From: owen@astro.washington.edu (Russell Owen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Word vs. Nisus vs. FM vs. WN
Date: 12 Aug 92 22:09:00 GMT
Followup-To: comp.sys.mac.apps
Organization: University of Washington

Here is an updated summary of word processor features. I've removed a few
minor and confusing columns and fixed a number of mistakes, especially in
the description of Word.

Conclusions:
For fancy work such as books or camera-ready papers, I think FrameMaker is
your best bet, if you can afford it, followed by Word. FrameMaker's main
limitation is that it is harder to use for simple things. However, as soon
as you want anything fancy done, FrameMaker pulls way ahead of Word. For
features supported by both products (such as tables and equations), I find
FrameMaker to be consistently more powerful and easier to use. Plus
FrameMaker offers important features not found in Word, such as powerful
autonumbering. FrameMaker is also available on more other computers
(including unix boxes), and moving files between machines is trivial (no
reformatting necessary).

For simpler work I recommend Nisus, followed by WriteNow. Both are easier
to use than Word or FrameMaker. WriteNow is least expensive, but I
personally find its limitations frustrating even for simple work. Nisus is
much less limiting and offers multiple undo which will save you hours of
work.

I've attempted to be accurate, but errors probably remain. Corrections and
additional information (especially about other good word processors (Taste?
MacWrite?) would be most welcome.

-- Russell
owen@astro.washington.edu
        
                        Word 5  Nisus 3 FM 3    WN 3

Full Undo               ?       yes     no      ?
Multiple Undo!          no      yes!    no      no
Open very large docs    yes     no!     yes     yes
Column Select           yes     yes     no      no
Discontiguous Select    no      yes     no      no

Grep (regular expr.)    some    best    some    no?
Find/Repl in selection  yes     yes     yes     no
Search for text+style   yes     yes     yes     no?
Search unopened docs    some    yes     ?       no
        
Hierarchical Styles     yes     no      no      best
Named Char. Styles      no!     painful yes     best
Named Para. Styles      yes     painful yes     best
Style Sheets            no      no      yes     ?

Space after para        yes     yes     yes     yes
Space before para       yes     no      yes     no
Widow Control           yes     no!     flex.   no

Multiple Columns        yes     yes     yes     yes
Fancier Layout          no      no      yes     no
Graphics Editor         yes     yes     best    no
Margin follows graphic  ?       yes     no      no

Hide margins/pagebreaks yes     yes     no      no
Settable Cmd-Keys       yes     best    no      no
Open any file           no?     yes     no      no
Multiple clipboards     no?     yes     no      no

Tables                  painful no      yes     no
Macros                  no      yes     no      no
Outlining               painful painful no      no
Equations               yes     no      best    no
Glossary                yes     yes     ?       no
Print merge             painful yes     ?       yes
Hyphenation             yes     yes     flex    yes

Auto-# Footnotes        yes     yes     yes     yes
Auto-# Endnotes         yes     yes     usexref no!
Auto-# Para,Fig,etc     painful painful yes     no
Cross-references        ?       yes     best    no
Hypertext               no      no      painful no

Doc Linking             pub/sub nonp/s  nonp/s  pub/sub
Indexing                poor    poor    decent? no
Table-of-contents       poor    poor    decent? no
Support for books       yes     no      yes     no
Source code editing     poor    good    poor    poor
hurt files recoverable  no      yes     ?       ?

Avail for other comp?   PC      no      unix,PC ?
Format needed to port   RTF             normal!

Reliability             fair    good    ?       good
Ease of Use             poor    fair    fair    good
Power                   good    fair    best    poor
Speed                   slow    fast    medium  fastest
Price                   med     med     high    low
Size                    huge    big     huge    med
Support                 poor    fair    poor    ?

Russell Owen
owen@astro.washington.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps