ARNOLDR%GRIN1.BITNET@cunyvm.cuny.edu (Arnold,Robert C Jr.) (11/12/90)
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I saw your post about Excellence! 2.0 and I was wondering if you could fill
me
in on a few things?
1. How much is it on Educational discount?
2. How do I get the discount?
3. How well does it handle graphics?
4. How is its overall speed?
5. How does that virtual memory for a document work? (Good/bad/so so)
I don't know if you have ever used Pen Pal before...but if so could you
tell me
how you think it rates in comparison.
I appreciate any response you can give me.
Mark Brown
CCUBROW@INDSVAX1.BITNET
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This was one of several messages I got in reply to my question
about converting postscript fonts to work with excellence 2.0.
I tried E-mail to these people, but all but one bounced; also I
thought that there might be enough interest to justify posting
my replies. If you do not agree, sorry for the bandwidth waste...
Excellence reminds me greatly of MS-word for the mac. The ruler looks
about
the same, and it attempts to be true wyswyg. The typing speed, cursor
control speed, and overall speed are adequete, but not exceptional on a
stock
amiga 2000, I imagine there would be no speed complaints on an accellerated
amiga. The spell checking speed, thesoreses (sp.) speed, and etc. are
quite
fast, even on a plain 2000, though I think the package checks for extra
memory and uses it to speed up those functions if possible (and I have 3
meg. BTW, it only uses 1.5 or so, at most). The main complaint, as I said
in my posting, is the delete speed. It is slow, just like normal cursor
movement using the arrow keys, but unlike the arrow keys it doesn't stop
when
you let go of the key--it continues to delete for whatever (probably large)
number of characters it stored up while the key was auto-repeating. It is
a
good package though, and seems to have more features than MS-word (though I
am not a MS-word guru), and probably more than wordperfect (plus it is MUCH
nicer feeling than wordperfect, except for the backspace/delete problem).
It
seems to handle pictures fairly well, though not as good as prowrite. The
postscript support is nicer than any other amiga wordprocesser I've used,
but
I would like to have more fonts included standard. They do include a
program that takes professional page postscript fonts and converts them for
use with
excellence, but this is an expensive way to get fonts if you don't already
own pro page...
If I remember correctly, I paid ~$100 for the Ed. discount priced package.
You must send them some kind of proof that you are a student/teacher/
something simuler and state that you want the educational pricing. I faxed
them my order with a photocopy of my student ID and they shipped the order
the same day via first-class mail.
I haven't used graphics very often in my documents, but it seems to do a
fairly good job at importing them. It allows resizing and cropping, but
does
treat an image as a single character, so you can't flow text around an
image
like you can in Prowrite (I think).
Its overall speed is ok, but not great :-) It is quite fast considering
all
of its features, but on my stock 2000 it is definetely *not* a speed demon.
I imagine it would be quite fast on an accellerated amiga. The only part
of
the program that I find painful is backspacing and deleting (using the
backspace and delete keys, not the mouse-selection delete function, which
is
quite fast). It seems to auto-repeat about 5 times faster than it moves on
screen, which leads to a lot of accidental deleting; just moving the cursor
around with the arrow keys is also slow, but it doesn't store up keystrokes
like the others do. Mouse speed, reformating speed, spell checking speed,
thesoreses(sp.) speed, and etc are all fast.
I haven't ever set up the virtual memory handler (it is optional to the
program, and doesn't use it by default). It seems to be a decent
implementation---you get to choose the maximum size of the document space,
and can page out to floppy, hard drive, ram: ;-) or whatever.
I have never used Pen Pal, though I looked at it before buying Excellence!.
From my understanding, Pen Pal didn't have postscript support, which I
really
wanted. Excellence! seems to have pretty much every feature I could
imagine
or want (so far), though it would be nice if it came with more postscript
fonts standard.
hope this helps,
rob
-------------------------end of reply----------------------------
Please excuse any weird spacing, I am using cut and paste from a cmdtool on
a sun to edt on a rlogined vax.
by the way, I am still looking for pointers in converting postscript fonts
to work with excellence.
Rob Arnold
Arnoldr@Grin1.bitnet
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