FelineGrace@cup.portal.com (Dana B Bourgeois) (02/02/90)
[my line eater is better than your line eater...] Chris Seaman mentions several points about Desk Top publishing versus Word Processing versus Text Editing. Not having used a DTP program, some of the points are new to me. But my message was about "what I'd like to see in a text program". And I think I stand by most of original comments. See, I want the DTP program to format the text, assign fonts, scale or rotate the graphics. Maybe current programs can't do all this. That's what I'd like to see. When I am composing on the computer, I just want to be able to open a file and fill it with text. I want lots of ways to move the curser, move blocks of text, delete text, etc. BAsically something like EMacs or vi. Now once I have all this text in a file, I want to import it into my (mythical) DTP. How about if I outline a box that represents a half page column and then click the menu item that says 'fill the box with text'? Then I outline the other half of the page and click on 'scale picture into box'. Voila! I have a column with picture. Create another box at the top of the text column, select a font, type the title into a string requester, and then the title is scaled to fit in the box using the selected font. That is how I would want to do my word processing. My real point is that in word processing, you type and format at the same time. Paragraphs and justification and pages and stuff. I want to do the grunt work of creation - the typing and block moving and deleting and re-typing without worrying about how the text looks. Once I have the words, I want to only focus on How It Looks. Purely a block, format, page, margin, column, paragraph series of operations. And since I want to deal with the text as a filled object like a page or column, add in graphics handling too. Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Video, now I want to see Deluxe Text. :) Really, am I the only one who wants two different programs. One to specialize in the content of what I say and one to specialize in how it looks when people read it. Dana Bourgeois @ cup.portal.com