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From: mmshah@athena.mit.edu (Milan M Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Word Perfect for Windows 3.0, Sneak Preview!
Message-ID: <1991Apr17.000638.22124@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 17 Apr 91 00:06:38 GMT
Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 49


Hi!

I went to a sneak preview of Word Perfect for Windows, and I thought some
people here might be interested.

The product demo was very slick. Its completely wysiwyg, but has a draft mode
that shows all the old "codes" that show up in wp5.1 for dos. In wysiwyg mode,
it seemed quite snappy (much faster than word for windows I thought), running
on a 16 MHz SX laptop with 5 Megs. Neat button bar feature where you could
create buttons for frequently used commands. Impressive table and multi column
features, just click on a button in the ruler and select the dimensions of the
table or # of columns. Has very nice graphics capabilities, and can include
wpg, pcx, tiff, bmp, and windows meta file graphics. Its File Open dialog box
even has a "view" button that lets you preview a file (even graphics files!).
File conversion from other formats supported from within the main app, no
need to run separate utility. It has what the person called a 1500 character
library, including math symbols, greek, and many other foreign languages, 
including Japanese. Also a Cyrillic (sp?) character set, which, apparently, was
used to draft all of Gorby's speeches in November.

It will come with its own printer drivers (some 900 it seems) which can print 
all these characters (It can also use the predefined windows printer drivers).
Equation editor works, but you can't get out of it; it gives you a UAE. Oh yeah
it has some sort of page layout capability; when you place a graphic in the
middle of two columns, the text in both columns automatically flows around the
picture! Of course, you can move the graphic around simply by dragging it
around. Some sort of macro language puported to be even more powerful than
whatever word for windows has is also there. Also, it will have everything that
WP 5.1 for DOS had.

In short, I was very impressed. I have NEVER used word perfect, and used to
use word for windows many moons ago, and in comparison, I am definitely tempted
to become a wp user. Right now, I am getting by on Microsoft Write. I mention 
this for two important reasons:

a) I DO NOT want to give the impression that I am a veteran word perfect user,
   and that it is my mission to make sure all net users switch to it, and
   thereby spark yet another flame war.

b) To substantiate that my impression has a chance of being objective. 
   (Doubtful for a variety of other reasons!!)

In any case, Windows users, excitement is on the horizon! (Unfortunately, he
didn't give a release date, except to say that it wasn't released in the first
quarter as promised!)

Milan
.