Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Brief overview of FullWrite (Re
Message-ID: <53839@sun.uucp>
Date: 19 May 88 16:27:02 GMT
References: <8452@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <76000207@uiucdcsp> <2733@polyslo.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
Lines: 44

>  Why is being able to see what your output is going to look like a falure.
>Then presentation Manager, and the Macintosh and Windowing enviroments in
>general are failures also?   I don't think so.  People who can't understand
>why we need WYSWYG are failures, and personally I like to be able to see
>what my work is going to look like while I'm working on it.

I think this is being overly harsh. I'm a BIG fan of WYSIWYG. But I'm also a
hardcore writer who types 100WPM or so. And when I'm writing, I dont' want
to edit, I don't want to format, and I don't want to make it pretty. All my
work goes through at least three phases: getting the damned words into the
system, getting the damned words spelled write and getting the damned words
looking right and back out of the system.

The problem with most WYSIWYG systems is that they are designed with doing
all three at the same time, and fight anyone who just wants to dump words
into the system at the greatest possible speed with the fewest
interruptions. This is very true of FullWrite, for instance. Microsoft
Word's one great advantage is that when I just want to write, it'll sit back
and stay out of the way -- although they to some degree go too far in that
direction and make it hard tweak the words with that ugly user interface of
theirs.

If there was one thing I'd really like to see in FWP in a future release, it
is a "Turn off the repagination and WYSIWYG" mode. The delays it tosses at
me when I cross a page boundary ("Oh! Page boundary! Draw a new page! move
the text! put up the header! scroll the screen! Okay, you can write again
now") can be very distracting if they hit at the wrong time -- writing is
hard enough work without having the word processor arguing with you. Another
thing I'd like to be able to turn off is FWP's insistence on showing the
entire page of blank paper when you have things like pictures that shift to
the next page. I'd love to be able to scrunch that page down to just the
size necessary to show what's on it -- the WYSIWYG setup is nice enough that
I can still tell where the beginning and ending of the page are, which is
Good Enough.

(and if this sounds like Griping, well, yes, it is. Bul I'll be damned if I
go back to Word 3.0, and I'm already finding that I'm retraining my writing
habits to take FWP's quirks into account. Another couple of weeks, and I
probably won't be bothered at all by most of them, except possibly
subliminally. Just to put the griping into perspective....)

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.