tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) (01/05/89)
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq%plaid@Sun.COM) previously posted several gripes about Ready,Set,Go! 4.5. Here are a couple more: 1. RSG 4.5 appears to have *serious* problems with any font that doesn't include a width table in its FOND resource. This includes all of the standard Apple fonts except the PostScript screen fonts (Times etc.) Try the following experiment: make a text box, select bold Geneva, and type a few words. The way the words shift around is truly remarkable (use the largest size of Geneva you have to make the effect most obvious). Also, cursor positioning in the text gets very strange. It appears that RSG has forgotten how to calculate widths of modified (bold, extended, condensed) fonts unless the FOND resource tells it how. I also saw some strange behavior with underlined text (like interword space going to zero), but can't reproduce it right now. Since I don't use PostScript fonts, this problem alone makes 4.5 unusable. Perhaps I could fix it by running all my fonts through Fontastic and creating FOND width tables, but I don't see why RSG should not be expected to cope with out-of-the-box Apple fonts. 2. Chuq mentioned that 4.5 is a tremendous memory hog, but he didn't make it clear that it is also a *disk* hog. Converting a 4.0a RSG document to 4.5 format roughly doubles the disk space occupied by the document. This is for good-size documents (tens of pages), so it's not just a question of somewhat more overhead for font tables. Does Letraset own stock in some disk drive companies??? I'd be willing to accept the resource usage in tradeoff for the new features, but until they fix the font bugs I'm staying with 4.0a. I wish I had my $50+ upgrade charge back. If I had bought 4.5 at full price I'd be REALLY annoyed. -- tom lane Internet: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu UUCP: <your favorite internet/arpanet gateway>!zog.cs.cmu.edu!tgl BITNET: tgl%zog.cs.cmu.edu@cmuccvma --
chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (01/06/89)
>2. Chuq mentioned that 4.5 is a tremendous memory hog, but he didn't make >it clear that it is also a *disk* hog. Converting a 4.0a RSG document to >4.5 format roughly doubles the disk space occupied by the document. This is >for good-size documents (tens of pages), so it's not just a question of >somewhat more overhead for font tables. Does Letraset own stock in some >disk drive companies??? This is *not* what I've seen. My 315K 4.0a document grew to 355K. this is because the now keep font-width tables inside so you don't have line breaks changing if you change System files. Your massive growth might be related to your other problem with the fonts, but while 4.5 documents do grow somewhat, massive growth isn't typical. Chuq Von Rospach Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms chuq@sun.COM When you're up to your *ss in alligators, it's hard to remember your initial objective was to drain the swamp.