jim@xios.XIOS.UUCP (James Tinkess) (02/03/88)
*****LINE EAT******** A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Does anyone on the net use mince? I heard it was a very nice editor. thanks...
dow@wjh12.harvard.edu (Dominik Wujastyk) (02/08/88)
In article <456@xios.XIOS.UUCP> jim@xios.UUCP (Jim Tinkess) writes: >A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style >editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Mark of the Unicorn are still in business, in 3rd street, Cambridge, MA, I believe. They market a word processor called FinalWord II, which is a Scribe/Emacs derivative which runs on PC/AT machines, and is said to be very powerful. It is one of the few word processors that can drive a Compugraphic 8000 typesetter. I don't know whether FW II is derived from MINCE. Dominik -- bitnet: user DOW on the bitnet node HARVUNXW arpanet: dow@wjh12.harvard.edu csnet: dow@wjh12.harvard.edu uucp: ...!ihnp4!wjh12!dow
tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody) (02/09/88)
In article <456@xios.XIOS.UUCP> jim@xios.UUCP (Jim Tinkess) writes: >*****LINE EAT******** >A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style >editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Does anyone on the >net use mince? I heard it was a very nice editor. > > thanks... Mark of the Unicorn now markets an emacs-style editor plus a scribe-style formatter under the name "Final Word." The editor uses a huge (525K) swap file for holding pieces of text. Also, it is beefed up with many menu-driven macros for inserting the "scribe" format commands. To a great extent, Final Word is exactly the same product as Perfect Writer, the CP/M program that used to be bundled with Kaypros, along with WordStar. I read a review of Final Word in which the separation of editing and formatting was described as a "breakthrough." Now, I personally appreciate the separation of editing and formatting, especially for longer documents, and I eagerly await the appearance of micro-scribe. But this way of doing things is hardly a breakthrough. -- Todd Moody * {allegra|astrovax|bpa|burdvax}!sjuvax!tmoody * SJU Phil. Dept. "The wind is not moving. The flag is not moving. Mind is moving."
dtrail@dasys1.UUCP (Dave Trail) (02/09/88)
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.40.6 of Tue May 12 1987 on dasys1 (usg-unix-v) Mark of the Unicorn now markets an editor called Final Word, which can be made to use a version of the Emacs command set. I use it and like it.
daveb@llama.rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) (02/09/88)
In article <456@xios.XIOS.UUCP> jim@xios.UUCP (Jim Tinkess) writes: >A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style >editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Does anyone on the >net use mince? I heard it was a very nice editor. > MOTU is still in business, and seems to be be specializing in MacStuff now. Their "Professional Composer" MIDI music program seems highly regarded. I do not believe they are presently interested in selling any MINCEs. I worked for a company that OEM-ed MINCE and SCRIBBLE (their scribe-alike), and was at one point very familiar with the code: Lovely stuff for the period it was written. It provided you an 8 buffer emacs with no extensibility, 2 windows only, could handle 256k files, and ran comfortably as a 48k CP/M-80 program. And written in BDS-C! For the user/hacker, it came with source code for the commands (but not the redisplay, command dispatcher or the buffer manager). The "Program Logic Manual" was a wonderful thing. It was also a mixed blessing for MOTU: they inadvertantly found themselves running a C programming school. Their follow-on word processor, "The Final Word" replaced the emacs command interface with something more object-like, and didn't come with source. All in all, beautifully engineered programs with features that didn't show up elsewhere for quite a while. Times change, however. I would recommend real GNU, either of the microemacs-es, or JOVE to current users. The micros and JOVE are more heavily featured than MINCE and have full source for free. My preference is micrognu ("mg"), but I am biased, having helped in its development. -dB "People will do anything for a potato." {amdahl, cpsc6a, mtxinu, ptsfa, sun, hoptoad}!rtech!daveb daveb@rtech.uucp
km@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Ken Mitchum) (02/10/88)
MINCE was also transiently available for the IBMPC and other MSDOS machines. It's main advantage was that it would work with rather severe memory and disk limitations. I still use it on the labtop HP-100, which has no disk, and very little memory.
davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) (02/10/88)
I got a copy of Final Word just to be able to typeset the MicroEMACS
manual. In the process of using it, I found that it would do a lot of
things for me not readily available in many editors. In addition to
spelling, it catches bad capitalization, doubled words, and in some
cases use of an incorrect homonym. It's fast, and does real typeset
output to a laser printer (if you have the correct fonts).
I am delighted with this product, and I wish I could get it in UNIX.
--
bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
{uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -meexodus@uop.edu (G.Onufer) (02/11/88)
In article <2906@dasys1.UUCP>, dtrail@dasys1.UUCP (Dave Trail) writes: > Mark of the Unicorn now markets an editor called Final Word, which can be made > to use a version of the Emacs command set. I use it and like it. Actually Final Word is a subset of the Scribe typesetting system... it only uses one point size font at any time, but is powerful for what it is... I haven't used its editor much, I prefer MicroEmacs on my system, but I use the text formatter for all of my personal papers, etc. at school. G. Onufer
cox@bentley.UUCP (MH Cox) (02/12/88)
In article <1157@sjuvax.UUCP> tmoody@sjuvax.UUCP (T. Moody) writes: >In article <456@xios.XIOS.UUCP> jim@xios.UUCP (Jim Tinkess) writes: >>*****LINE EAT******** >>A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style >>editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Does anyone on the >>net use mince? I heard it was a very nice editor. >> >> thanks... > > >Mark of the Unicorn now markets an emacs-style editor plus a >scribe-style formatter under the name "Final Word." The editor uses a (text deleted) >To a great extent, Final Word is exactly the same product as Perfect >Writer, the CP/M program that used to be bundled with Kaypros, along >with WordStar. Borland's often-announced, soon-to-be-available word-processor, Sprint, supposedly is a direct descendent of FinalWord (this from a friend of mine who uses FinalWord and is a beta-tester for Sprint). Mark of the Unicorn either changed their name or split up into two companies. My last update to FW (version 2.2) was from FinalWord Corporation. >I read a review of Final Word in which the separation of editing and >formatting was described as a "breakthrough." Now, I personally >appreciate the separation of editing and formatting, especially for >longer documents, and I eagerly await the appearance of micro-scribe. >But this way of doing things is hardly a breakthrough. I've always had a hard time convincing people that WYSIWYG (what-you- see-is-what-you-get) is NOT the best way to write a document (especially a large, complex document). Most people insist they want to see the document on the screen the same way as it will be printed out on paper. Everyone wants to use an Aldus PageMaker or Ventura Publisher to do their large documents (although Ventura Publisher comes close to being a WYSIWYG version of FinalWord). I've been successful in convincing many of my friends and most of the people I've worked with/for that non-WYSIWYG document-processing is the way to go. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to convert all of Bell Labs to use FinalWord/Scribe versus troff :-). Scribe is to troff as Modula 2 is to assembler... -- Michael H. Cox (201) 580-8622
davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) (02/12/88)
In article <1061@uop.edu> exodus@uop.edu (G.Onufer) writes: | [...] | Actually Final Word is a subset of the Scribe typesetting system... it | only uses one point size font at any time, but is powerful for what it is... I'm not sure what you mean by one point size font. I typeset the MicroEMACS manual as I get new versions, and I use three point sizes, plain, bold, and italic, plus a constant width 12 pitch for the tables which need it. I forget the details on setting it up, but the font names are defined in the setup file for the particular printer, along with the escape sequences to initiate them, and you have to provide font width tables, a real pain by any measure. -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me
wrp@biochsn.acc.virginia.edu (William R. Pearson) (02/14/88)
]A company called 'Mark Of the Unicorn' used to make a emacs style ]editor called MINCE. Are they still in business? Does anyone on the ]net use mince? I heard it was a very nice editor. I believe that Mark of the Unicorn exists - they sell a music program for the Mac I think and a terminal emulation program for the IBM-PC (PC-Intercomm). They used to sell a word processor for the PC, Final Word (a combination of MINCE and Scribe, their old word processor). I recently got a letter from FW Corp (Final Word Corp) that suggests some of the products may have been split off. Mince was available for CPM, but the version that I used on the PC was really only designed for DOS 1.1, I am not sure they were selling it by the time Dos 2.X came out. (That was some time ago). Bill Pearson wrp@virginia
aad+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Anthony A. Datri") (03/01/88)
AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Believe me, you would rather use edlin that mince. Mince isn't an acronym -- it's a description of what it does to your FAT. Use Epsilon, put out by Lugaru around here somewhere.
davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr) (03/02/88)
In article <MW-Vd3y00WAIcTY1N8@andrew.cmu.edu> aad+@ANDREW.CMU.EDU ("Anthony A. Datri") writes: | AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! | | Believe me, you would rather use edlin that mince. Mince isn't an | acronym -- it's a description of what it does to your FAT. Use Epsilon, put | out by Lugaru around here somewhere. I will state without comment that I have used MINCE and it's successor Final Word for about four years without a problem. There may have been a problem with some version of MINCE, or MINCE in general on some machine, but I have not seen any problem with it. The person who got me started on MINCE still uses it. "reproducible results aren't" -- bill davidsen (wedu@ge-crd.arpa) {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen "Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me