop publishing, so I have been hanging in there with it, asking questions online several times a week.

The first support person I met there was Paul Blais, who helped me with formatting problems. Early in our conversations we learned that we both live in Saint Paul. That was an eye-opener. You picture your online correspondents in some glamorous techno place like Palo Alto or Provo. To realize you could call someone on a free call for get tech support -- it's like dying and going to heaven, without all the loose ends.

Anyway, Paul was friendlier and more helpful than 20 typical tech support folks put together, a process I don't recommend. After him I met Tink Long ("Many call me Micky, a few call me Micheline, but most everybody calls me Tink"). Tink is a computing advocate for OS/2 users, and she has saved many of them from a lot of grisly gnashing with her clever typographical fixes for WordPro. She also did ghostwriting duty on several books about WordPro. Plus her volunteer work for Lotus.

In my case, I called with an impersonal problem -- how to balance cell widths in table layout mode. A question like that, you don't expect a lot of zing in the answer. But within moments, Tink had me looking at Web snapshots of her grandchildren, Jesse and Tony.

Now, I know there are users who would find this distasteful. They are the people who, driving through a strange town, will eat at the fast-food strip outside town instead of Dot's Cafe on Main Street, and never experience the tangerine chiffon pie.

But I have a stepsister like Tink, someone who dots all her i's with little circles and happy faces. For years I frowned at this behavior. But I have accepted that some people are unrelentingly cheerful. And they do atone for it with good deeds and thoughtfulness.

Tink helped me with a score of issues, especially the tendency of my Compaq Presario to crash fourteen times a day, while I was running WordPro. Her insight: it was Compaq's fault. And you know, it was.

Tink is always looking for add-ons to improve WordPro's native features. Her website (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tink), offers a collection of scripts attached to icons she calls the TinkBar(tm). They enter characters like curly quotes, em-dashes, and special symbols. They even offer an eyestrain-reducing beige screen to work from.

The scripts are freely offered. Neither she, nor Paul, not the other Lotus volunteers get paid by Lotus for the work they do. This dumfounded me, and I asked her why. Her answer: "Paul is a giver, and I am a giver. We have a ball giving to the WordPro community. We honestly get pleasure out of helping others."

So I issued a challenge: wouldn't it be great if WordPro did what its predecessor AmiPro did? How about a headlining feature that would capitalize all highlighted words that were important enough to be capitalized?

Tink spent the entire weekend creating a script that combined my desires with hers. She calls it "TinkCaps: InitCaps with Brains," and it is available at her website. It caps the first letter of each word in a line and culls out words that should not be capitalized. To create this script she had to individually identify every word in English we don't capitalize: articles, connecting conjunctions and prepositions. There are a lot.

But it works like a charm. When I congratulated her I tried my best to be sincere, but a note of goofy dryness crept in. I told her "InitCaps with Brains" was the greatest piece of software code since Lotus Notes. "Really?" she said. Well, no, not really, I had to answer. God help me, why am I that way? Now she's mad at me for the fake compliment. But I still, really, really like the script.

But I'm not so sure about the name TinkCaps. I lean more toward her sharing a wee bit of credit with me. Do you think she'll go for FinkCaps?(TM)

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