Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite Professional
Message-ID: <54660@sun.uucp>
Date: 26 May 88 19:02:23 GMT
References: <8805261653.AA24756@decwrl.dec.com>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
Lines: 58

>Chuq Von Rospach recently posted about not making comments based on the
>MacWorld demo version, stating that the released version has "many enhancements
>and improvements".  Could someone (maybe Chuq) post a synopsis of what those
>are?  Might be useful for those of us still trying to decide.

Well, I didn't use the demo version a LOT, so I'm going to miss some stuff,
but here's a first cut on what I see as differences.

o It's somewhat faster.

o It doesn't crash.

o There are enhancements to the spelling checker

o It now reads Word 3.x documents (it doesn't write them, however. But you
  can write MacWrite files that Word can read. And the conversions do work
  pretty cleanly, from my experience.

  [As a side note, FullWrite conversions seem to be more complete than a lot
  of WP's conversions. Headers end up as headers, instead of as text or
  simply disappearing. And sidebar pictures and text are shifted over as
  well at the end of documents. Formatting conversion works pretty well, too.]

That's off the top of my head. Someone who worked with the demo version more
(Jeff?) can probably add to it. The big things are stability and bugfixing.
Fullwrite Pro is very solid -- I haven't crashed it yet. In fact, I've
crashed Word 3.01, the BugFix version, more than I've crashed FullWrite.
And I generally do things that bring Word Processors to their knees,
especially if the memory management isn't quite up to snuff.

(To really see how a word processor memory management is set up, try this:
	o download 50K from a Unix box.
	o load into word processor
	o go through and convert all <cr><cr> pairs to random text.
	o convert <cr> to space.
	o convert random text back to <cr>

	This converts stuff to paragraphs. It also raises major havoc
	with internal memory management because it chops up 50K of text
	into about 15,000 very tiny chunks. If the garbage collector isn't
	very good, or the chunks aren't efficient in space, the word 
	processor gets VERY unhappy.

	There are tools that can help you do this outside of the word
	processor (I use McSink and Macify for a lot of stuff these days)
	but as a worst case test of a word processor, it works great.
	Another fun thing is to leave your system alone for a while, and
	have your cockatoo go play on the keyboard. My bird crashed Word
	a couple of times that way with lots of really weird, random
	keyboard typing. (she also occasionally turns my mouse into a 
	hamster, which isn't recommended.... :-()



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.