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From: spage@cup.portal.com (S spage Page)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: WYSIWYG flamage (was Re: what i
Message-ID: <21278@cup.portal.com>
Date: 14 Aug 89 11:44:50 GMT
References: <210927@<1989Jul28> <77900017@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
  <5036@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
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Please don't send out messages of the form "Just try doing XYZ on your (yuck)
system" unless YOU REALLY UNDERSTAND THE OTHER SYSTEM.  You're just clogging
up the net.

I recently switched from ditroff heavy-hitter central (Sun Microsystems
tech pubs) to PC land.  Yes, it was a shock, yes it is different.  But snap
judgements and opinions that try to characterize the entire PC WP arena are
going to be wrong!  Don't trust anyone who pontificates about some package
unless s/he has spent months working with it (this especially applies to PC
software reviewers, whose opinions are mostly worthless).

The dynamics of the DOS software industry (same O/S functionality for years,
single-process, 640K RAM limit, corporate buyers, herd mentality) have
resulted in huge, monolithic, complex, many-layered standalone packages
competing in check-list wars.  The feature list for Microsoft Word for the PC
is about 7 pages long!  The program is so vast that it mocks attempts to
characterize it.  And before you can even make sense of someone's claim that
it's really great/it really sucks, you have to know:


   o	is he using direct formatting?  making his own style sheet?  using
	a pre-defined style sheet?
   o	Is he using the mouse or keyboard interface?
   o	Is he displaying in text mode or graphics mode?
   o	Is he in screen mode, show-line-breaks mode, or show-layout mode?
   o	Is he using Word's built-in features, using Word's predefined macros,
	writing his own macros, doing post-processing of Rich Text Format, or
	using add-on utilities?
   o	Is he editing 5 pages or 500?

I could sit here and blab about how great Word is (it's sorta great, actually).
But unless you understood the product and my use of it enough to make sense of
the above issues, I would not be communicating with you.  For this reason
I've given up trying to figure out if Word Perfect is a better package -- I
don't have a week free to start formulating the right questions.  The same
is starting to happen with graphics packages: they are becoming too rich, too
all-encompassing, too self-centered to converse about.

I apologize for going on at length on such a nihilistic theme ("Discourse is
feeble and futile").  I think a better way to structure this discussion is
"What should the ideal system be" with occasional informative "Well, here's
how TeX/Word/troff does it" interjections.

=S Page		GO Corporation

P.S.	To switch column formats in PC Word:
	<Ctrl-Z>		if you've defined a macro "<Ctrl-Z>".
	<Ctrl-Enter><alt-MD>	if you have a style sheet with a multi-
				column division style called "MD"
	<Ctrl-Enter><esc>fdml<tab>5
				if you do it with direct formatting
	<Ctrl-m>c		if you use the predefined macro to change
				number of columns.
	...
	...
	Is it harder or easier in Word than in troff?  Meaningless question??