chow@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Christopher Chow) (04/14/88)
Has anyone had extensive experience with Word Perfect 1.0 (the release version)? I've recently had a chance to play around with it for a while, and while I think it has some good points, I'm disappointed. One immediate thing I discovered is that while it can convert text files nicely, WP seems to have some problems converting MacWrite files and massive problems with Word 3.01 files. Some Word files would convert perfectly, while during conversion of other Word files I would get the following dialog box stating twice that an error occur, id = <blank>. Once during a conversion attempt at a Word file Word Perfect crashed and alot of wild disk i/o occured on my hard disk. So far it appears that the hard disk contents were not damaged so it apparently got stuck in a loop doing random seeks and reads across the disk. Word Perfect does have nice crash recovery features. Your files are checkpointed to a temp file during the session and should you crash, the next tim you restart Word Pefect you're allowed to grab the contents of the temp file. Multiple temp files are created if you've worked on several files simultaneously during your session. The only thing that bothers me is that my experience with trying to convert Word files leads me to believe the Word Pefect is not rock steady. I'd rather have a solid WP w/o crash recovery featues than an pseudo-stable one with crash recovery. [I've also gotten one crash with out of memory error on a pretty small file - Tech Note 81 - Disk Caching - the standard Multifinder size of 600K dosen't seem to cut it.] Finally, some opinions: The menu structure is not nicely done...its complex and overly relies upon heirical (sp) menus. The program is slow in my opinion, and certain things are un-Maclike. For instance, if you do an select all from a submenu of the edit menu, your insertion point and view are shifted to the end of the document. The program allows you to customize several features of it, however, its not extensive enough. For example, you can change the various colors which Word Pefect uses if you're in a Mac II w/ 8-bit video. Unfortunately, when you change the text selection color you also change the cursor (I-beam) color. This way, its impossible to use a nice shade of light blue for selection (which is what I normally use), along with a black cursor (light blue cursors are much harder to see than a black one). In fact, this is kind of un-Maclike. Why allow changing of the text selection color within Word Pefect when the standard supplied Color cdev from Apple already does this? All things considered, I don't like this word processor. Now, when is FullWrite really going to ship? Disclaimer: All this comes from using the release version of Word Perfect for only about an hour on a Mac II w/ 2MB of memory and Multifinder. Christopher Chow /---------------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Internet: chow@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (128.84.248.35 or 128.84.253.35) | | Usenet: ...{uw-beaver|ihnp4|decvax|vax135}!cornell!batcomputer!chow | | Bitnet: chow@crnlthry.bitnet | | Phone: 1-607-253-6699 Address: 7122 N. Campus 7, Ithaca, NY 14853 | | Delphi: chow2 PAN: chow | \---------------------------------------------------------------------------/
whiteheada@byuvax.bitnet (04/16/88)
Make sure that your "release" is dated 14 April because the company recalled all of the 4 April ones. They shipped the final version on the 14th. That one corrects some of the importing problems that you found. Armand Whitehead Brigham Young University h