egv@aicchi.UUCP (Vann) (01/29/88)
Jeff, thanks so very much for responding to the comments I made concerning
FullWrite Professional. I like an awful lot of others (including yourself)
are anxious to see this product become a hit. I only hope that the folks
at Ann Arbor can catch something of the dialogue being conducted in this
forum at put our worthwhile suggestions to good use.
Let me respond with a few challenges:
- First, I continue to believe that the issue of the side bar
will give many a hearty word processing veteran a moments
pause. The concept will prove to be 'new' and its application
for doing things such as running three columns on a page begun
in two column mode will take some time to envision. It appears
however that you have more than a headstart on the field.
Having come out of a typesetting background, I was at least
familar with the term. It however took a bit of 'supposin' to
allow myself to understand sidebars as another name for things
like endnotes, footnotes, posted notes, etc.
Acutally, this is a point that really can't be argued, on the
experiences of hundreds of people will bear our either of our
theses, or perhaps neither.
- Secondly, I must have been rather vague in my explanation of
what I intended when speaking of unbalanced three (or more)
column documents, being 'trivial' in Word.
Let me begin by stating that I had in mind a TABLE that I had
created usig the side-by-side column method. Each column was
defined with a style sheet. In each style sheet I would specify
the left and right margins of the column, its type characteris-
tics, declare each to be a side-by-side paragraph and indicate
if and where vertical rules are to be printed.
The last thing you do is indicate that each columns style sheet
is to be followed by the next column's style sheet, ending with
the last column referencing the first.
It's a clever way of doing things, which was shown to me by a
colleague. It works well and does NOT require using the PREVIEW
screen as you mentioned in order to determine alignment.
- In answer to your question about the EPSF document being pasted
into a sidebar, I don't know as yet. But I will try this and
report to you later.
- The slowness, that I found was NOT in the scrolling of the
drawing once as it appeared on the logical page. But working
with it in a open drawing window, is where the slowness results.
I may have mentioned that you should always paste your images
into the sidebar only when you have no drawing window open. This
works best and is fast. In other words, DO NOT use the NEW PICT
function (or whatever its called) just open a sidebar and paste
in your graphic immediately. You do not and should not open a
drawing window, unless you have time to burn.
--
Eric Geoffrey Vann
Analysts International (Chicago Branch)
(312) 882-4673
..!ihnp4!aicchi!egvmoriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (02/02/88)
>Jeff, thanks so very much for responding to the comments I made concerning >FullWrite Professional. I like an awful lot of others (including yourself) >are anxious to see this product become a hit. I only hope that the folks >at Ann Arbor can catch something of the dialogue being conducted in this >forum at put our worthwhile suggestions to good use. I think they have been; they called me up a week ago -- said they had seen Chuq and my articles and asked if I had any further suggestions to add (I did, but emphasized which ones I thought needed to be in by the release, and which ones could wait until a later release). I suspect that if they've seen mine, they've probably read yours (I hope they have); I'd really like to have a choice at release time about whether a new chapter causes a page break or not (this may be tougher than I thought, if all the virtual memory software is based on a chapter-by-chapter scheme). Also, one of the nice things about the Word spelling checker is the "check-mark" button that allows you to check a word you typed in to replace the mis-spelled word; I don't believe the Microlytics checker allows that. Regarding the challanges, I think that most of them boil down to different personal preferences on our parts. I don't come from a typesetting background, so I associated the word "sidebars' with those funny lime-colored boxes you always see in NEWSWEEK and such; it's a pretty free-format concept to me, but I could see how it could be confusing to folks who associate "sidebar" with a very well-defined typesetting structure. As to creating a table, I see how you could prefer that in MS Word format over FullWrite, especially if you use the in-table calculation abilities Word has (these have always seemed rather useless to me -- I import them from Excel and leave it at that). For myself, I prefer FullWrite's WYSWIG method of opening three sidebars as "columns", each with a particular style sheet, and then placing these "column" sidebars into another, wider sidebar. Voila... a table. That is by far the easier method to me, but.... your mileage may vary. As to speed problems in general, I think there is a lot of that in the demo -- most of the virtual memory functionality ain't there. HOWEVER, from everything I've heard from people with gamma and new betas, doing heavy-duty word-processing AND having 1 Meg of memory is going to be clumsy. You can get by with a meg and do work in FW, but getting access to DAs (unless you're in MultiFinder, which means you've got at least 2 Megs anyway) can be rough. This isn't a complaint on my part; in several ways, this is a more powerful program than FrameMaker (and a less powerful program in others), and that kind of ability costs in hardware. But those buying it should realize that to use FullWrite to its full abilities, you're going to need more than 1 Meg of RAM (in my opinion). Thanks for the comments, Eric. PS: The rumor that FullWrite will read in MS Word 3.01 files at release time appears to be confirmed. The lack of Word 3.01 compatibility would have been a major stumbling block in FW marketing; as long as the released version is relatively bug-free (and out before May), they are really going to be tough to beat (especially when the 2-Meg SE with a 40MB drive come out -- they're just MADE for FW). PPS: Has anyone had a chance to play with the $90 beta version of WordPerfect? A friend of mine bought it, and of late has been swearing a blue streak about the number of bugs (I replied "Why do you think they call it a beta version?" and almost had a pillow shoved down my throat). She says, however, that it has a very nice user interface. "The following is not for the weak of heart or Fundamentalists." Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty CREDO: You gotta be Cruel to be Kind... <*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>
kfr@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (Karl F. Ruehr) (02/03/88)
In article <1005@aicchi.UUCP>, egv@aicchi.UUCP writes: > . . . I only hope that the folks > at Ann Arbor can catch something of the dialogue being conducted in this > forum at put our worthwhile suggestions to good use. > I have forwarded (much of) the comments on this net to some people at Ann Arbor SoftWorks. I can't promise they will read them ALL (they seem to have some coding or something keeping them busy :-), but they expressed an interest and accepted a copy of the material. They will probably NOT be responding to questions, so don't address any to me .... -- Fritz Ruehr (kfr@zippy.eecs.umich.edu)