Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite on shelves
Message-ID: <52428@sun.uucp>
Date: 8 May 88 23:39:19 GMT
References: <158@amcad.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: chuq@sun.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach)
Organization: Fictional Reality
Lines: 111
Keywords: fullwrite nonvapor

>The vapor has coalesced!  FullWrite is on the shelves (at least at
>Egghead Software - it should get to other stores next week).  Fancy box,
>with a discount price under $300.  A companion book is announced but not
>available at the moment.

>I hope it was worth the wait.

I think so, so far. I picked up my copy at ComputerWare for about $260. I
haven't played with it a lot yet, but I have pored through documentation and
done a little prodding and pushing, and I think I'm going to really like
Fullwrite. 

It's definitely not perfect, but it has the power of Word 3.0. It's also a
very intuitive program. As you read through the manual, you start to realize
just how intuitive it is (in many ways, you don't need to read the manual.
For a program of this power, that says something).

There are some areas that I've flagged as things to be aware of. Some of
these are plusses, some minuses. This isn't in any particular order (yet):

+ The documentation is generally well written. There are two volumes: a
	learning guide and a reference manual.

- However, the manual does not have a tutorial. There are a bunch of samples
	on the disk, but no structured tutorial introduction. The learning manual is
	basically a "take a look at this" and assume's you're poking at it
	on your own. A structured tutorial would help the startup time.

- The manual is incomplete in some areas. It mentions, but never explains, 
	stationery (read-only documents that are used as templates). It
	barely mentions something called background files, which are (I
	think!) used to import stuff like EPS files into stationery. I
	really don't understand what they do, how, or why. I'm hoping that
	the examples shipped with the program explain it, since the manual
	ignores them. This looks to be, also, the only way to get postscript
	code into your documents. Hope I'm wrong on that one.

- Style sheets are functional, but more limited than Word 3.0. No "based on"
	or "next style" options. Styles seem to be additive, also: if they
	set up a bold/italic style and impose it on underlined text, it
	comes up bold/italic underlined.

+ They've implemented something called a variable. A more generalized flavor
	of the various page/date/time icons in Word headers. you can define
	your own, too (I'm not sure why yet, though). One that I find
	missing is the # of words (variables exist for pages and
	characters).

- You don't seem to be able to save drawings from the draw layer
	independently. You can grab them via the clipboard, but you could
	almost obsolete the need for a separate drawing program if you could
	save it conveniently.

- Startup is rather slow, and it brings up a copyright message every time.
	Not really bad, but it stays up long enough to be irritating, and I
	almost get the feeling AT has a wait loop in the initialization code
	for the startup screen. If that's true, I hope someone finds a patch
	for it. If not, there's a lot of initialization going down.

+ Change bars. Real, honest to god, decent, integrated change bars. You can
	turn them on or off, reset them after every save, reset them on
	request, all sorts of things. You may not care about change bars,
	but once you've worked with them in a serious writing project,
	you'll hate to lose them. It's nice to be able to scan through and
	edit only those parts that have been changed, rather than having to
	search for all the new text (and probably missing some of it).

+ Bookmarks. In a large document (or even, for that matter, a small one) how
	many times have you found yourself bouncing between two or three
	places, verifying one thing, rewriting another, checking to make
	sure the narritive matches in disparate parts of the story? On
	paper, you just keep the pages next to each other. On computers,
	you go crazy. Bookmarks let you set a pointer to a specific place in
	the document, and reference it by name. A "go to " label for your
	writing. I wish I'd thought of it.....

o Performance seems reasonable. Once it's started, that is. I'm also not
	hurting for memory. You have to have 1Meg to run it, 2 meg to run it
	with Multifinder. This won't work very well on a floppy system,
	either -- I wouldn't try less than a hard disk.

o Spell checker is on a part, probably a little better, than the Word 
	checker. A little less powerful, a little more intuitive. Goodenuf,
	as they say.

o A thesaurus. I'm not terribly convinced a computer thesaurus buys you
	anything over a desk model (and the desk model is cheaper). But
	we'll see.

o Imports Write and Word files. Exports only Write files. Initially I was
	bothered by this, but it makes sense. The Word 3.0 file structure
	is an amazing bitch to work with. And if you're exporting, you lose
	most of the special features -- and you're likely setting things up
	to import into another program that is also likely to read Write,
	not word files (or both). Macwrite is the primary text-transfer
	format for the Mac -- even Word reads it. So there's no real reason
	to export in anything else.

All in all, it looks to be a definite step up from Word 3.0. Easier to use,
a lot more writer friendly, a lot more intuitive. It is definitely,
definitely a word hacker's program, not for the casual writer. But it set
itself off for the high end, and it seems to have achieved it. This is a
first impression, though. I'll tell you more when I have a couple of weeks
under my fingers. 

chuq

Chuq Von Rospach			chuq@sun.COM		Delphi: CHUQ

       I come to preach to a religion that doesn't exist. It has no members.
          It has no clergy.  It has no doctrine. It has no collection plate.