rsvp@eleazar.dartmouth.edu (R. Scott V. Paterson) (05/25/89)
Can someone tell me what makes Ready-Set-Go 4.5 so much better than 4.0a? -rsvp
chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (05/25/89)
>Can someone tell me what makes Ready-Set-Go 4.5 so much better >than 4.0a? Lots of new features. fractional point kerning. non-integer font sizes (I've done things 9/10.5 point, for instance). paragraph feathering. Color support. Tagged text support. Various user interface improvements (tabs still suck). That's the good side. The bad side: it's huge, it eats memory, it's slow. You better hope you're on a MacII. Where I used to be able to generate a 60 page newsletter in an 800K partition, I had trouble with a 28 page document in an 1100K partition. What's worse is that if RSG 4.5 runs out of memory, it throws up and dies -- and it will, because I've isolated what seems to be a memory leak in the text handling procedures. Do a lot of text operations and you'll see the memory allocation continue to grow -- until it hits the end, when you'll see the application die and perhaps take the system (and in one case, my hard disk) with it. I argued with Letraset about this one for a long while and finally gave up. It's slow. It downloads code into your printer for some of the advanced features -- which means that it may not be able to print documents formatted in 4.0a if you use downloadable fonts. If you use a printer without a lot of memory (like a LaserWriter+) you may as well give up on downloadable fonts unless you're running Laserwriter 6.0 (which is needed to make the 'unlimited downloadable fonts' option work correctly). All in all, I've now published two and a half issues of OtherRealms on RSG 4.5 as well as a number of smaller things. (The half issue was one that I had partially done when I got the upgrade, tried to convert and had to switch *back* to 4.0 because 4.5 wouldn't print the damn thing). As strong a supporter of RSG as I've been over the years, I'm switching to pagemaker. I don't feel that any of the traditional advantages of RSG over PM still exist: it's not cheaper, it isn't more effective on lower end hardware, it is still easier to use, but it isn't as flexible. It used to be that RSG was much stronger in longer documents and with text-oriented stuff. Neither is true any more -- and PageMaker now imports Word style sheets, which RSG doesn't. Everything that made me support RSG 3.0 and 4.0 has been changed in 4.5a as Letraset abandons their original market in an attempt to take over the grail of beating PageMaker. Add to that the *constant* system crashes I've been having and all they've done is convince me that I might as well run PageMaker, since instead of removing all the strengths of the product, the Aldus folks have focused on fixing their weaknesses and all of my original complaints about *that* product have been resolved. Unless you're working with a large screen, lots of memory and a MacII, you'll be happier with RSG 4.0 with anything except small documents. If you use it, like I do, for newsletters, you'll probably run into problems unless you use a large memory partition. Unless, of course, Letraset decided to fix the memory failure problems without bothering to tell me. Chuq Von Rospach =|= Editor,OtherRealms =|= Member SFWA/ASFA chuq@apple.com =|= CI$: 73317,635 =|= AppleLink: CHUQ [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.] This is....The Voice....of USENET....in special English. 1300UTC on 11525.