ruslan@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Robin C. LaPasha) (12/06/88)
Flame time - hit 'n' now if you aren't still looking over WPs.. I just got off the phone to the tech support for the excellence! word processor/etc.. excellence! HAD seemed like a nice product - Postscript, supported Amiga fonts too, etc.. And the manual contains the [para]phrase "excellence! fully supports all international keymaps." Great, I thought - I can make my bilingual fonts using high-bit ascii and get at them with the alt key via my custom keymaps... No such thing. With my custom keymap, I got only low-bit ASCII, no matter what keys I hit. Well, you can get the accented vowels in usaX, by doing the dead-key trick (such as alt-d, then the letter, etc.) - but you can't get at the rest of the high-bit ASCII stuff with usaX or any other keymap in excellence!. Is this strange? Well, yes. Notepad (snort!) has no problem with the WHOLE keymap (mine included.) Neither does WordPerfect (8/10/88 ver.), which doesn't seem to care whether the character (Topaz only, but the whole set) is printable or not. (The CLI doesn't take them, but that's probably because of control codes all over the place ...) So, I explained this to the tech. I said (more or less) go ahead and try to get an alt-d, alt-t, or alt-p. (Dorn, thorn, etc.) First he tried to tell me that Notepad uses a special keymap or font. Uh huh. Sure. Then, when I explained that WordPerfect didn't have any problem either, he had me hold the line ... then came up with a "solution": get the letters I want via a search- and-replace operation stored in the glossary, or something of the sort. (How I was to tell the glossary about the letters that weren't available, I don't know...) The kicker - "But that isn't 'fully supporting all international keymaps,' like it says in your manual!" "Sure it is - if you do the search-and-replace function, that's HOW we support the international keymaps." I tried to explain that if it didn't support the keymap in the normal, Amiga way, then they could hardly call it support... and got nowhere with the guy. I mention this to all to try and help out: 1) those (especially outside the US) who may have wanted parts of those other keymaps that for one reason or another excellence! chooses not to support; and 2) those like myself trying to build and use other keymaps. If anyone knows of a word processor that: a.) accepts any Amiga fonts; and b.) accepts any Amiga keymaps - please let me know (last I heard, ProWrite also breaks keymaps. Sigh.). With support like that, who needs real features?! Robin LaPasha ruslan@ecsvax.uncecs.edu -- Robin LaPasha |"When there is no cat, ruslan@ecsvax.uncecs.edu |the mice dance the horo" - Bulgarian proverb