193ellis@bunzel.qal.berkeley.edu (Michael K Ellis) (03/16/89)
I recently had the dubious pleasure to find a rather annoying bug for the Wordperfect word processor for the Mac. I was running WP v. 1.0.1 on system 6.0.2 on an unmodified SE 20HD using the On Cue launcher when this little problem cropped up. I was editing an endnote and couldn't find a particular character, so I went over to the apple folder and got out the Key Caps DA. I found the character, closed the DA and edited the footnote. Now then, WP requires that you use the Close command to get out of the endnote editor, the same Close command that shuts open files. When I selected close it gave me the "Do you want to save changes to?" menu. I noticed that this looked funny, and tried to get back to the main file, but I couldn't. I finally chose Close and saved the changes, figuring that it wouldn't erase any of my main file, and I could just reopen the file and keep editing. Wrong! Wordperfect evidently got confused when I opened up the DA, and mistook the end note for the file itself. When I saved the file not only did it take the footnote as my entire file, but it erased all the timed backup copies! AAAAGH! I lost a five page paper two and one half hours before the damn thing was due. I had to manually retype from memory and needless to say, the finished paper was less than desirable. Similar tests seem to indicate that this will happen anytime you are editing one of the submenus and open up a DA. The only solution is to _quickly_ restart the computer so that it doesn't make a timed backup consisting of only the header/footer/footnote/ endnote and then restart from one of the other timed backup copies. If you have any comments on this problem or a better solution please email them to me. Oh yeah, if you're wondering why the hell I'm running Wordperfect: I got the thing for $99 with full documentation, warranty, tech support, etc. It was literally a deal I couldn't pass up. Besides, it's not a bad program, but it does take a while to get used to some of its quirks. I hope the next version is somewhat better. Michael K. Ellis 193ellis@snowy.qal.berkeley.edu "Is everybody happy?" Machiavelli (pseudo quote. I found a better one but no one I know speaks Totoro.)