kiely@lownlab.UUCP (James P. Kiely) (01/14/87)
I am planning to buy "WordMarc" (a.k.a. "Muse") as the WYSIWYG word processor for a VAX 11/730. Does anyone have any experience with this package? Is there anything inherently good or bad about this particular word processor? Would anyone strongly suggest that I buy another package rather than "WordMarc"? Thanks. -- NAME: James P. Kiely USPS: Kiely Laboratories USENET: ...!harvard!lownlab!kiely P.O. Box 624 PHONE: +1 617 782 4136 Allston, MA 02134-0624
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (01/15/87)
In article <325@lownlab.UUCP> kiely@lownlab.UUCP (James P. Kiely) writes: > I am planning to buy "WordMarc" (a.k.a. "Muse") as the > WYSIWYG word processor for a VAX 11/730. I assume you are talking about the product marketed by MARC Software. We tried it out a couple of months ago and were terribly disappointed. Our requirement was to print technical stuff on an Apple LaserWriter, which they claimed they supported. At least at the time, that was somewhere between a joke and an outright lie. Their idea of support for an Apple LaserWriter was to flip the switch to Diablo 630 emulation mode. When we heard this, we were horrified and told them that what we meant by "supporting the LaserWriter" was "producing PostScript output". They told us that they were working on it and would send us a preliminary version of the PostScript driver. Everything from the word "go" was a mess. First, we couldn't read the tape they sent us (on either of two tape drives). It turned out to be a combination of the block size on the tape not matching the documentation (figured that one out with trial and error using "dd") and parts of the tape being unformatted. When I convinced them the tape must be bad, they sent us another one, but we couldn't read that either. It took about 3 or 4 tapes before we got one that we could even load. They muttered something about how they didn't have a tape drive on their Sun system and had to move the files to a Celerity (which had a strange notion of block size) and there was something wrong with the drive, etc. I can understand a drive having hardware problems, but to send 3 bad tapes in a row to a customer doesn't exactly inspire confidence. I suppose there is nothing exactly wrong with it, but the tape turned out to be in cpio format, with each of the files contained on the tape being a tar image! I guess that's legal, but why bother with that brain damage? There are lots of systems that come with cpio *or* tar, not both, so this seems pretty stupid to me. Well, anyway, we have both, so that wasn't a real problem. Next problem. The code only comes as binaries (OK, OK, I'm spoiled; you can't really take points off for not distributing source on a commercial product) so configuration is rather inflexible. There are several directories built in which didn't match our disk organization. We wanted to put the stuff in /usr/local/{bin,lib}, but the binaries expected to find the stuff in /usr/wmc. A few symlinks took care of that, so no big deal. Worse was this monster shell script they had for installing the software with a cute, but totally unnecessary, set of menus that got in the way more than they helped (Nested menus in sh? Give me a break!) I don't remember the details, but we had to edit the script to get it to work on our system -- there were some assumptions made that symlinks couldn't fix. The list of problems with installation goes on and on. For example, the distribution comes with a bunch of terminal drivers standard, and there is a menu item for loading the optional drivers. On the Sun tape, the driver for the Sun is on the "optional" part -- this caused us rather a bit of confusion. I will give them credit for trying, however. It just happened that about the time I was getting fed up (which was actually fairly early on, but I kept at it to humor some people), there was a big Unix show in New York. They arranged to have the guy who was working on the PostScript driver get assigned "show duty" so I had a chance to meet him in person. Since their flight back wasn't until the evening of the day after the show closed, he even spent the morning at our site, helping us get the software up. Several brownie points for sending a programmer to a customer site to do the install. Unfortunately, these are the only points MARC gets, and they are not enough by far. Would it have made a difference if the 'Niners got a second field goal against the Giants? It turns out that they don't even have a PostScript printer in house (or didn't at the time), and were working largely from documentation and borrowing time on other customer's machines for testing! Needless to say, the driver didn't work very well and the guy spent most of the morning patching it together. Once it did get running, it was a disaster. Seems that WordMARC can't deal with proportionally spaced type; it's designed for fixed-width fonts like on daisy wheel printers. The PostScript driver was originally set up to use Courier. When I pointed out that we wanted to use the other fonts, they made it use Times or Helvetica, but the software still did the filling calculations as if the type was monospaced! Needless to say, the results were not satisfactory. One of our requirements is being able to set math and scientific stuff. They claim they can do this, but what they offer is pretty sad. You designate a shift character (I think they use "[" by default). Then, to do alpha, you say [a[, or something like that. That's not too bad until you have to start remembering that a square root sign is [%[ and an integral is [@[ (or whatever they are). They are real proud of the fact that they can do 15 levels of sub and super scripts (and this kind of marketing bullshit even impressed some of the people here, much to my grief) but the results are so horrible looking as to not even be readable, let along aesthetically pleasing. If you want a good laugh, ask to see some samples of what they can do in math mode. OK, let's assume they have solved the minor problems of getting the software to work, and making the installation reasonably painless. You still have a piece of software that I don't think is worth the effort. For some fairly large number of thousands of dollars, you get something which can fill and adjust monospaced type and center lines. It's got some sort of on-line help, menu-guided front end, but I didn't think that worked very well. There are also some commands for searching and moving text, but nothing out of the ordinary. For my money, if that's all the functionality you need you will be much better off with some flavor of Emacs in auto fill mode. I think even the commercial versions of Emacs are cheaper than WordMARK, and you can always go for one of the PD versions, such as gnu. If you need anything much fancier than that, WordMARK just won't do it for you anyway, and you'll do better to go with something else. Frankly, other than InterLeaf (which is pretty wonderful but I can't even begin to afford it) I don't know of any WYSIWYG systems currently available that I would want to use. Some of the Xerox systems look pretty good from what little I've seen of them, but as far as I know, Xerox machines don't talk to Unix machines, so we didn't look too closely. Certainly, I don't know of any worthwhile WYSIWYG's that run under a general-purpose timesharing OS on an ASCII terminal. If you find one, let me know -- we've spent a lot of time looking. What we're experimenting with now is TeX, previewed on Sun workstations. We're eagerly awaiting VorTeX, which as far as I understand it, is a sort-of WYSIWYG version of TeX. Maybe the answer is some flavor of MacWrite/Draft/Paint/Word/Whatever on an Apple Macintosh (which we will also be playing with shortly). While I have fought fiercely to keep dedicated word processors out of this place, I do recognize that in some environments they are probably the right solution. There are some people around here who swear by Wang systems for scientific manuscripts, so I suppose they might be worth looking into. Meanwhile, we sent back the WordMARC tapes and we're still struggling along with troff and friends (eqn, tbl, bib, etc) and hoping something better comes along that we can afford. -- Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 "you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"
usenet@soma.bcm.tmc.edu (USENET maintenance) (01/19/87)
We have been running WordMARC on our Masscomp system for over two years.
We find it useful and easy to use, but it does lack some features that
limits us. As roy@phri has already noted, WordMARC has no concept of
proportional printing. It also cannot handle a wide variety of font
sizes. It has no concept of a "page" and that limits its usefulness
with conventional laser printers. It can be an administrative nightmare.
It has its own database of terminal and printer types and each available
terminal line must be defined for WordMARC to know what to do with it.
However, the menu system does make it easy to use. It does have the
capabilites of dealing with special characters. It does produce
a document file that can be shipped from UNIX to VMS to MS-DOS or
wherever a version of WordMARC is available and be used without alteration.
It does handle large document assembly in a reasonable fashion.
Also, I get the impression that the people at MARC are really trying to
meet the demands of their sophisticated customers. It just takes them time
to develop a plan of attack.
In short, if your user base is too busy to become fluent in page
description languages or troff commands, WordMARC is a good choice. But,
you do lose something.
Stan uucp:{shell,rice,cuae2}!soma!sob Opinions expressed here
Olan domain:sob@rice.edu or sob@soma.bcm.tmc.edu are ONLY mine &
Barber CIS:71565,623 BBS:(713)790-9004 noone else's.