Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!mimsy!brillig.umd.edu!spector
From: spector@brillig.umd.edu (Lee Spector)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Technical Word Processing
Message-ID: <24696@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 1 Jun 90 12:35:31 GMT
References: <5559@hub.ucsb.edu>
Sender: news@mimsy.umd.edu
Reply-To: spector@brillig.umd.edu (Lee Spector)
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 24

In article <5559@hub.ucsb.edu> jsimon@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes:
>
>I use FullWrite for everything. It's far from perfect, but not
>as far as everything else out there.

I don't get it.  I've played with the FullWrite Demo a bit, and I
can't figure out how it is finding such devotees.  The problem: it's
incomprehensibly, fantastically SLOW (on my IIcx with 8 Meg.).  The other
day I tried a search/replace on a document with less than 10 pages and it
took something like 15 minutes!!! Granted there were alot of replace instances
(I think I was replacing double spaces with single spaces) but no other
word processor that I've tried is even in this ballpark for unuseability.  
I once created a longer document (maybe 60 pages, with some graphics included)
and as I recall it was so slow that you had time to go get a cup of coffee
every time you flipped a page!

FullWrite's features are indeed quite nice, but I just can't figure out how
anybody can put up with such sluggishness.  Perhaps FullWrite devotees just
produce very small documents?  Perhaps they all have accelerators?  Perhaps
the current version (2.?) is significantly faster than my demo (1.1)? (I
asked an Ashton-Tate person if speed was one of the upgrade improvements
and they said no, but I think it was just a salesperson...)

 -Lee (spector@cs.umd.edu)