Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!moriarty
From: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite Frustrations
Message-ID: <2792@fluke.COM>
Date: 1 Feb 88 20:58:34 GMT
References: <1005@aicchi.UUCP>
Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM
Reply-To: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer)
Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA
Lines: 70

>Jeff, thanks so very much for responding to the comments I made concerning
>FullWrite Professional. I like an awful lot of others (including yourself)
>are anxious to see this product become a hit. I only hope that the folks
>at Ann Arbor can catch something of the dialogue being conducted in this
>forum at put our worthwhile suggestions to good use.

I think they have been; they called me up a week ago -- said they had seen
Chuq and my articles and asked if I had any further suggestions to add (I
did, but emphasized which ones I thought needed to be in by the release, and
which ones could wait until a later release).  I suspect that if they've
seen mine, they've probably read yours (I hope they have); I'd really like
to have a choice at release time about whether a new chapter causes a page
break or not (this may be tougher than I thought, if all the virtual memory
software is based on a chapter-by-chapter scheme).  Also, one of the nice
things about the Word spelling checker is the "check-mark" button that
allows you to check a word you typed in to replace the mis-spelled word; I
don't believe the Microlytics checker allows that.

Regarding the challanges, I think that most of them boil down to different
personal preferences on our parts.  I don't come from a typesetting
background, so I associated the word "sidebars' with those funny
lime-colored boxes you always see in NEWSWEEK and such; it's a pretty
free-format concept to me, but I could see how it could be confusing to
folks who associate "sidebar" with a very well-defined typesetting
structure.

As to creating a table, I see how you could prefer that in MS Word format
over FullWrite, especially if you use the in-table calculation abilities
Word has (these have always seemed rather useless to me -- I import them
from Excel and leave it at that).  For myself, I prefer FullWrite's WYSWIG
method of opening three sidebars as "columns", each with a particular style
sheet, and then placing these "column" sidebars into another, wider sidebar.
Voila... a table.  That is by far the easier method to me, but.... your
mileage may vary.

As to speed problems in general, I think there is a lot of that in the demo
-- most of the virtual memory functionality ain't there.  HOWEVER, from
everything I've heard from people with gamma and new betas, doing heavy-duty
word-processing AND having 1 Meg of memory is going to be clumsy.  You can
get by with a meg and do work in FW, but getting access to DAs (unless
you're in MultiFinder, which means you've got at least 2 Megs anyway) can be
rough.  This isn't a complaint on my part; in several ways, this is a more
powerful program than FrameMaker (and a less powerful program in others),
and that kind of ability costs in hardware.  But those buying it should
realize that to use FullWrite to its full abilities, you're going to need
more than 1 Meg of RAM (in my opinion).

Thanks for the comments, Eric.

PS:  The rumor that FullWrite will read in MS Word 3.01 files at release
     time appears to be confirmed.  The lack of Word 3.01 compatibility
     would have been a major stumbling block in FW marketing; as long as the
     released version is relatively bug-free (and out before May), they are
     really going to be tough to beat (especially when the 2-Meg SE with
     a 40MB drive come out -- they're just MADE for FW).

PPS: Has anyone had a chance to play with the $90 beta version of
     WordPerfect?  A friend of mine bought it, and of late has been swearing
     a blue streak about the number of bugs (I replied "Why do you think
     they call it a beta version?" and almost had a pillow shoved down my
     throat).  She says, however, that it has a very nice user interface.

                        "The following is not for the weak of heart or
                         Fundamentalists."

                                        Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET:     moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP:  {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
CREDO:        You gotta be Cruel to be Kind...
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