info-mac@utcsrgv.UUCP (info-mac) (05/12/84)
Date: Fri, 11 May 1984 13:21 EDT From: "William D. Cattey" <uw-beaver!WCATTEY@BBNF.ARPA> To: info-mac@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA Cc: WCATTEY@BBNF.ARPA Phase-Of-The-Moon: FQ+4D.0H.57M.22S. Subject: Macwrite pains I am writing this note in the hopes that some problems I encountered using Macwrite can either be fixed in the next release. I have a document that is big enough to take 100 percent of the Macwrite buffer space. I could deal with the following annoying little problems by working around them : There had to be *lots* of free space on my diskette before the save imagee for the printer would fit. This meant a diskette with Write, System, my document, and nothing else. The whole document image does not necessarily have to be created in one huge file! I had to save my file and bring in a fresh copy of Macwrite every time I got the message "Almost out of memory cannot undo this operation." while inserting text. Insert stops working when it cannot undo typing. I expected tht later inserts would succeed after acnowledging that they could not be able to be undone, or that deleting characters from the buffer would help. This error also seemed to affect the other commands in random ways. Bill Coderre is right about headers and footers being buggy. They have many problems: They are awful to use. Their user interface should be re-thought. I suggest that headers and footers have commands to make them appear in the document, and seperate commands to grab hold of them for editing. In my large document, most of my fiddling time was spent waiting for Macwrite to re-paginate my document between hides and shows of my headers and footers. (I hope to hide and show less often when other bugs are fixed. see below) Once the page number icon dissapeared from the footer command completely. I have not been able to re-produce this problem. I got around it by hiding the footer, saving the file, starting a new Macwrite and re-creating the footer. The following happened with a particular very large document: After certain screen refresh opertions, such as using the scroll boxes, or across a show/hide rulers command pair. The page numbers I asked for in my footer would no longer appear on the screen image. MacWrite had re-positioned the icon within the footer, and decided that even though the page number was still in a visible region of the footer, that the text should not appear. I got around this by I had to hide and re-show my footer, and move the page number icon to the second line of the footer from the first line of the footer (where Macwrite decided it belonged). The first time I printed out my document, the header text, consisting of the date did not appear on the printed page. Only blank lines. I made a few revisions to the text (deleting a couple of lines) and then neither the header nor the footer text appeared. I got blank lines where dates and page numbers should be. I suspected that asking for a big document with headers and footers was too much, so I got rid of the header. I tried reading the document back in to a virginal Macwrite. I tried several combinations of header text, lack of header text, etc. I could get the page numbers to appear in the screen image but never on the printed one! After several hours of fiddling, I went back to a previously saved copy of the file that predated the problem with insertion, forgot about trying to get a header at all, (since it did not want to print), and settled for page numbers that printed. I also deleted MacPaint from the disk, because this time, although the document was 10 lines shorter, Write complained of insufficient space on the disk for the printed output. Booting a new MacWrite did not help at all, althought I expected that it would. I suspect two possible causes: 1) Perhaps header information stored in the document had gotten corrupted, and only a previous version of the document with correct footer information would solve the problem. I would have expected header and footer information to be completely replacable with new information from MacWrite rather than getting corrupted once and forever. 2) If header and footer output is kept in seperate disk files (as I *think* I saw mentioned here) perhaps the write failed due to lack of space, but was not complained about. If there were 3 file outputs, perhaps error checking is missing on one or two of them. This is the first problem I have ever encountered in the Macintosh that I could not quickly find a work around for. My shining image of the Macintosh got tarnished. Interestingly, I did eventually find work arounds for the problems, and it has taken me much longer to find this sort of frustrating problem than with any other machine I have used before. This speaks well of the overall useability and quality of the system (The IBM PC was so frustrating to me that I felt like throwing it out the window in the first 5 minutes of use!) Perhaps I will elaborate on this topic in a subsequent submission to info-mac. I hope this stuff is dealt with in the next release. When will *I* be able to get the next release at my friendly Cambridge Massachusetts Computer Store? Maybe I should become a Macintosh Developer??? William D. Cattey wcattey@bbnf