kawakami@.berkeley.edu (John Kawakami) (04/10/91)
Question: When will FSM GDOS be out, and how will I be able to get it to print with a DeskJet 500? Why: Because I need to know if I should shell out the money for the Migraph GDOS printer driver. BTW, FSM GDOS exists in some form. I got a letter from Goldleaf (of WordFlair fame) that was printed on a SLM605 with FSM GDOS. It looked VEERY nice. I sense two possible bugs: 1) the spacing of the letters is not perfect, 2) the capital letters are blacker than the lowercase letters. These might just be bugs in the fonts. The 605's output is very nice; FSM's rasterization appears to be very good as well. Another BTW, they used a Palatino or Palatino-like font. Review: Wordflair II is very nice. Problems: as usual, it's slowed down by Atari's GDOS and VDI and AES; still not enough drawing tools; the screen bitmap is not buffered, so updates are unnecessarily slow; only one edit window; no word processor file conversion utilities. Assets: this is the only word processor of its kind on the ST (the object oriented model is perfect for modern document management; the only other program I have used like this is framemaker); it's faster than most other ST word processors which have half the features; comes with a graphics file conversion .ACC; has dictionary, thesaurus, and hypenation dictionary (all are based on digital Webster, so Goldleaf went outside for those modules); FSM GDOS compatible; pretty good database management which works better for mailmerge than the usual db-program-or-textfiledatabase + wordprocessor combination. WF is geared mostly toward writing dynamic documents, that is, documents that will change over time, or change depending on who is supposed to read it. This is the opposite of most word processors, which are geared toward static documents like research papers and books (well, some can be used to write books). I will continue to use WordPerfect for some things, but anything with a table, graphics, or mailmerge will definitely end up on Wordflair. Is it worth $125? Yes. John Kawakami kawakami@ocf.berkeley.edu Amateur Crank! ucbvax!ocf.berkeley.edu!kawakami