Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site cmu-cs-spice.ARPA
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!rochester!cmu-cs-pt!cmu-cs-spice!tdn
From: tdn@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA (Thomas Newton)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: spacing (MS-WORD flame, actually)
Message-ID: <405@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 30-Jul-85 12:48:55 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmu-cs-s.405
Posted: Tue Jul 30 12:48:55 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Aug-85 05:20:18 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 44

How is MS-WORD more user-hostile and confusing than MacWrite?  At least in
WORD I don't need to devote half the screen area to rulers if I'm typing in
paragraphs with different formats.  I also find the ability to work with more
than one document at a time and to split a window very useful.  MacWrite only
lets you work with one document at a time, and only gives you one view of that
document.

My two major complaints with WORD are

    (1) Although Microsoft put in keyboard equivalents for mouse/menu
        commands, they didn't go far enough.  To move the cursor and
        select text, you must press COMMAND, OPTION, and sometimes the
        SHIFT key in addition to one of the non-alphanumeric keys on the
        right hand side of the keyboard.  When I'm using Emacs, I very
        rarely need to press more than two keys at once.  And what did
        Microsoft do with the more desirable COMMAND-key combinations?
        They devoted them to such "common" functions as repagination!!!

    (2) If you want to change the number of columns in the middle of a
        document, you generally must break across page boundaries.  For
        example, there is no way to print a two-column article with a
        large one-column title/introduction, unless you break it into
        two documents:

            The title page, two-column with a large header and
            with the page boundaries changed

            The rest of the document

        The only way to tell it "break this page into one-column and
        two-column pieces" seems to be to change the page boundaries
        and use an extra-large header on the first page.  But since
        the page boundary setting is global, this screws the rest of
        the document.  So you are forced to break one document into
        two pieces, or to choose a formatting that it can handle.

By and large, the things that WORD has problems with (other than slow printing
on the LaserWriter) seem to be features that don't even exist in MacWrite.  So
yes, WORD has problems, but I'll take it over MacWrite any day of the week.
Now if only they'd put in a basic Gosling EMACS-like set of keyboard commands
(programmability is too much to hope for) and make the formatter smarter about
multi-column documents...

                                        -- Thomas Newton