Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pons.cis.ohio-state.edu!tj From: tj@pons.cis.ohio-state.edu (Todd R Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications Subject: Re: When will new WordPerfect be available? Keywords: WordPerfect Message-ID: <87249@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> Date: 14 Jan 91 01:48:05 GMT References: <8133@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <510@pallas.athenanet.com> <1991Jan12.223304.28382@contact.uucp> <1991Jan13.092642.17590@news.iastate.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: Todd R Johnson Distribution: na Organization: Ohio State University Computer and Information Science Lines: 111 >> I'd like to put in a plug for MSS Excellence. For those of you >>who don't need the powerfull mathematical formatting capabilities of TeX >>there is MSS Excellence. Excellence 2.0 is a WYSIWYG word processor that >>supports postscript (even color postscript!), and virtual memory. The >>program is stable under 2.0 and seems to multitask very well. Excellence >>has a large dictionary (to check your spelling :) and a large thesarus (for >>those hard to describe things). I've heard that it is similar to Microsoft >>Word, though I've never used Word. That may or may not be a good point for >>people here. At least using the PostScript fonts, Excellence seems to be >>reasonably true to its WYSIWYG claim. Excellence 2.0 is in no way comparable to MS Word. It doesn't even come close. It is somewhat comparable to MacWrite II, but not as polished. I'll discuss the specific reasons below, but first I should start at the beginning of the story. Installation My cousin bought Excellence 2.0 over Christmas break. The first thing we tried to do was install it on is HD. No problem, I thought, the program comes with an installation program for HD. I followed the the instructions for starting the installation, but the installer wouldn't run. It turned out that it had been renamed on the disk. Once I ran the renamed version is started up and then shut down. I could never get the installer to work. Ok, I thought I'd just look inthe manual to see where to put the various files and what I'd need. Surprise, the manual just indicates that the installer program will put the files in the correct directory. Even finding the necessary assigns was difficult. After about an hour or so of frustration the program was finally installed. Inital Run Excellence 2.0 claims to run in 1 meg. That's true enough, it just doesn't do much. With a virus checker and dmouse running there wasn't even enough memory to bring up a file requestor. I tried to turn on the virtual memory option, but it didn't seem to work. On a one meg Mac you can run MS Word 4.0 just fine. You can't multitask (you can't even run Multifinder), but Word will work well. I wouldn't seriously consider Excellence unless you have more than one meg. Most of the functions wouldn't run in 1 meg. Printing Printing (to a 24 pin epson) was Ok. Nothing great. No where near as good as LaTeX output to the same printer. I suspect that the best way to print is to use postscript output and then print using Post. Features Where excellence really loses (as compared to MS Word) is in its lack of styles. In Word you can create named paragraph styles that indicate how to format a paragraph. For example, you can create a quote style that indents the right and left margin .5 inches and sets the font to 10 point (down from 12 point used in the rest of the document). Whenever you want a long quote, you just type it in and apply this style. Later on, you might decide that you want a different format quotes (perhaps you want 12 point text). Without styles you would have to go to each quote in your document and change each paragraph format. With styles, you just edit the quote style and all paragraphs with that format are automatically changed. Paragraph styles include many different parameters. You can set spacing, margins, tabs, space before and the parargaph, and many more. Styles are also hierarchically related in that lower styles can inherit features from higher styles. Thus, if all of your styles are organized under the normal style, you can change the font type of the normal style and the font type of every paragraph in your document will change. Instead of styles, Excellence has rulers that can be placed in the text. This is equivalent to MacWrite II. The problem is that there is no way to make global formatting changes. You must change every instance. You also don't have as many parameters to set, so you don't have as much control over the formatting. Finally, there is no way to automate bibliogrphies in Excellence. With Word, I use a program called EndNote that keeps a database of entries. When I want to reference an entry, I just place a pointer in the Word document to the entry. When I'm ready to print, EndNote reads the Word file and spits out another Word file with my bibliogrphy entries and in-text citations formatted according to a desired bibliographic style. EndNote also works with many other Mac WP's. If you really want to do WP on the Amiga, I'd suggest that you either buy AmigaTeX (or use a PD LaTeX) and resign yourself to the fact that some simple things will be impossibly difficult to do (just try to change a font or go from single to double spacing), or buy AMax II and Word 4.0 (which works well under Amax), or buy a Mac and Word. Another nice aspect of Word is that the educational discount price is only $69. I would caution, however, that all WYSIWYG word procesors (including Word and FrameMaker) still have serious limitations (No cross-referencing in Word 4.0, for example). If you absolutely must have the best, and you have the time to invest (you'll need lots if you really want to customize things), TeX or LaTeX is the only way to go. ---Todd -- Todd R. Johnson tj@cis.ohio-state.edu Laboratory for AI Research The Ohio State University