chuq@plaid.UUCP (06/18/87)
I've worked a bit with Word Tools, and gotten some more information from Aegis, the publisher. In general, I'm pretty happy with it, although I haven't really started stretching it and I have to wait until the latest deadline is out to start building my punctuation translators. Aegis has told me that they are aware of the bugs that I mentioned in my first message: o the preferences file is misnamed on the distribution floppy when used from hard disks. o There are bugs reading Word 3.0 files. They told me that a new release would be forthcoming, and that all registered users (you DO turn in those cards, don't you?) will be notified and updated free of charge. Aegis should be congratulated for this policy. With the exception of the Word bug, it seems pretty solid. I've noticed a few glitches in their character translation tables, but I'm not sure yet if that is the way the default punctuation definitions are set up or whether they're hard coded. For instance, typeset quotes and em-dashes both seem to be defined as characters and not punctuation -- so when you look at the word list, you see things like "-- Harry" and "'foobar". The word list sorts in dictionary (caseless) order, but counts capitalized words and non-capitalized words separately, so you will have an entry for "A" right next to an entry for "a" -- I'm not sure yet whether I consider this a bug or a feature, because both ways have merits (for instance, what do you do with the word "may" as in "Mother said I may go home now" and "May" the month?) Immediately, the most useful things I've found are the counting features and the ability to check out the extremes -- it will show the n longest sentences, the n longest paragraphs, help you find the really long words and phrases, and generally give you a feel for when your prose is going out of control. It gives you a general reading level counter for the work, but since I don't know what studies were used to generate I don't know how they're coming up with it -- the numbers seem pretty reasonable, and running different samples through it with different writing styles it looks like, in comparison with each other, things look about right. I still want to look at the background for the numbers, though. The style section has a lot of potential. The default style sheet it uses is reasonably good, and will help you find the most obvious warts in your writing. Don't believe it explicitly, though -- it will, for instance, try to put commas in ALL of your numbers, including things like zip codes and telephone numbers. It is a suggestion engine, not a master. I really like the idea of being able to modify and tweak the styles for my own quirks. As soon as I find out what they are, I plan on adding them. So Word Tools is cheap (under $100), it's fun, it is useful, and will probably be MORE useful when I have time to customize it. It looks like the company is behind it and is working to fix the initial problems (which are minor). If you do a fair amount of writing with your Mac, you should take a look at it and see if it'll help -- you may find you don't use it a lot, but if nothing else it gives you an automated tool to help you decide if you're coming up with new bad habits in your writing. chuq Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ Now, where did my ex-wife put my Fairy Dust?