Rashumon


Rashumon was a multilingual graphical word processor developed for the Amiga computer by an Israel-based company called HarmonySoft and was sold until after the demise of Commodore in 1994. Rashumon had particular support for Hebrew, Arabic and Russian as well as English, and it could send its text to speech synthesis in English.
Rashumon was the only word processor for the Amiga having the ability to create and edit multilingual documents. Rashumon printed using Type 1 PostScript fonts and it also supported Intellifont.

Name

Rashumon was named after a Japanese movie which had four different characters giving different versions of the same event. Amiga User International commented that this name seemed appropriate for a wordprocessor designed to support multiple languages.

Notable features

  • Discontinuous selections: the user can select multiple parts of the text—even if these parts are separated from each other—and perform clipboard manipulations on them.
  • A Table generator, allowing the creation and editing of tables.
  • Multiple key map support, up to five simultaneously, allowing for the use of multiple languages simultaneously.
  • Search and replace including color, style and font filters. For example, end users could search for the word "Apple" only in green and replace each occurrence with the word "Banana" in yellow.
  • Multilingual string gadgets for creating and renaming files, drawers, etc.
  • Import and export multilingual ASCII files to and from PC compatible|PC] and Macintosh.
  • Fast screen updating and scrolling.
  • Interchange File Format graphics support.
  • Direct access to 255 characters of each font, similar to inserting "symbols" or "special characters" in modern wordprocessors.