ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) (01/31/86)
Art Zemon does a good job of flaming Microsoft for their copy-protect scheme, gives the scheme away to the world, and then ruins an otherwise flawless article by stating: >Finally, now that I've flamed all over Microsoft, I want to >emphasize that I consider Word 2.0 to be the best word >processing program on the market. It is well worth the cost and >I highly recommend it to anyone who writes documents more than >one page long. If you have not personally used Word, go try it. I could mention at least 50 ways in which the SSI WordPerfect package RADICALLY outperforms packages such as MSWord or Samna, but I'll settle for two here. Type the following (badly mis-spelled) tongue twister into MSWord as well as WordPerfect, run the respective spell checkers, and then report on your findings: An elefent stteppped on a bigge blaq bugge and the biiig blakke buig blead thickke blaekk bloood WordPerfect's spell checker is the only one I have ever seen that can deal with such things at all, and it actually deals with them quickly and elegantly. MSWord's spell checker, aside from not having the pheonetic capabilities at all, actually takes the words it feels are misspelled in a document and presents them to you in a list TOTALLY OUT OF CONTEXT, for YOU to fix; it can't fix them. The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent function. Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind of construction: a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now. MSWord has no rational way of doing this; you have to type the whole paragraph sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something. A military secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord. It is interesting to note, by the way, that WordPerfect, which is far and away the most serious PC word processor, is not copy-protected.
mdf@osu-eddie.UUCP (Mark D. Freeman) (02/02/86)
Summary: In <504@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: > >MSWord's spell checker, aside from not having the pheonetic capabilities at >all, actually takes the words it feels are misspelled in a document and >presents them to you in a list TOTALLY OUT OF CONTEXT, for YOU to fix; it >can't fix them. Completely untrue of version 2.0 (released at least 12 months ago). >The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent >function. Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind >of construction: > > a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent > beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now. MSWord has > no rational way of doing this; you have to type the whole paragraph > sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the > "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something. A military > secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord. Also completely untrue. Set up a style sheet entry with the first line set to have a left margin of whatever your tab is, and have the rest use the proper left margin for the rest of the paragraph. Also set a tab in this entry where the left margin is for the majority of the paragraph. Keystrokes to implement this (once it is a style sheet entry, for example 'hi' for hanging indent) is <Alt-H> <Alt-I> a. <TAB> <type paragraph here>. You are either using an old version, or have never read the manual. >It is interesting to note, by the way, that WordPerfect, which is far and >away the most serious PC word processor, is not copy-protected. This is, unfortunately, a true statement. Word's copy protection is a pain, but is easily removed. The spelling checker cannot hold a candle to that of WordPerfect, although your criticism above is untrue. WordPerfect 4.1 has a wonderful thesaurus and can do math, both lacking in MS Word. However, the style sheets and MS Word's method of displaying attributes is far better than WP. REVEAL CODES indeed! I own copies of both, and use WP solely for documents with math requirements. -- <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mark D. Freeman Guest account at The Ohio State University StrongPoint Systems, Inc. mdf@osu-eddie.UUCP 209 Olentangy Street Mdf@Ohio-State.CSNET Columbus, OH 43202-2340 Mdf%Ohio-State@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA !cbosgd!osu-eddie!mdf I disclaim even my very existance. Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, Rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science. -- Gary Zukav from "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
zemon@fritz.UUCP (Art Zemon) (02/06/86)
Ted, I'm afraid you have simply exhibited an ignorance of the way Word is used. I would have replied directly but you have badly misrepresented Word publicly and that's unfair to those who have never seen the program. In article <504@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: > >MSWord's spell checker, aside from not having the pheonetic capabilities at >all, actually takes the words it feels are misspelled in a document and >presents them to you in a list TOTALLY OUT OF CONTEXT, for YOU to fix; it >can't fix them. This is simply wrong. Word splits the screen, displays the context in the top portion, the mispelled word in the bottom, and possible alternatives in the middle. You can then choose whether you want Word to fix the error or not. If the word is correctly spelled but is not in recognized as such by Word, you have the option of adding it to one of three dictionaries, the main dictionary, a user dictionary (optionally included when you run the spelling checker), or the document dictionary (automatically included whenever you check this particular document.) When you get all the way through the document you have one last chance to tell Word to apply all the changes you made or throw them away. I'm not sure where you saw a version of Word which could not correct spelling mistakes. Perhaps you saw Word v1 (which was distributed without a spelling checker) and a second vendor's spelling checker. The spelling checker which comes with Word v2 is one of the most pleasant that I have ever used (Turbo Lightening is possibly better but would not understand Word's hyphenation). By the way, the *best* spelling checker I have seen is included with IBM's DisplayWrite 3. You can check any word as you type it by simply hitting a function key. It consults the on-disk dictionary (only one, not three, unfortunately), offers alternatives on screen, and fixes the error immediately. Very useful. >The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent >function. Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind >of construction: > > a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent > beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now. MSWord has > no rational way of doing this; you have to type the whole paragraph > sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the > "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something. A military > secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord. This is also simply wrong. I would define a paragraph type which has a left indent of (for example) 1 inch but with the first line indented -0.5 inches. A tab is automatically created at the 1 inch point. I would simply type "a.<TAB>a tab, followed..." to get the paragraph you have described. One of the nicest features of Word is style sheets. I can collect all of the various paragraph definitions into a style sheet which I can attach to various documents. I might, for example, define the above indented paragraph as type "IP". To begin writing indented paragraphs I would simply type <ALT-i><p> and forget about any messy reformatting or margin adjusting. For you Nroff/Troff gurus out there, style sheets are roughly equivalent to a macro package. They are not as general but you define what the document looks like in the style sheet and just enter the text in the document. Finally, both my wife and I worked at TRW (defense division) for a number of years and are both intimately familiar with the formatting requirements of MIL-STD documentation. There is only one thing which Word does not automatically do for you when writing such documents; it does not automatically number the paragraphs. I guess "troff -mm" still wins, but not by much since Word very nicely drives both the Apple and the HP laser printers. -- -- Art Zemon FileNet Corp. ...! {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax} !trwrb!felix!zemon
dpz@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (David P. Zimmerman) (02/08/86)
I read with interest ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden)'s comments about MSWord's and WordPerfect's spelling checkers and decided to try out Turbo Lightning on his sample text: > An elefent stteppped on a bigge blaq bugge and the biiig blakke buig > blead thickke blaekk bloood After running it through (and leaving the words that it couldn't handle as is), Lightning came back with this: An elephant stepped on a bigge black bugge and the biiig blakke bug bled thickke blaekk blood Not too surprising, if you consider how Lightning goes about its checking: based on a list of commonly misspelled words, then based on phonetics, then on length. I had to scroll through the list of possible corrections Lightning gave me to find one or two of the words, while others were right at the top of the list (one of which was, surprisingly, "stepped" for "stteppped"). Of course, I couldn't resist running it through Lightning's thesaurus: An elephant stepped on a bigge swarthy bugge and the biiig blakke germ bled thickke blaekk blood Oh, well - so much for that (probably would've done better with the thesaurus had more of the words been spelled correctly). David
maxg@tekig4.UUCP (Max Guernsey) (02/12/86)
In article <86@fritz.UUCP> zemon@fritz.UUCP (Art zemon) writes: >Ted, > >I'm afraid you have simply exhibited an ignorance of the way >Word is used. I would have replied directly but you have badly >misrepresented Word publicly and that's unfair to those who have >never seen the program. > > >In article <504@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes: >>The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent >>function. Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind >>of construction: >> >> a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent >> beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now. MSWord has >> no rational way of doing this; you have to type the whole paragraph >> sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the >> "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something. A military >> secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord. > >This is also simply wrong. I would define a paragraph type which >has a left indent of (for example) 1 inch but with the first >line indented -0.5 inches. A tab is automatically created at >the 1 inch point. I would simply type "a.<TAB>a tab, >followed..." to get the paragraph you have described. > >One of the nicest features of Word is style sheets. I can >collect all of the various paragraph definitions into a style >sheet which I can attach to various documents. I might, for >example, define the above indented paragraph as type "IP". To >begin writing indented paragraphs I would simply type <ALT-i><p> >and forget about any messy reformatting or margin adjusting. Also IP can be defined differently in different style sheets so you can have one style for the draft copies and another for the final version simply by changing the style sheets. >-- > -- Art Zemon > FileNet Corp. > ...! {decvax, ihnp4, ucbvax} !trwrb!felix!zemon Max Guernsey Tektronix tekig4!maxg