chuq@plaid.UUCP (05/11/87)
From: harvard!ksr!alcatraz!benson@seismo.CSS.GOV (Benson Margulies)
Date: 11 May 87 13:34:39 GMT
Organization: Kendall Square Research, Cambridge MA
This note is a critique of WPS C based on several weeks of usage.
Executive Summary:
For its high price, WPS (and even TPS) leave a lot to be desired.
Big-screen Mac's provide more functionality in some areas for a
very competitive price.
PRICING:
TPS (the full package) is $15K per node to commercial users. That
priced it out of our current capabilities. WPS is only $3K, which is
still pretty steep for something with a lot less typesetting smarts
than Scribe (or even MicroSoft Word 3.0). However, the relevant
individuals here were unwilling to doom themselves to text processing
on a Mac+ screen, and we couldn't wait for a big-screen mac. All
of our other work is on the Suns, TPS does have some features that the
Mac competition lacks and we expected to find the budget down the line.
TPS vs WPS:
WPS cuts out:
numbering
TOC
Index
crossreference
paint-like editing
multiple columns
The font repetoire (see below) may be a WPS/TPS issue, I'm not certain.
The line quality feature (see below) may be a WPS/TPS issue.
SUPPORT:
support is only by phone. No electronic mail. This is a big waste
of time.
INSTALLATION:
The package comes on a TAR tape customized to your licences nodes. You
load the first file set, which gives you a shell script. If you are
foolhardy enough to run the shell script instead of modifying it, it
reads the rest of itself in to the current directory (OK so far), and
then proceeds to try to fool with the root file systems of all of the
machines listed in the current machine's nd.local. If the machines
that are licenced aren't clients of the machine that will contain the
code (true for a while in our case) you have to fool with the shell
script by hand. It would have been far better to separate loading the
code from munging the clients, or to at least just ask you for the
names of the licenced machines.
The printer installation script fools with your printcap. If you
already have the printer you are going to use, their script will
modify your existing entry. For an IMAGEN, at least, it will break it.
Their standard operating procedure is to install a filter of theirs as
the :if keyword which is completely incompatible with the 3.3 lpd.
The daemon can't even start up.
When asked, they say "its not supported to share a printer between
interleaf and the rest of a site."
However, they have a link in /etc to lpr, and by replacing it with a
suitable filter program I was able to circumvent the problem. The
program also writes around the misfeature that the impress document
control that they generate dosen't specify enough fields. If you
configure the Imagen document defaults suitably for vanilla lpr,
Interleaf documents come out wrong. My filter program adds extra
document control to correct for this.
After I did all of this, they admitted that Sun interleaf users had
hit the same problem, and used approximately the same solution.
THE ENVIRONMENT:
The environment is a mediocre imitation of a mac. It is a desktop with
icons. But to move something you have to click left, click and hold
right to pull down a menu, and select move. To move something in the
directory structure you have to cut it and paste it, you can't just
drag it.
All pull-down menus permit you to just click and get the default
action. The default for open items is always CLOSE. So one misplaced
click and you close up the directory you are in. The code is at least
as bad as the mac at dealing with long file names. Its nearly
impossible to maintain a visually organized appearance.
The scroll bars are inadequate. There is no visual indication of where
you are in the file. Left goes up and right goes down. Admittedly,
this steamed me because it is the oppposite of Symbolics, which I used
to use, but it stil strikes me as counterintuitive.
There is no command environment anyplace.
You can get out to Un*x via Terminal documents. They are slow. The
keyboard is broken within them - Left and Right are censored, and
there is no way to type a backquote.
BASIC TEXT FORMATTING:
The document structure is a series of "structured components." They
correspond roughly to MicroSoft Word paragraphs. Each component type
has:
margins,
default font,
line spacing,
widow/orphan/page break,
tab stops
component type names are limited to 9 characters.
The margins provide for hanging indents on the first line. Unlike
scribe, there is no control on merging of adjacent top and bottom
margins. In Scribe, you can distinguish between hard inter-item
spacing and soft spacing that merges with soft spacing from the
preceeding or following item. There is no hierarchical structure.
There is nothing like the scribe templates for itemized lists that
supply bullets and the like for you.
The best you can have is a template document off to one side with
templates that you cut off, paste into your document, and modify. Its
very time-consuming.
For each component type in a document, there is a hidden copy that
provides the default for new components of that type. However, the
only way to edit it is to edit the properties of an example and choose
a menu click that updates the defaults and all of the other examples
that match the defaults. If you delete the last example of a
component, the global default disappears, too.
This setup leaves me with a dilemma. I hate to ever change the
properties of an individual component, because then I can't make
global style decisions and have them apply. On the other hand, since
(unlike MicroSoft word 3.0) component types can't inherit from other
components, I keep having to generate whole families of nearly
identical component types. They are just as hard to maintain.
Their approach is to leave all components like the template until you
are about ready to pull repro. Then edit individual properties to get
page breaks and spacing perfect. Then for the next rev you unify all
the properties of all the components and start over.
There is no way to split a component in two without killing half,
creating the new component, and yanking the half into the new
component. Line feed creates another component like the current one,
but there is nothing like Word 3.0's "Next Style" feature, and I miss
it. So when you are in the middle of a section title, and you type LF,
you get another section title, not the paragraph that you want.
No outlining features. I wrote a awk program that scans their markup
language for known component names and spits out an outline.
There are far too few keyboard accelerators for common operations. You
can type c-V to scroll down, but no esc-V to scroll up. Some functions
are accelerated on the function keys, but by the time I've moved my
hand that far I might as well go for the mouse. Needless to say, they
don't tell you how to reconfigure the keyboard, if in fact it is
possible without the source.
Special characters are torture. Here's the sequence for a bullet:
D (click right to the left) click middle, pull down font, pull down
family, pull down Symbols. F3 to get back out of Symbols and back to
prevailing font. WHEW! They have a keyboard accelerator for "an
appropriate sized bullet" but we disagree on "appropriate." Other math
symbols are completely unaccelerated.
Superscripts and subscripts are even worse. They are individual
special characters instead of a text style. For a superscript, you
have to go into symbols font, type BS in front of each digit, and then
back to text. Wanted superscripted letters? Tough, you have to use a
diagram.
There is a clipboard instead of a kill ring. That is, the kill history
is only one deep, and they have never heard of emacs features like
kill merging.
No footnotes. They have something they call a footnote, but its really
a diagram, and thus can't really contain body text.
Documents are auto-checkpointed. This is useful, but the
implementation is unbelievably irritating, since with no warning your
keyboard just stops working for the 30 seconds that it can take to
save a large document. I couldn't stand editing a 100 page document.
When you need a checkpoint you have to look for it yourself. When my
machine crashed, and I restarted, it neglected to inform me that it
had a checkpoint newer than the last saved copy. Luckily, I want
hunting it myself. I would much prefer to just save the document for
myself.
The font repetiore is a problem. You get a serif and a sans-serif,
each in roman, bold, and italic. No bold-italic. Then you get greek,
symbols, typewriter, and math. No bold in the typewriter font. No
partial derivative sign. No foreign language accents.
No document control. (i.e., no change bars, no diff). Salesman says
that they are building a big document-management system for a VAX
suitable for 747 manuals which will cover this terain. Big $$$s. I
would be perfectly happy with a simple change history, myself.
DIAGRAM HANDLING:
The diagraming system is like macdraw, but more cumbersome. There are no
keyboard accelerators.
Once you have a piece of text in a diagram you can only edit it from
the right side. Each line of text is independent. There is no cursor.
To plant some text, you just start typing. Wherever the mouse it, the
text goes. I find that I can never quite predict where text will go,
and I always have to move it.
In addition to a grid, they have spiffy feature called gravity. It
makes things join in useful ways. However, when you really need to put
something close but not quite at a gravity point, it takes two
four-menus-down clicks to turn the grid and gravity off, and then the
same to turn them on again. It desperately needs a keyboard
accelerator.
There is no notion of line quality (dashed, etc.).
The repetoire of fills is very small, considering the capabilities of
the laserwriter and imagen that they are printing on. The "screens"
are effectively about 50 dots to the inch, when the printers can hack
300. Needless to say, you can't add your own.
There is notion of grouped objects. You can edit a group. When editing
a group, you can't touch anything outside it. However, if the group is
sitting on top of something else, and you make the mistake of using
BACK on an object in the group, you will send it behind the
unselectable non-group-member, where you can't retrieve it.
There is nothing to move down one in the stack of objects. BACK sends
things to the very bottom.
In an apparent effort to keep the menus short, they have made them
deep. To align objects is MISC->ALIGN->ALIGN-TYPE. To align to the
frame is MISC->ALIGN->FRAME->ALIGN-TYPE. Some are deeper than this,
like PROPS->FONT->FAMILY->CLASSIC->10.
Since the pull-downs always walk to the right, my mouse is always
falling off the side of the mouse-pad. More of the foibles of optical
mice.
To my prejudiced mind, this demonstrates that high flexibility and
strict menu interfaces just don't go together. What we need here is a
command interface to allow concise specification, and then menus for
the inexperienced.
You can't mix fonts in a single text object. Since superscripts and
symbols are a different font instead of an extended character set (as
per gripes above) you have to assemble strings out of little pieces.
No white-on-black text.
OUTPUT QUALITY:
The leter kerning is inadequate. As a result, the letter spacing is
uneven. The spacing between lower case l and other letters on either
side is particularly ugly.
FINAL NOTE:
Why, you may ask, am I using something that I have so many complaints
about? I don't care very much about wysiwyg on text. I do for
diagrams, and there is nothing out there on the sun for that purpose.
If I could have bought a good diagramming system for the sun that
could write impress or postscript for scribe to pull in, and scribe
could determine the size from the file and not insist that I tell it
in the @picture, that might have been an alternative.
The Mac same close, but I would have been stuck with the tiny screen,
and the performance of Word 3.0 for a really big document was an open
question. Word 3.0 numbering was pretty strange compared to TPS.
We also assumed that for our $3K/station we would get some pretty
enthusiastic support. We've gotten pretty solid "sorry, that's not
something we support." Mind you, we haven't had problems of the form
"we don't understand how to do X." We have questions like "There
dosen't seem to be a way to do X," and we are right all too often.
So we consider Interleaf to be the best of an inadequate bunch, and
hope that future releases will improve it.
Benson I. Margulies Kendall Square Research Corp.
harvard!ksr!benson All comments the responsibility
ksr!benson@harvard.harvard.edu of the author, if anyone.
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Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM [I don't read flames]
There is no statute of limitations on stupidity