Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!arisia!fischer
From: fischer@arisia.Xerox.COM (Ronald A. Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: MS Word 4.0: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Summary: tables were done in Xerox star
Message-ID: <734@arisia.Xerox.COM>
Date: 9 May 89 00:35:51 GMT
References: <1860@aucs.UUCP> <10094@claris.com>
Organization: Xerox PARC
Lines: 15

Tables, as in the convenient implementation seen in MS Word 4.0, were
done similarly in Viewpoint from Xerox and I believe in the
predecessor Star.

Imagine what adding a (partial) syntactic parser to your english
documents could do, change format of lists from inline with commas to
bullets automagically, check plurality of sentences, etc.  There's
still plenty of room for real improvement instead of increasingly
large feature lists.

Sadly, the hardware manufacturers aren't quite proviing the right "OS
level" (eh hem) toolkits to build applications.  Apple has a start
with MacApp.

(ron)