Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!oliveb!sun!plaid!chuq
From: chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: FullWrite on shelves
Message-ID: <52688@sun.uucp>
Date: 10 May 88 18:32:28 GMT
References: <158@amcad.UUCP> <52428@sun.uucp> <2317@polyslo.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Lines: 46
Keywords: fullwrite nonvapor

>    It kind of grows on you, as you learn the program it keeps getting better.

This is very, very true. Cautionary tale time.

I was working with FWP last night redesigning my letterhead. Much to my
dismay, FullWrite doesn't support Word's concept of "First Header" and
"First Footer". I spent a good hour trying to muck FWP into giving me a
first header. You only want the letterhead on the first page, after all. I
finally gave up in disgust and started laying the letterhead out in the main
body of the document.

Almost immediately thereafter, I realized that if you put the letterhead in
a sidebar, and tied the sidebar to the top of page 1, you had a first
header. Even better, it was a good, generalized solution to the same problem
and rather than build a customized feature to support letterhead, they built
a generalized feature that happens to support it as well as other things.

It works wonderfully, by the way. 

By trying to force FWP into a Word paradigm, I had major problems. When I
stopped trying to reproduce my Word letterhead in a FWP document, and
instead designed a FWP document, the thing fell into place cleanly and
easily. And I'm more impressed with FWP than before -- general answers to
general problems are better than specific features. Sidebars are really,
really neat things. The more I play with them, the more I think their power
is still under-appreciated.

>    It's there to support background pictures.  You can have FullWrite print
> a picture on every page, or just the first page.  It's a simple way to add
> fancy boarders or letter head to a document,  and since it's a picture you
> don't have to worry about where it is in relation to text.

Here's an exceptionally stupid question. I can't get FWP to read either a
background picture or a background EPS file. I have to open them up with
MINIwriter. So how do your create/change/maintain these files in FullWrite?
It isn't documented, and I can't find the feature. Do I really need a
text-only DA to work with text so FWP can use it?

I'm starting to look forward to pulling Word off my disk. I don't think it's
going to be long, now....


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.