Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!indri!lll-winken!uunet!convex!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: WordPerfect dumps Amiga
Message-ID: <8036@killer.Dallas.TX.US>
Date: 7 May 89 17:44:02 GMT
References: <1077@afit-ab.arpa>
Distribution: na
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 43

in article <1077@afit-ab.arpa>, wbralick@afit-ab.arpa (Will Bralick) says:
> In article <155@modcomp.UUCP> srp@modcomp.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz) writes:
> Second, I am a bit confused.  I understood that WP made back their
> sunk cost on their Amiga port in a (record ?) three days (version
1.00?).

The posting specifically said that it was operating costs over the
past year that was killing them. Having all those programmers on the
job, handling all those support calls, etc. The costs are still
beginning when you shove the product out the door...

And to the person who said "Good riddance": Word Perfect might not
have been a good word processor to you. But to me, it certainly looked
attractive. I write large manuals (>100 pages) with indexes, table of
contents, footnotes, the works. Word Perfect would do all of that, and
would do it with reasonable speed. Meanwhile, last time I tried
Excellence, I almost fell asleep waiting for it to scroll....

> Third, I have been debating which of the premier word processing
> packages to buy.  The one with a national reputation for building
> word (perfect ?) processors that had (relatively) recently entered 
> the Amiga marketplace or the one that was built for the Amiga by 
> a company that has been writing software for the Amiga since words 
> were first scribbled on an Amy1000 screen.  Hmmm...  It appears that
> my decision has been made for me.

Don't make up your mind so fast -- there's alternatives. For simple
writing with straight text, e.g. letters and such, I use MicroEmacs
(the PD MG version) together with proff (a PD nroff-like formatter).
For heavy-duty tasks (e.g. 100 page manuals), TeX/LaTex is more likely
to be satisfying than Excellence. For shorter messages with imbedded
Amiga graphics, a desktop-publishing package such as, e.g., PageStream
(when they get all the bugs out), will do much better. Excellence is
really of use only when you want all of the above, and it's not really
satisfying for anything larger than a form letter. And if TeX had
graphics capabilities (does AmigaTeX? The version I've used under Unix
doesn't), you wouldn't want Excellence even for that. 

--
|    // Eric Lee Green              P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509     |
|   //  ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg     (318)989-9849     |
|  //    Join the Church of HAL, and worship at the altar of all computers  |
|\X/   with three-letter names (e.g. IBM and DEC). White lab coats optional.|