Date:         Sun, 11 Oct 92 01:11:39 BST
From:         Tony Hirtenstein <tonyh@IBMPCUG.CO.UK>
Subject:      NB4 installation
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.notabene

        The news about NB4 in THIS part of the UK - on the edge of
the second largest forest in England - is both good and bad.  The
good news is that the full upgrade (NB The Works, with Lingua, Orbis
and Ibid Plus) was sent out at the beginning of the month.  Well
done, Tony St.Quintin.  The bad news is that it neither instals nor
works correctly, and I fear that it is not sufficient to follow the
sparse instructions - my own troubles occurred despite using a new
directory, NB4.

   1) On my old EGA machine at home, which has a Phoenix EGA
adapter, the installation programme crashed the whole machine after
extracting the files from the first programme disk.  Apparently it
is both hardware- and software-sensitive; I was advised to boot from
a floppy disk to avoid interaction with other programmes, such as
4DOS and QEMM, and this worked, but I was lucky enough to have two
floppies and a 3.5" version.  Single-floppy users beware...!
   2) On the office VGA machine, the programme installed itself but
went into XyWrite mode while installing the Deskjet fonts/cartridges
- I use the original Deskjet with equivalents of the D and E Times
Roman cartridges.  All well until the final Printer Customization
screen, at which point the programme went haywire, printing 'HP
Deskjet 500 printers/cartrigdes'[sic] over the screen options,
starting about four lines from the bottom.  I could cancel the
installation but any other course sprang the 'XyWrite trap' - no NB
functions and nothing to do but quit.
   3) Although it's working with a new directory the installation
programme insists on copying files over ones that have already been
extracted, including NB.KBD and other files from version 3.
Onscreen help is lacking at this point, and it's easy to overwrite
version 4 files with version 3 files without meaning to.  If like me
you overwrite NB.KBD you will be left with no version 4 functions at
all, and it's big-red-button-and-back-to-square-one time.
   4) The Deskjet fonts and cartridges are confined to the ones made
by HP: so no support for the Pacific Data Products 25in1 cartridge,
which offers a complete range in Times Roman and Helvetica, plus
Prestige Elite, maths symbols and Brush.**
           **Michael Jasper: did you get my file with the 25in1
        width tables supplied by PDP?  Please let me know; and
        anyone else interested in constructing a printer driver for
        this cartridge, please contact me.
   5) A warning to anyone using NB at two different locations: NBI
have committed the cardinal upgrading sin of changing the formatting
commands and then failing to provide backward translation.  As far
as I can tell without having been able to use it, Version 4 will
read and translate Version 3 files, but it cannot convert them back
to version 3.  So I cannot use v.4 at home or at work until it is
working perfectly at both ends.
   6) A further sin in my book is to require users to have special
hardware to make full use of the programme.  Apparently we need a
special VGA card with character memory in order to display Lingua
characters, and extra printer memory to print them.  If Windows can
do both these tricks without that hardware, why not NB?
   7) We can only guess what the final documentation will look like,
but what has been released is not satisfactory.  The keyboard
template is particularly bad: it's cluttered, it omits the F11, F12,
PrtSc, Scroll Lock and Pause keys, and worst of all it's the wrong
way round - the function key descriptions are at the top not the
bottom, making them invisible if you use a keyboard drawer!
[Happily, this is the least serious of NB4's problems; the answer is
to buy a new shirt!  Yes, most shirts sold over here come with a
piece of cardboard that you can easily make into a dozen keyboard
templates.  I've spent many happy hours constructing professional-
looking templates with nothing more than cardboard and transfer
kits...]
        Maybe I've been unlucky, but I have yet to be shifted from
the view that this version of the programme is not ready for
release.  Do NBI really think that existing users should all act as
beta-testers, or that any new user would be able to make do without
proper manuals?
--
**************** Tony Hirtenstein ********************
tonyh@ibmpcug.co.uk ************* West Oxfordshire ***
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU