The name of this program succinctly describes its function: it is a word processing program that has hypertext capability. As this is the case, this review will first examine the program's word processing capabilities, and then will turn its attention to the hypertext aspect.
Word Processing
Black Magic provides the basics of word processing. Its capabilities are simple and straightfoward. It supports cutting and pasting of blocks, cursor movement, search and search/replace operations and simple deletion functions. In terms of formatting, it allows you to control text attributes (bold, italics, underlining, double underlining), tabs, margins, page breaks, centering, justification and indentation. The program also has a macro definition function. Overall, it appears to be roughly equivalent to MacWrite in its word processing capability.
Black Magic is ponderous. In my experiments, it took the program 48 seconds to locate a word at the end of a 100K byte file. In contrast to this, it took Nota Bene 2.0 about one second to perform the same operation with the same file, and Word-Perfect 4.2 took 9 seconds. Another indication of Black Magic's sluggishness is the time it takes to reformat when you reset the right margin. When I changed the margin from column 79 to 55, it took 10 seconds for the program to complete the operation and return control of the computer. When changing back to column 79, it took 40 seconds to return.
Black Magic controls the display entirely in graphics mode. This allows it to display text attributes directly on-screen. This, too, is a bit of a mixed blessing, since it is probably this use of a