chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (06/09/87)
From: chuq%plaid@Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Date: 7 Jun 87 23:21:58 GMT
Doug Clapp's Word Tools is finally out an on the market. I just picked up
a copy, and these are some first impressions.
The first thing I ran into was disconcerting. Load everything onto the hard
disk, boot up Word Tools (this is not copy protected. yay!). It can't find
its preferences file, which I copied from the floppy. Exit word tools.
It's created a preference file -- the preference file on the floppy is not
named correctly ("Word Tools" instead of "Wordtools"). Not encouraging when
the distribution floppy doesn't work right.
Word Tools doesn't read word 3.0 files. It thinks it does -- will do a word
count, but gets an infinite hang (not an error! foo...) in the style
checker. It does read ascii, macwrite, and word 1.x files.
The manual is sketchy. 52 pages, inlcuding index. 10 pages devoted to
Switcher (why?)(. Not how to use WT with Switcher, but to how to use
switcher. Four pages of introduction, including a long explanation of why
this program was Vaporware for so long (basically, it didn't work...) when
you get down to it, 39 pages of documentation. There is no explanation of
their algorithms or how they come up with their values -- although you can
(in theory) write away for the details.
What does Word Tools do?
Three basic functions: counting, style checking, and punctuation checking.
Counting: words, sentences, paragraphs, characters, other random things.
Generates averages, documents extremes. Nice if you want to know that you
have 5 characters a word, with the longest word being 11 characters. (Which,
if you're a serious writer, is sometimes VERY handy -- that was not a
specious comment). Will give you Grade Level, Interest Level, and
comparisons between your averages and Word Tools ideals. These are useless,
however, because they don't document what their ideas are, what algorithms
they use to generate the numbers, or what research they based their material
on. Maybe when I get the "Word Tools Technical Notes" (which should have
been shipped with every copy, frankly) I'll know better.
Style: Looks for ugly words and phrases, suggests alternates. Really
doesn't like the words "Really" or "very" very much. This looks like a good
way to catch lazy writing habits.
Punctuation: looks for glitches in the punctuation. improper spacing,
commas outside of quotes, glitches in the use of various punctuation.
What is Word Tools good for?
If you don't do a lot of writing, I doubt you'll care about Word Tools. If
you are a writer, it'll probably be nice to have a copy around. I don't
think I'll run everything I do through it (although I could be wrong) but it
is nice to have something that has a chance of catching a bad habit before
it gets out of control. Just as a word count program it has its uses.
Where I think it may have a hidden use is in desktop publishing. One thing
it allows you to do is edit your own custom punctuation and style preference
sheets. You could, for instance, put together a set of punctuation changes
that would convert all double quotes to typeset quotes, single quotes to
typeset quotes (including handling apostrophes properly), zap double spaces,
convert ellipses and m-dashes, and all those things that you need to do to
take a piece of ascii text and make it look right. I currently do this by
hand, and I think Word Tools will be a Godsend if it does what I think it'll
do. If I can get it to properly handle smart quotes, it will more than pay
for itself.
I'll go into more details when I've worked with it for a while. First
impressions are that it is okay -- especially at a price of $60 (at
Computerware) when you compare it to the competition: the very expensive
and not terribly useful MacProof, and doing it by hand. How it stands up
under use, we'll see.
chuq
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Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ
Now, where did my ex-wife put my Fairy Dust?