jacobson@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (02/24/89)
Well yesterday I finally got my copy of Pagestream after a year. I had actually given up ever seeing it. Only two good things can be said about it One is that it does a good job of making decent output for a 9 pin Epson LX 800 I use. Second the poscript file you can creat with it transfers beautifully to my Mac at work and I get a nice copy on my Laserwriter. Thats about all I find good with it. Flame on: The bad news is that otherwise the program is a piece of junk. It is so bug ridden as to be nearly useless. Even Wordperfect in its early days was never as buggy and prone to wierd lock ups, GURUs and such. As others have already mentioned the screen display has a tendency to go wierd. I find that it gets confused, messed up when I select certain modes and it tries to refresh the display. Twice when I used the zoom mode the screen went all wierd and garbled like I remember seeing in the days of programs that could not use fast ram, but then I tried again and zoom worked fine. When I flow text around graphics the flow gets all weird sometimes and I have to move the side scroll bar to get the display refreshed so that the text will flow properly around the graphics. It looks to me like they don't know how to deal with Amiga screen graphics such as refreshing the screen display, and such. The requesters for file operations are weird, and very non-standard. Other requestors have so many ways of interacting with them that they often act very flaky. The program is supposed to read in WordPerfect files but will not, crashing with a visit to the Guru every time I try to read the file. The file import feature correctly recognizes the file as WordPerfect but then crashes when I try to load it. I could go on, but you get the picture. I am not happy at all with the program and whish I had took the $100 upgrade offer in September for Professonal Page. I took a chance for the $50 "upgrade" from pagesetter to this junk and I guess I got what I payed for. How can they even release such a poorly finnished product. If this is the finnished result of getting rid of all the bugs, what did the product look like a year ago???? Anyway I do not reccomment the product to anyone in its current state. It has lots of nice features but the flakey and bug-ridden interface nearly makes it unusable or at least unreliable (you don't know when something will go weird with the screen display or a guru will visit you!) Russ Jacobson jacobson@uiucuxe jacobson%uiucuxe@a.cs.uiuc.edu jacobson%uiucuxe@uiuc.csnet [ihnp4,pur-ee,convex]uiucdcs!uiucuxc!uiucuxe!jacobson