Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
From: willg@cix.compulink.co.uk (William Gallagher)
Subject: Re: which word processor
Reply-To: willg@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 13:04:40 +0000

In article <tal691.718778742@huxley>, Tonio 
Loewald writes

>No offence intended, but:
>This is all rubbish. Just about all word-processors 
implement
>headers and footers the same way. FullWrite just 
sticks icons in
the icon bar to show you where they are. Why is this 
a crime? It
>also lets you SEARCH for them. And you can stop 
headers and footers
f>rom carrying over to a new chapter.

>The major problem with FullWrite is that it's no 
longer supported
>by Borland (who bought out Ashton Tate. Apart 
from that, it's a nice
>powerful, but slow, word-processor.

I went to a show to look at the latest Mac word 
processors once, and saw FullWrite for the first time.  
There was no one to demonstrate it to me, so I sat 
there and played for a while.  Ended up recommending 
it over any of the then alternatives.  It has been the 
only recommendation I've regretted, because it was 
not powerful enough for long documents, continually 
ran out of memory and fell apart sometimes - less 
often than MacAuthor, more often than WordPerfect.

I think I was unclear about the headers and footers.  
Finding those icons is not as easy as you imply; I've 
been called in to sort out users who were having very 
peculiar effects through not knowing where the icons 
were.  You'll have noticed what happens if you define, 
say, a header, footer and margin in the same place, 
FullWrite puts just one icon in the margin: a box with 
ellipses in it.  Fine, but when you do it at the top of a 
page you can't obviously see that the I-am-a-page-
break squidge and has ellipses in it too.  Can't 
remember much more of this point now, but I do recall 
solving some users problems by just clicking on what 
appeared to be a page (or maybe chapter?) break and 
revealing all of these others.

>WordPerfect is only good for people who need to 
use it on other platforms.

Its a point of view, and one that WordPerfect UK are 
pushing over here.  I just don't agree at all.

>WriteNow is the best word-processor around, unless 
>you want features that have very little to do with 
>writing (such as a second rate drawing program, or 
>page layout, and so on). I like programs that do one 
>thing VERY WELL (WriteNow is like this) versus 
>doing lots of things badly (Word f'rinstance).

I still can't comment on WriteNow, but otherwise I 
agree with you.  However,  I also want applications 
that work in the way I do; that when I sit down to 
write I don't have to fiddle or worry about the 
vaguaries of the word processor.  Part of that is 
suiting my working practices which are, as I said, a 
mix of straight writing and then layout control.  So for 
me the choice is now WordPerfect 2.1.  For you, 
clearly, its WriteNow.  Someone somewhere seems to 
like Word, but there's no accounting for taste.

>(Comments about versions of FullWrite and 
allocation of memory in Macintosh)
Even less offence intended, but I do know about that, 
and since it was for a review I took especial care to 
only use the latest versions of each.

Isn't it good that there are word processors that suit 
each of us?  People - myself included - get very 
attached to their word processors, and whilst it makes 
for the odd tedious argument I'm glad that software 
can be good enough to bring this loyalty out in people. 
I read somewhere that whatever word processor you 
buy first you'll be happy with; perhaps that answers 
the original question.

William

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William Gallagher.  .Sig coming Real Soon Now.
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps