info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (06/08/84)
Date: 7 June 1984 0150-EDT From: uw-beaver!Donna.Auguste@CMU-CS-A To: Bboard.Maintainer@CMU-CS-A Subject: mac as word processor? Attention: macintosh bboard I would like some information about use of the MacIntosh for creating, formatting, and printing text documents. What are MacWrite's strong points and weak points? Are there other word processor alternatives available for the MacIntosh now or on the horizon? Are there printers and printer-interfaces that can cope? Please reply to Auguste@CMU-CS-A. Thanks.
info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (06/10/84)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 84 11:01:50 EDT
From: Mark H. Nodine <uw-beaver!mnodine@BBN-UNIX.ARPA>
Subject: Re: mac as word processor?
In-Reply-To: Your message of 7 June 1984 0150-EDT
To: Donna.Auguste@cmu-cs-a.arpa
Cc: mnodine@BBN-UNIX.ARPA, info-mac@sumex-aim.arpa
I have actually been quite pleased the MacWrite word processing capabilities.
I have used a number of screen-oriented editors (as well as some line-oriented
ones) and have enjoyed the user interface of MacWrite. I also have
considerable experience with a large number of text-justifying systems.
Some of the strengths:
(1) It is quite consistent in the way it handles things. You don't find a
lot of (unpleasant) surprises that happen when a system either tries to be
smarter than you want it to or not as smart as you would wish.
(2) The most commonly used features such as paragraph indenting and word
alignment/rearrangement are done completely automatically and predictably.
(3) The ability to mix graphics with text is an enormous boon.
(4) The WYSIWYG philosophy is generally helpful, particularly with such
things as page boundaries and word alignment.
(5) The imagewriter in high quality, non-tall adjust mode with the Geneva 10
font (the only font for which I have any experience) is amazingly good for a
dot-matrix printer -- I even used it for a final copy of my resume.
(6) There is a large variety of fonts, sizes and styles available. In
particular, the outline and shadow styles are things I have never seen
elsewhere. The Cairo (hieroglyph) font is interesting.
(7) It's fun. I believe that things are much more easily learned and
retained if they are fun to use.
Weaknesses:
(1) There is a minimum margin size which cannot be passed. This is
something like 1" on the left and 1 1/4" on the right.
(2) Although I have not tried any large documents (yet), I am told that
there are problems when MacWrite gets close to its memory limits. Very
large documents have to be broken into several files. This is probably not
a problem if your chapters tend to be a size that fit in memory, but
otherwise...
(3) There are still a couple of bugs even in the upgraded version of
MacWrite which pertain to things which are outdented getting lost when
printing in high quality mode. Presumably Apple will fix these since they
have been mentioned before on Info-Mac.
(4) There are some cases where the WYSIWYG philosophy does not work very
well. The major case I can think of has to do with formatting of
mathematical equations. In this case, the style used by TEX or the eq
preprocessor for nroff/troff is probably preferable.
(5) It is impossible to create tables with vertical lines short of
creating them in MacPaint and pasting them in. This creates problems if you
need to edit them...
(6) As far as I can tell, you cannot have a picture from MacPaint on the
same line as MacWrite text. This means you must have
<text...>
<picture>
<text...>
Occasionally something else is desired. Oh well.
(7) The mouse is perhaps somewhat overused.
I still really like MacWrite, and would probably have been willing to use it
for my thesis if the Mac had been available then.
Cheers,
Mark