c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young (WHY)) (12/01/87)
<It's them line-eaters. They do *strange* things to a man!> Imperfect words about WordPerfect... Okay. First of all, WP for the Atari is version 4.1, as opposed to the most current version for the PC, which is 4.2. As far as I can tell, most of the features are the same, and are supported equally well. The dictionary and the thesaurus are both huge, and contain many words that I did not expect them to (Berkeley, Oakland, eugene, etc.). The print program supports 250 different printers already, and you can add your own. You can print out the parallel port, the serial port, the MIDI port(!), or to a device file. However, as good as all that sounds, the program is not without its share of bugs. The people at WordPerfect have obviously not learned how to deal with GEM perfectly, and this shows. Here's a list of bugs found so far, in one night of just messing around with it: When a menu is dropped down, you can still type, and one character will overrun your menu. You can changed the default shape of the text cursor, but if you do, it screws up the positioning, so it is placed half a line above your text. Setting the time and date after you enter the program will not work. It reported the year as 2028. Some of the keyboard equivalents to menu commands don't seem to work. WP will sometimes crash or lock up without any apparent reason. It does this more often on a monochrome system than on a color one. Occasionally, WP just will not access a disk correctly. It then pops up a dialog box which is missing part of its text. Resizing the window a few times can cause the text to be misplaced, as can using the speller or thesaurus. WP and its subsidiary programs may set up a RAMdisk, and will sometimes exit without deallocating the memory, eating up ~300K. There are also some minor problems which are not real bugs, but should probably be fixed: When doing dictionary searches, the mouse pointer does not turn into a bee or anything to indicate that it's busy. These can sometimes be quite time consuming, so it would be more consistent with the GEM interface (and the rest of the program) to give a more visual indication of busy-ness. Some of the Help files seem to refer to IBM keyboards (Page Up and Down, for example). The documentation seems to be one revision ahead of the program, as there are features mentioned in the docs which don't exist in the program (such as the use of the 6x6 font). The Goto Shell function is currently unimplemented. And of course, not everything will fit on one disk. This is one of those programs that really make it worth having a hard disk (I know, because mine is at the shop right now). Of course, on the plus side, I have to say that $99 for such a package is not bad at all. The documentation is thoroughly written, professionally typeset, and just brings such a touch of... of... IBM to the whole thing. Also, the program is just loaded with features that I haven't even explored yet. It does everything I want, and more. It's definitely something to look at. Also, it's not as slow as I had first thought, and it does show the text WYSIWYG, except for right justification. Plus, once you send in your registration card, there is toll free support and minimal cost upgrades. Disclaimer: I'm not associated with \ /\ /arner the latest revision of SANITY. \/ \_/ Address: ucbvax!dorothy!c9c-eh |oung c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU \__|
ANKH@cup.portal.com (12/03/87)
Warner...where did you get WP for $99 ?? The lowest price I have seen quoted anywhere is $175. I'd like to know who has it for that price. Thanks, ANKH