domo@riddle.UUCP (Dominic Dunlop) (01/06/89)
In article <5066@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> amlovell@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Anthony M Lovell) writes: >[Lotsa stuff deleted] > > Bad things that make you yearn for the age of steam. > >Word Perfect - This thing has caused me more headaches... [Potential bias warning: my company has been known to sell WordPerfect, but I'll try to be objective about it...] Strange. I use WordPerfect on my Mac, and find it quite tolerable. What it does, it seems to me to do with panache. Yes, I'd like to be able to put boxes around things. Yes, I sorely miss regular expressions, but basically, it gets the job done and -- on the Mac, at least -- what I see on the screen is what I get on the printer. Don't know about the PC-DOS version, as I haven't used it. What I have used is the UNIX/Xenix implementation. As with most UNIX software, it's severely limited by the character-based interface. There's no way (unless, perhaps, you use a monospaced font) that you can get what you see, but that's down to the outdated display technology. That said, WordPerfect has done a really great job of helping the user to customise for their terminal and printer. In fact, WordPerfect has the best installation procedure I've seen for any UNIX product. (Admittedly, some of the competition's ``procedures'' are crud of the highest order, but that's another story...) A colleague who knows the DOS product tells me that UNIX WordPerfect lacks only one non- essential feature (I forget what it is) relative to DOS, and tells you politely about the shortcoming if you try to select it. I've never seen a more conscientious port of a user-interface intensive DOS product to UNIX. Most I've seen (no names, no pack drill) seem to shed features like leaves in autumn as they make the transition. Where WordPerfect falls down in comparison to UNIX market leaders is in lack of ``integration'': DataPerfect and fellow travellers (yes, I have the British spelling dictionary) have yet to make it out of the DOS environment as far as I know. This means that Uniplex II (which my company also sells) and other products such as Q-Office and SCO's imminent Office Portfolio have the jump on it for those who want more than a word-processor. I suppose you could cook up some fancy WordPerfect macros to help in integration, but, so far we haven't bothered: those of our in-house users who need such things use Uniplex II. >That's it. Go ahead, flame me about Word Perfect - you are dead wrong >and God knows it. Well. OK. If that's what you want. Not so much a flame. More a draught of hot air... As a matter of interest, I wonder what editors/word- processors Anthony does like. Personally, I don't like MS Word. Maybe starting with WordStar, then er.. graduating to vi has marked me for life, just as having FORTRAN as my first programming language is supposed to have done. -- Dominic Dunlop domo@sphinx.co.uk domo@riddle.uucp