From: fgd3@nifty.UUCP (Fabbian G. Dufoe, III)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re:  WP PC -> Amiga
Distribution: comp
Date: 29 Sep 92 10:43:39 EDT
Organization: Fabbian G. Dufoe, III

In article <1992Sep28.165244.6403@city.cs> lionel@cs.city.ac.uk (Lionel Tun) writes:
>Hhhm. I though WordPerfect Corp were a world class company
>whatever that means. WP is a serious package costing hundreds
>of quids. How can WordPerfect Corp allow it to be buggy?
>Is this true? I have just bought WP and it crashed under 
>WB2.0. I just assumed I did something wrong. Is the program
>inadequately tested? What recourse is there - WP is supposed
>to be _serious_ software!?

   I've used Amiga WordPerfect 4.1.11 extensively under Workbench 1.3 and a
little under 2.0.  It seems to run all right under 2.04, but crashed
consistently under earlier versions of 2.0.  It occasionally crashes under
1.3, but not often.

   There are a number of bugs in WordPerfect that have been around for a
long time.  WordPerfect Corporation no longer supports Amiga development so
those bugs won't be fixed.

   The most serious bug is in the Print program.  Start WordPerfect, bring
up the choose "Print/Control" from the menu, and use the "P" option from
the print control window to enqueue two print jobs.  The first job will go
into the queue just fine.  But when you put another job in the queue two
things will happen.  The number of copies for the first job will be changed
to 16 and the binding width will be changed.  I wrote WordPerfect about that
bug when they first released 4.1.11.  They quick lost interest in
communicating with me at all.  You can work around the problem by enqueuing
your print jobs some other way.  Retrieve the documents, choose "Print/Full
Text" from the menu, and close the documents, for example.

   Anyone who has opened more than one WordPerfect document at a time has
probably noticed how much slower Intuition operates.  This is a bug that
affects any programs running at the time, not just WordPerfect.  However, it
doesn't seem to have any adverse effects except to slow down the system, so
I can live with it.

   A third bug, which seems to be unimportant, is that italicized text in
WordPerfect causes a minor flaw in the display some lines above the
italicized text.  The content of the file does not appear to be affected and
the printed output is correct, so it is a bug that can be ignored.

   As to the "serious software" question, I don't know of any commercial
programs that don't have some flaws.  It's a shame that software authors and
publishers don't take more pride in their work, but that's the way it goes.
They are driven by market forces and earn more revenue by releasing five
imperfect versions of a product than by polishing and testing and revising
until a program is perfect.  From the user's point of view, we must decide
if the usefulness of a program is enough to outweigh its imperfections and
cost.

--Fabbian G. Dufoe, III
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications