info-mac@uw-beaver (12/15/84)
From: gvax.chow@Cornell.ARPA (Christopher S. Chow) From mazur@harvard.ARPA Thu Dec 13 15:18:24 1984 Message-Id: <8412132018.AA04821@CORNELL-GVAX.ARPA> Received: from harvard.ARPA by CORNELL-GVAX.ARPA (4.30/4.30) id AA04821; Thu, 13 Dec 84 15:18:00 est Date: Thu, 13 Dec 84 15:19:01 EST From: mazur@harvard.ARPA (Eric Mazur) To: chow@cornell-gvax.ARPA Subject: MacWrite 3.17 Status: R I think those words were not litteraly mine, but version 3.17 is definitely a "dangerous" version, which should not be used for any serious purposes (such as lecture notes in my case). The most serious "bug" is the following. Try typing a document of a few pages containing several font-changes (e.g. for eqs.). Then scroll back and make a few font-changes at the end of a line, and then immediately after that (beforethe cursor has come back) reposition the cursor to a position earlier in the same line (are you still following?). Two out of three times the cursor will NEVER come back! You will hear a lot of disk spinning, but that's about all that will happen, until... you reset your Macintosh, which is a very bad thing to do if your disk is spinning (the result is that you either lose the system file or the file you were working on). This happened several times to me, it took a while before I understood when it was happening, and even now I am not sure I could reproduce it right away.. Anyway several other people on info-mac have already been complaining about this. Other disturbing bugs: italic characters at the end of a line are truncated when printed. You will only see this if you actually get to printing, because a) you first have survive the typing, i.e. hope that the cursor will not disappear, and b) you have to have enough time to print. Yes that is another serious problem with MW3.17: the speed of printing is reduced to approximately zero (1 character/second?), and I have had two 10 page documents, which would bomb after printing the fifth page, and -this is even worse- permanently damage the document. For small documents these problems -apart from the slow printing; please restore the spooling- do not occur, and everything seems fine. Very nice is in particular the possibility to fix the line-spacing, unfortunate though that overlapping is not possible: a cut-off will occur when you have sub- of super-scripts in the same fontsize. All things considered I would not recommend anyone to use version 3.17. Going back to my old version seemed like an improvement (what a difference in speed)! To "go back" there are two possibilities: 1) Save your file as "Text only", exit 3.17. Open with your old version and reformat (tedious), or 2) Copy your whole document to the clipboard, exit 3.17, enter old version, and paste (only possible if your document is not too large, otherwise you will have to do it in pieces. By y the way, why are you susing 3.17? The versions floating around presently are 3.2, 3.25 and 3.5! If you really need a disk based editor right away I would try to get one of those.. Good luck! Eric mazur@harvard.ARPA P.S.: Maybe you should forward this letter to info-mac as an extra warning (although there actually have been quite a few; I neglected these just like you and many others here at Harvard).