Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!lll-tis!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!rutgers!rochester!PT.CS.CMU.EDU!andrew.cmu.edu!ws0n+ From: ws0n+@andrew.cmu.edu (Walter Ray Smith) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: FullWrite problems Message-ID: Date: 5 Feb 88 02:44:59 GMT Organization: Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 57 After playing with the "don't panic" prerelease release of FullWrite, which finally arrived on the second attempt at shipping, I have conflicting impressions. The overall concept is very well done, with good abstractions (Notes, Sidebars, Styles, Classifications, Rulers). The icon bar is great, although distinguishing the type of a 5x5 icon requires more practice than I have. All the different ways of moving around the document will be useful--browsing, bookmarks, and "jumping" (which is essentially Emacs incremental search, or Raskin's "leaping"). The bibliography, index, and table of contents are done well. I think the design of this program is generally good. But there are some severe deficiencies with the implementation I got in the mail. I hope all these things will be resolved before release. By the way, if any of these problems are actually nonexistent, please let me know what I should be doing. You can't set the height of a sidebar attached to text without typing a number into a dialog box. Why is it necessary for me to figure out by trial and error (or by holding a ruler up to the screen) how many inches high my figure or table is? Admittedly, you can graphically set the size of a page-specific sidebar, but that's just a slightly easier form of trial and error. I would like an "automatic" setting for height and width. While text does flow nicely around sidebars as advertised, it is impossible to make text *NOT* flow nicely around sidebars. You can't place a 2x2 figure at the top of a page with no text on either side unless you type a bunch of blank lines next to it, which defeats the purpose of a page-specific sidebar. Line heights keep changing at random when I move the insertion point. Just clicking the mouse in the text causes nearby lines to move up and down, apparently at random. I can only get them back the way I want by randomly clicking around, trying to tickle the bug again, and this usually makes some other line change. Sometimes whole blank lines appear and disappear. This is especially a problem in sidebars, since the size is fixed, and when a blank line appears at the top, the last line falls off the bottom and vanishes. The *only* place you can set paragraph spacing is in the Document Base Style. It is therefore *global*. You can pick exactly one paragraph spacing for everything in the document. Needless to say, it practically always has to be zero, eliminating the paragraph spacing feature. As everyone knows, the thing is slooooooooow. But that's strictly an implementation issue. That's all I can think of right now, but I'll be sure to let everyone know if something else shows up. I hope AAS is out there somewhere. - Walt -- Walter Smith, CS graduate student, Carnegie-Mellon University uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!wrs ? ARPA: ws0n@andrew.cmu.edu usps: 5706 Darlington Rd.; Pittsburgh, PA 15217