I received this from Aravind, at Zoho, on Tuesday evening. Zoho Writer is by far the best AJAX-based system so far, IMNSHO, and is well worth a look if your only experience has been with Microsoft or Google’s offerings. The only thing that stops me from using it exclusively is that it’s slower than GD&S on a slow connection. Anyway, it keeps getting better…

Hi Bill,

How do you do?

This mail is regarding an update to Zoho Writer to be announced tomorrow (Wednesday), 6 am PST. The main features of this update are :

Pagination support : You can now view your document page-wise by clicking on the ‘Page View’ link in the Zoho Writer toolbar. And this page wise view will be applied for printing of documents as well (the ‘Print Using PDF’ option).

Headers & Footers : Headers/Footers can now be added to your Zoho Writer documents. Other than getting printed, the headers and footers get exported to pdf/doc (when ‘Export’ option is used) as well. Click on the ‘Page Layout’ link at the top-right.

Spell Checker: The spell checker has been improved and it now supports 43 languages. The spell checker setting is at the document level (you can choose a different language for each document). By default it is set in the ‘auto’ mode and it takes the browser’s language setting. Click on the down arrow next to the ABC spell checker icon in the toolbar.

There are other features going in as well - improved import/export of documents, Chinese UI (taking the total number of UI languages supported to 11), public Zoho Writer documents can be downloaded/mailed etc.

We are still working on a few last minute glitches and you may find a few UI related issues with the new features. These will get corrected by tomorrow. Kindly refrain from blogging about this update till Wednesday, 6 am PST.

With warm regards,
Arvind

[tags]ajax, soho, online word processing[/tags]