From: alansar@ccs.northeastern.edu (Mohammad Al-Ansari)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.misc
Subject: Re: ARGHH!-WFW2.0 Sucks big time!
Keywords: Crashes problems wfw
Date: 13 Oct 92 05:22:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: random.1992Oct13.052247.6046
Organization: College of CS, Northeastern U

In article <mcdonald.368@aries.scs.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@aries.scs.uiuc.edu (J. D. McDonald) writes:

[...]


>
>
>W4W also lacks other seriously needed features - character and
>paragraph styles, for instance.

I don't know what you mean by "character AND paragraph" styles. There
are certainly paragraph styles. As for character styles, that is a matter
of taste (as this whole issue actually is :). If you really need such
styles, simply record macros for them. A small WordBasic program can
also be written to display a menu of all such macros and let you pick
the one you want to apply.

>
>One of the biggest ... in fact, I would say THE biggest ... flaws in
>W4W is that you can't read the intermediate files (modulo things like
>indluded bitmaps) and can't (the topic of the original post) #include
>other files. It is **very** possible to introduce bugs into a W4W
>file that simply **can't** be fixed, because you can't read the file
>and see what they are. 

Could you please give some examples of such bugs? Do you intruduce those bugs
through WFW or by modifying files with a regular text editor?  If this is the
case then I don't see the point.

>                       People knock TeX because it is a "programming
>language". True, but W4W is too, in a sense, **and it prohibits you from
>reading the code to find bugs**!!!!
>

>************************************************************************
>
>W4W is like a 
>programming language would be if the code was "write and delete only" and
>you could only tell if it was right  by examining the output .. 
>no debuggers!!!  (I.e. once you wrote the code, you could never examine
>it exactly ... only delete lines of the source without seeing them, 
>only knowing what you intended them to do (e.g. seeing the comments).
>
>************************************************************************

No. You don't write ANY code in WFW. You only give a description of the output
by using some visual tools.  The "programming" you are talking about is done
for you by WFW.  The goal of anybody who uses a word processor is to have
output that matches his or her specifications.  WFW does exactly that and thus
you should not complain about not being able to see the code.  It is just
another way of doing things.  I certainly don't want to know what goes on
behind the seens if I don't need to. Unless there is something I don't know,
and depending on how you answer the question above, I couldn't care less about
the code that WFW stores. I only care about the output.

WFW is an interface between you and the code.  Do you object to all such
graphical interfaces? You also should direct this criticism to all WYSIWYG
word processors on all platforms, not only WFW.


>
>
>Doug McDonald


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Mohammad Al-Ansari                      | alansar@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu
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Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.misc