rcbamhl@eutrc3.urc.tue.nl (Marc Heijligers) (01/19/90)
Every Macintosh owner knows about the problem of choosing the right wordprocessor. We have seen many discussions on this topic, in all computer magazines and on the net. Everybody claims that their own word-processor is the best. However the arguments used are not always very realistic. I think the best way to judge wordprocessors is to design a layout you use very often, and not all those 'whistle and bell' layouts you see very often (e.g. text floating around pictures, drawing packages in word-proc. etc.). What counts to me (and I think to most users) is the way I must handle my word-processor to obtain my layout. The layouts I use very often are the next two. A layout for articles: --------------------------------------- | A heading on the whole length | | of the page | | | | column 1 which column 2 which is | | holds text and the proceeding | | pictures of column 1 | | ... ... | | ... ... | | | --------------------------------------- A layout for reports at our University: --------------------------------------- | A heading on the whole length | | of the page | | | | Just one plain column of text with | | some formatting. For example | | paragraph numbers which have a | | negative indentation. | | ... ... | | | --------------------------------------- My headers and footers, which only contain page-number, title and chapter numbers, contain a straight line to indicate the borders of the text. Looks pretty simple, huh? I have made this layout in Word, Nisus and Full- Write Professional. I did this with some text I prepared on a piece of paper. Here are the results (Mac Plus, 4Mb, system 6.0.3., MultiFinder on, some INIT's): Nisus (version 2.0, demo): Editing is very fast in Nisus. Formatting is very fast too, however the lack of paragraph based style-sheets is a cons. If you could only search at those paragraph icons (which hold the paragraph format) and replace them with another paragraph format, this would solve the main problem. To make one big title in my first layout, I had to use the draw-layer. However, the second column did overwrite my heading. I could not solve this, and I suspect this is a bug. For my second layout it was hard to get my paragraph titles negative indented. I just had to give all the rest of the text a positive indentation, which is not very elegant. Headers and footers were easily created with the drawing layer, however Word is a lot nicer here. Nisus also is not WYSIWYG. I cannot see how the page looks in real size. It is hard to place the headers and footers in the Page Preview window. A very good point of Nisus are Cross-References. However, if you have a lot of them (which I usually have), the Search menu grows too big. Formatting was a easy job in Nisus. You do not need to pass a hundred of dialog boxes to get something done. However, you had to decide your formatting style before you started editing, because of the lack of it's style sheets. I also discovered more bugs in Nisus. The bugs look so trivial, that the program almost looks unreliable (how about a cross reference to an empty string; booom! in version 1.0 or garbage in version 2.0. Those are the kind of bugs a programmer has to intercept, just like the famous 'divide by zero bug' all programmers learn). Word (version 4.0): Editing in Word is also an easy job. However, the menu-commands involving editing are spread in all menu's, which is not practical. You can customize the Word menu's with the Command option, however I think that such a feature indicates that MicroSoft is not capable of creating a good universal interface themselves. Word has no GREP and multiple undo's, things I felt were very useful in Nisus. Also the Page Preview in Nisus looks a lot better (a separate window, which you can see while you are editing). The lack of character style-sheets and cross-references is Word's biggest problem when editing and formatting. Also indexing and making a table of contents are much better in Nisus (especially the Find/Index future is very useful). I know of WordRef and MacroMaker, but that does not solves the problem. In the first place it does not offer the features I want, and in the second place the use of them is not very user-friendly! On the other hand Word is very reliable, I haven't discovered many bugs (although some of them are very stupid. How about making a table of contents in A4; it all looks alright in the Print Preview, however when Printed all my pagenumbers have been transposed to the next line. The reason is that the tab at the right exceeds the right margin. The most bugs in Word concern printing!). The formatting of my two layouts went very well. Word offers all layout capacity to obtain the results. Word's style sheet are very good, however making a style leads you through too many dialog boxes before you get anything done. I think the user-interface of Word is one of it's biggest problems, together with the lack of some features mentioned above. FullWrite Professional (version 1.1, Dutch demo version) This one looks like a dream for any academic. However, my Mac Plus has nightmares about its speed when I am writing. One column editting is acceptable fast, when using two columns it gets terribly slow. Fullwrite's user interface is fantastic. However, the menu's are not always logically built, and sometimes they give you dialog boxes at places where you expect them in menu's (like choosing a window, show invisible characters etc.). FullWrite's style sheets are very good: finally a program which let you choose between character or paragraph based style sheets. However, with Word its style sheets you can accomplish more, like space before a para- graph, next style, based on etc.. Both layouts were no problem for FullWrite. I must say that placing the Side Bar for the main title wasn't easy (why no possibility to do it in the 'main' window instead of in a dialog box in which I can only see some numbers instead of the text). I also had some problems to get the lines in my headers and footers, in spite of its excellent drawing feature. In FullWrite I missed GREP and multiple undo's. I also missed the negative indentation for my paragraph number. It's formatting power is not as powerfull as that in Word. I really do miss that space before command Word offers. Indexing, cross-referencing etc. are all well implemented. It all is object oriented, the way the Mac is made and how its software is meant to be written and work. However, indexing in Nisus using the Search-option is much easier to do. FullWrite was the only WordProcessor which bombed two times during my work. I believe I was trying to index a cross-reference the first time. I could not reproduce the error again. The second error appeared when inserting a new ruler, and make it two columns (also not reproducable). FullWrite also does weird things with the menu-bar. On Cue doesn't work and option-DA doesn't work. I am not sure, because I have a demo version, but I cannot see any way to export files to text or MacWrite or Word docs. Anyone? There is no word-processor which 'wins'. FullWrite is good and acomplishes many needs, but it is slow and I do not like the bombs. Word misses cross-references, and I really need them. I also miss character styles. Nisus misses paragraph styles, and this makes it useless for formatting long documents. Auto figure numbering is something I miss in all these word-processors. I know there is a Nisus macro capable of doing this, but that one looks very poor. Has anyone experienced the same sort of problems? Please write! I like to hear how some problems mentioned here have been solved. Tips are welcome too. Bye, Marc Heijligers rcbamhl@eutrc3.urc.tue.nl