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From: saal@moss.ATT.COM (Sam Saal,1A-110,6956,Cap Gemini)
Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop,comp.text
Subject: Re: Anyone have experience with Island Write,Draw & Paint?
Message-ID: <1991May24.160629.29634@cbnewsl.att.com>
Date: 24 May 91 16:06:29 GMT
References: <17688@fibercom.COM>
Sender: news@cbnewsl.att.com (NetNews Administrator)
Reply-To: saal@moss.ATT.COM (Sam Saal)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 38

In article <17688@fibercom.COM> rrg@fibercom.COM (Rhonda R. Gaines) writes:

>The header says it all.  I would appreciate any comments you have on this 

We used all three packages before it bacame Island's toy.  In those
days, all of ~2 years ago, it was SunDraw, SunWrite, and SunPaint.
Were they trying to immitate Mac?

The draw and paint tools were very good.  They had good screen capture
capabilities and the ability to transfer images from one to the other
was very helpful.  I also liked the toolkits for drawing and painting.
The only thing missing (and may have since been added) was the ability
to trace a bitmap back to a vector.

SunWrite had its problems.  It was fine as long as your document was
very short (3-5 pages max), you weren't working on a loaded machine,
and you didn't make many changes to docs with lots of illustrations.
SunWrite anchors pictures to the page.  This means that if you added
text before text associated with a picture, the picture would no longer
be right next to that text. This was especially a problem if the text
was indented to flow around the picture.

Write works very slowly.  It took forever to redraw screens and even
longer to move between pages.  Add that to the fact that you had to
manually readjust pictures every time you added text, and the process
became agonizing.

Another reason Write is only good for smaller docs is its inadequate
collections capability.  Generating ToCs, indexes, Lists of Figures,
etc was a pain because it had to be done manually.

Sun/Island -Paint, -Draw, and -Write were really inexpensive, though,
and we thought we could get away with using them.  We found out
otherwise and have since moved to FrameMaker.  (We also looked at
Interleaf, but that's even more expensive.)
--
Sam Saal        saal@moss.att.com
Vayiphtach HaShem et peah HaAttone