bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (Robert Montante) (09/15/86)
I consider myself a big fan of 'vi', but when I want to do pure word-processing I prefer a true word-processor, such as is common on MSDOS-grade machines. One big advantage is that you never have to worry about getting near the end of the line with a Multimate or a Wordstar or whatever, and the words won't get broken in the middle. (Perhaps vi can be tickled into behaving this way, but not only do I not know how, the word-processors DON'T have to be tickled.) Word-processors frequently offer nice text-composition aids like 'rulers', you can move the margins and tabs (most corporate communications don't thrive on a tab every 8 char's), and you can right-justify without you having to choose your words as luckily as I did up to the previous line :-) They'll also reformat so that you can see what you've been doing, without having to send it off to the printer. In short, vi is a better general-purpose editor, but a good word-processor is a better dedicated word-processor. I don't believe that most offices write much source code, nor do I think they produce many documents in volume sufficient to warrant the set-up time of installing NROFF (or TeX, or even Wordstar) special formatting commands. Why not recommend a hardware setup that supports both?
bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) (09/17/86)
I've done this sort of thing several times in the past several years (set people up with word processing, secty's, faculty etc.) I think what we need is facts. Not sure what that means exactly, perhaps some human engineer types can fill in the details. I found my experiences very anti-intuitive so I am very suspicious of all the pat and "right-sounding" answers being proferred on this list. Right now, I'm doing it again (more or less, this time there are quite a few people involved.) I keep having that experience (still) of walking into a room full of people for a meeting (mostly management types) who proceed to tell me with great authority that secretaries can't possibly learn UNIX, we can use UNIX, but we must find some sort of captive idiot program. I think they're full of s**t. At least, they deny all my experiences. [btw, how many of your secretaries have gone to college? most? hmmm, how long before we decide that a baboon is anything that walks on two legs and has less than a PHD?] Similarly, I guess people can't possibly use a system that, to contact someone, requires the keying in of a 5 to 18 digit number. But they do (our phone system.) Ah, but perhaps they can do it, but can they do it well? Who knows, can they do anything well? You entrust them with your sacred documents, but can't expect them to edit and chew gum at the same time. I don't think we have the vaguest idea what we are talking about. I could believe that some of the idiot systems let people learn a few things quickly, but after the first few days they tend to be frustrating because they are so limiting. It's like a car that only goes 10 mph, sure, it'd be easier to learn how to drive, but who would want to use it after that? I guess we can approach the problem like a math proof (that is, presume that cold logic will suffice where we have no actual facts.) We can say things like: A good word-processing environment must have X,Y,Z. Product A has X,Y,Z; therefore it is good. QED. Doesn't mean anything though. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, most "word processors" are chosen by management for various reasons (I could tell you stories...) Worse, a lot of the "customers" do in fact have a hard time evaluating a product. The suggestion "have the customers (eg. secretaries) try it" is laughable. Some perhaps. But if they've never used such systems what can they possibly say except that this one seemed easier/harder during the first 10 minutes they've ever been exposed to such a thing. How does that reflect on what their opinions might be 6 months from now? Utter bulls**t. As I heard someone say once, the most amazing thing about all the technological devices we use are the people who use them. I'm serious, I do this stuff for real. The stuff I am hearing on this list sounds like the same stinking pile I hear "in real life", not surprising. The funny thing is, the people who talk about what certain people are too stupid to do seem to be working from modus ponens and some sort of wierd extrapolation. The people with experiences to speak about seem to admit that the people they work with have pretty much adapted well to just about anything that was handed to them (or, put better, if it was reasonably useful to a "wizard", the "lesser beings" found it useful also.) Only experienced carpenters ever use hammers very well, but I'm not sure that's an argument for soft headed hammers for everyone else. The rest of us can still manage to get a nail driven in, give or take a few surface mars and some wasted time. I think the only thing important with a lot of these activities is being able to understand the goal, and I think most secretaries understand what a well typed memo should look like (how many TeX/Troff etc wizards do? Swell, beautifully typeset but not worth a damn according to the style guide, hmm, who's the idiot?) What are your assumptions? Are you sure? I'm not being contentious, I'm serious. Or, at least I'm not sitting here arguing that a system that makes you type SHIFT-Z is OBVIOUSLY easier for a secretary to learn than a system that makes you type CONTROL-Z (I presume that comes from programmers who remember that control characters confused them early on in their programs, not someone who is facing the fact that in one case you hold down one key and strike another and in the other case you...of course it is intuitively obvious that SHIFT is more mnemonic than CONTROL for introducing control functions, oh foo, I must have said that wrong, it didn't sound right...) I dunno. But at least I admit it... -Barry Shein, Boston University
terry@nrcvax.UUCP (Terry Grevstad) (09/18/86)
bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) says: > >As I heard someone say once, the most amazing thing about all the >technological devices we use are the people who use them. > >The funny thing is, the people who talk about what certain people >are too stupid to do seem to be working from modus ponens and >some sort of wierd extrapolation. > >I think the only thing important with a lot of these activities is >being able to understand the goal, and I think most secretaries >understand what a well typed memo should look like (how many TeX/Troff >etc wizards do? Swell, beautifully typeset but not worth a damn >according to the style guide, hmm, who's the idiot?) > > (liberally edited) Loved this article. I tried to get this same idea across to my boss many years ago. At that time I was a word-processing supervisor. My boss, whose only experience with word-processing was dictating letters and signing them when they came back, made all the decisions on the software we were going to use. He decided that we needed new software. At the time we were using an embedded command type of software written especially for us. It would do virtually anything I decided it needed to do, with a minimum of confusion. And I had part-time university students doing the input for me, most of whom never stayed longer than 6 months. I was constantly training people and found it very easy to train them to use the system. He decided that the software was ``too difficult'' for the secretaries to use. Well, the secretaries never used it--the word-processors used it. They gave us what they wanted typed and we did the work. (turn around time ~30 minutes, less in a pinch) What he finally decided on was a menu driven system that was so slow we about died. Prompt questions for everything, and it only did letters and memos. He was quite nonplused when he found that his new word-processing system would not produce the paper he had to write, or create copies of the speech he had to give, or even provide a means to produce documentation for itself. We, the people who used it, the people who had to work with it, were never consulted on what it should be capable of doing. ``We'' were ``too dumb''. ``We'' got out of that job and went on to bigger and better things. -- _______________________________________________________________________ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- without a Terry Grevstad ECNALG Network Research Corporation ihnp4!nrcvax!terry {sdcsvax,hplabs}!sdcrdcf!psivax!nrcvax!terry _______________________________________________________________________ -----------------------------------------------------------------------
maslak@sri-unix.ARPA (Valerie Maslak) (10/04/86)
One of the folks who responded to this seemed to be unaware of such goodies as wordwrap, autohyphenation, and format-to-screen using macro packages and pipes (and aliases) that are available on unix. Sigh. This is the problem with unix as wordprocessor, I'm afraid: there's too much that too many users don't know. The worst problem boils down to the fact that you need to have someone available who knows how to work the magic before you can be a magician.