Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!rutgers!mtunx!mtuxo!mtgzz!drutx!clive From: clive@drutx.ATT.COM (Clive Steward) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: FullWrite -- I'm sorry, but... Message-ID: <8013@drutx.ATT.COM> Date: 1 Jun 88 00:23:02 GMT Organization: resident visitor Lines: 109 in spite of the religion being formed, I have to wonder on what bases such great enthusiasm is being grounded. Though perhaps I haven't found features which answer some of the problems....would be open to suggestions. And I will add up front, can really appreciate that the postit notes, change bars, etc., are overlay additions which any word processor would be the better for, especially for professional/group use. My position: I think FullWrite has a way to go before it challenges Word as powerful balanced document tool. And also that Word could be improved to match ease of use, mostly through some easy visual controls/indicators added to work with its rich style abilities. (e.g. Consider a little stack of style layers, showing/selecting styles on mousing). Now to the experience. To begin, my model of working with Word has been: quickly write some text. Then hit it with styles and the index/contents tools to produce a very finished looking product almost immediately. Pictures and multi-column/sidebars take a bit of fussing with display page. I couldn't seem to find anything like this power in FullWrite. All in all, it feels rather like MacWrite -- you know, rulers everywhere, because it's the only way to get what you'd like. In fairness, the sum experience was this weekend, trying to move a medium size (50 page) document from Word 3. The translator worked somewhat; at least all my text and pictures came through. However, much formatting, including headings, was lost. It did tell me so. Then came the fun. Yes, it's slow, and yes, it takes more than half of a 2.5 meg Mac Plus; however also no crashes, no problems with Multifinder. The real problem seems to be the limitations built into a rather fixed document model. The style model especially seems to be missing essential design and user freedom features. It may possibly be seen as an improvement, to set base styles for (only) the text classes the FullWrite programmer thought important. But why then are substyles singly inherited from these, and themselves not able to have anything like the same degrees of freedom? Some key points missing: 1) You can't set the inter-paragraph spacing, except at the top level, where it is for the entire document. Thus where I have inclusions of program code, for instance, each CR separated line will have lots of space, or I will have to multispace between each paragraph through the entire document, as in using a typewriter. 2) Substyles don't allow setting first line in/outdents separately from the global style. Thus I can't have a style for bullet items, etc.. Back to ruler pairs for _each_ list and the return to normal text style afterwards. 3) Though sidebars seem to be the intended answer for unusual things, they don't fill in here (included listings, etc.) at all. And see below. Other things noticed: 1) The outliner requires selecting the entire document first, to generate an outline. I couldn't even seem find a way to do this, across chapter boundaries. And don't find the outliner interface nearly as easy or failsafe (scrambled text for me often) as Word's. 2) Working with graphics seemed unduly difficult; also the drawing tools, including interface to Bezier curves, seem very awkward. I agree that they could be well left out; would rather use SuperPaint, especially as it's upgrade promises. 3) Sizing anything (especially graphics) included in sidebars appears to be a royal pain -- resize each of (possibly several -- why are there several) involved layers first, etc.. And some, like the drawing 'canvas', seem to require sizing by numbers, not point and drag to fit! 4) Things (notably backspacing over text) seem to slow down in sidebars, thus making them still less desirable as a substitute for a generalized style capability. It's interesting also that the first thing people seem to ask for is to turn off the WYSIWYG. I agree, though that slowdown is minimal, really. Obviously some (!) work was put into making screen update rapid; it shows. And clearly a lot of work went into FullWrite itself, with good intentions. What I really don't understand is the 'bash Microsoft' tone in the recent articles, unless it's smarting about the bug-infested first Word 3.00 release. If you really needed such a tool, weren't you glad it was there? I have been. Think few of us are really in a position to cast such stones. And just because a company's getting big, or has to do with IBM (now, I might have to think about that one), doesn't automatically bring evil. It's still individuals -- aren't we who write programs always -- who put the sweat into making these things. I think that the competition will bring us better versions of both products, and possibly growth towards (RTF?) generalized interchange formats. Clearly, presenting an easy interface to document quality formatted text is a complicated problem. Can we see the progress as fun? Clive Steward (not my best literary effort..., but it's pseudo-Monday)