Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!elroy!mahendo!jplgodo!wlbr!scgvaxd!ashtate!dbase!awd
From: awd@dbase.UUCP (Alastair Dallas)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite -- I'm sorry, but...
Summary: I like being trendy, I guess
Message-ID: <371@dbase.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jun 88 16:53:28 GMT
References: <8013@drutx.ATT.COM> <6799@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Organization: Ashton Tate Development Center Glendale Cal.
Lines: 36


With all the net traffic so adoring of Full Write, I decided I had to try it.
I work at Ashton-Tate on PCs, but it's just me and my Mac when I go home.
I have 2 Meg of RAM, so that's one controversy I didn't worry about (we have
some 1 Meg Macs in the office, and we haven't had any problems with FWP
except that you can't have 200k of sounds in CheapBeep and expect to run
in just a Meg).

I felt like posting this because people are bashing Word and no one has 
mentioned the best thing about FWP.  One writer said that Word was a PC
word processor ported to the Mac, but FWP was a Mac product.  I think that's
unfair.  I'd say instead that for all the cumbersome-ness of Word, you'd
expect the features of FWP instead of having to stare at the watch cursor
as you toggle Page Preview mode.  I think Word deserves the title "Mac
software," but its just second-generation wp while FWP is third-generation.

But the main reason for going to FWP, which is every bit as cumbersome as
Word as it struggles to keep the display WYSIWYG while you struggle to say
what you want to say, is trendiness.  There is a set of page-layout and
typographic cliches that happen to be "in" this year, this month.  And
FWP is savvy enough to make these conventions easier than other word
processors do.  For example, it looks great to leave a 2" strip down 
the left side of each page with a vertical rule next to the text.  You
can do that in Word, but it's dirt simple in FWP.  What Word can't do
anywhere near as easily is to paste a picture in that 2" strip.  Or
another stupid style thing: FWP lets you do Bold, Italic, like Word, 
but they also have Small Caps, where the lower-case letters are
capitalized, but smaller than the upper-case letters.  Check out most
advertising, annual reports, etc. and you'll realize that this is the
single biggest cliche of the desktop publishing fashion year.  And FWP's
got it.

These are my observations as someone familiar with Word and now familiar
with Full Write, not as an Ashton-Tate employee.  I work on dBASE IV;
I know nothing about the other stuff except as a user.

/alastair/