chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (01/05/89)
>>The current beta of 4.0 is very stable. Also, from what I can tell, faster >>than 3.01. >This sounds great, Chuq. Can you tell us whether it's suffered from >``program bloat'', a la Ready,Set,Go! 4.5? For those who don't know, >RSG is a wonderful program, but jumped in size from around 220K in >version 4.0 to over 500K in version 4.5. Let's put it this way. I'm quite happy with Word, and it hasn't forced me to go out and buy more memory. Since it's Beta, I don't want to talk about file sizes or memory usage since those can still change. I tried this weekend to convert OtherRealms (which is about to go to printer) from RSG 4.0a to my recently received (and much delayed. again) RSG 4.5. The problems I had sent me scurrying back to the safety of 4.0a. I've already lodged a number of glitches, problems and bugs against 4.5 in a very few hours of use, including: o a possible memory leak -- do a lot of style edits on text (select, convert bold->plain, convert plain->italic) and you run out of memory (in a 1024K Multifinder partition). Letraset's non-committal about this. The person I talked to seems to think a constantly growing memory set is normal.... o when you *do* run out of memory, RSG barfs and dies. it doesn't do the famous "I'm out of memory! save your work and quit" stuff, it just goes away and you lose your changes. Not a happy camper. No reaction from Letraset on this one, yet. o Documents that use downloadable fonts are in for a *fun* time. OtherRealms uses three (and sometimes four) downloadable fonts. Barely fits in my LW+. It printed just fine under 4.0a. Won't print in 4.5 because Letraset has to download all sorts of stuff into the Laserwriter to handle the micro-adjustment info. I could get it to print with two downloadable fonts, but not three. REALLY UNHAPPY CAMPER. They're looking at this one, but folks who don't have a hard disk on their printer are probably in for major surprises. Here's what I've found out about RSG 4.5's space and memory usage. The size of the binary almost doubled. A 32 page document that took up about 500K in 4.0a took up about 900K in 4.5. The standard 4.5 Multifinder partiion size is 1024 -- and I've blown memory in that size once already. 1200 is probably more reasonable, which makes it larger than FullWrite. To be sure, RSG 4.5 has a lot of power. It's got some real ass-kicking features that'll come in *very* handy. But it's also sucking up a *lot* more resources than it used to, and I'm not yet convinced the tradeoff -- especially the printer resources -- are going to be worth it. If I can only use 2 downloadable fonts, RSG, for all it's wonders, is useless to me. >On the other hand, at least it, unlike PageMaker, can still be >fit on a floppy disk.... Yeah, but try to *use* it on a floppy. (smart people might try to compare what I *did* say about RSG and didn't say about Word 4.0 and interpolate, but it wouldn't be fair, would it? Especially with Word still being in beta....) 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.