Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!ncar!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Fullwrite Professional Question...
Message-ID: <53272@sun.uucp>
Date: 14 May 88 18:25:45 GMT
References: <6022@sigi.Colorado.EDU> <53074@sun.uucp> <2279@spray.CalComp.COM>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
Lines: 47

>This is about the zillionth reference to sidebars on the net. Perhaps I
>blinked, but I haven't seen any description of what sidebars are about.
>I get a vague impression from the various postings, but it seems that such
>an important concept deserves a better description for those of us who
>haven't really seen FullWrite yet.

I'm sorry. They're intuitively obvious to me, but I grew up in a family that
published a newspaper....

A sidebar is a piece of related but independent text that is attached to an
article. If you look at any magazine, you'll see instances of this. For
instance, in the article I wrote on Timesharing services for Macintosh
Horizons, there was a short sidebar in which Mike Banks took a
semi-fictional look at the future of timesharing services. Not part of the
article, but something that gave it more depth.

In many cases, these are separated from the main text by being boxed, by the
use of spot color, or by some other form.

FullWrite has taken this concept and generalized it. At any point in a
document, you can create a sidebar. This sidebar can be attached to a given
piece of text or a specific spot on the page. You can put something in the
sidebar, text, graphics, whatever. 

This allows you to put together very complicated and flexible documents,
once you get the hang of it. It's a really, really neat feature.

>On the other
>hand, it appears to lack some features I use every day in Word.

Like what? I've found two: functionality is lacking in styles (especially
"Based on" styles; and paragraph formatting and text leading is primitive.

Neither of these are major problems. You can get around them fairly easily.

Also, it's slower than Word 3.0. Enough to be noticable, not enough to make
me think twice about switching.

If there's something else you think is missing, let me know. There's 
probably a reasonable way to do the same thing.



Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

	Robert A. Heinlein: 1907-1988. He will never truly die as long as we
                           read his words and speak his name. Rest in Peace.