🚀 go-pugleaf

(Norton Chia) writes:
>What do you think of [WordPerfect 2.0]?

I recently used WP 2.0 to convert a technical paper that I had created
using WP 1.0.3 from one-column to two-column format for publication.  It
wasn't much fun.  I ran into several bugs.  For example, a search-and-replace
went into an infinite loop, so I had to reboot; under Multifinder, when WP 2.0
was started up again, it said "Backup files exist" and asked "Are there other
copies of WordPerfect running?" but before I could respond, the dialog box
disappeared, and WordPerfect quit! I had to reboot with Finder to be able
to start up WP 2.0 again.

The spelling checker has a button marked ALWAYS SKIP, but words that I said
to always skip (like people's last names, or abbreviations) weren't always
skipped -- they would come up as misspellings again.

I found quite a few annoyances.  You can't create ANY footnotes if your
document is in double column format, for example.  I had to fake it by typing
the footnote text in a very small font at the bottom of the column, where
it would have appeared if WordPerfect put it there.  Of course, that makes
it cumbersome to change the document, since a "fake" footnote snakes along
the columns with the regular text.  And in WP you can't EVER create real
footnotes that don't have some sort of superscript character associated with
them.  But sometimes you need to; for example, for notices at the bottom of
the first page of a technical article describing project funding, etc. --
notes that aren't associated with a particular word or phrase of the document.

In general, working with two columns of text is pretty slow.  (This is on a
5MB Mac II).  Often there would be about a 5-second delay before the mouse
cursor changed from a text I-beam back to an arrow while WP was processing a
change to the text and updating the columns.  Scrolling with columns is slow.

The new drawing feature isn't as useful as it could be, because it's done
in an opaque, overlaid window.  You can't see the text that the graphics
will be placed into until AFTER you're done drawing.  I wanted to draw
a graphic that would be exactly the width of one of my text columns, for
example, but I couldn't *see* the text columns to get the width right.  So I
had to use trial-and-error, going back and forth between the text and drawing
layers.  There is no ruler available in drawing mode, although there is an
unlabeled grid.  Nisus does a much better job of integrating text and
drawing...you don't go into a different mode to do the drawing.

Another annoyance is that on a color Mac, no matter what color you make a
WP 2.0 document icon, after you edit the document and save it, the icon is
changed back to black and moved to a new place in the folder.  Also, double-
clicking on a WP 1.0.x document does NOT launch WP 2.0, which makes editing
pre-2.0 documents with WP 2.0 more of a chore.

>At least [WordPerfect Corp. is] upgrading all 1.0-1.03 users to 2.0 for free.

OH, NO THEY'RE NOT!  They charged me $75 + tax + shipping to upgrade from
WP 1.0.3 (at educational prices).

I expected a few bugs in WP 2.0, since it's a complete rewrite of WordPerfect.
Version 2.0 is a big improvement, despite my gripes.  WordPerfect Corp. has
a good track record of product support, so I hope they polish up WP 2.0's
rough spots relatively quickly.

  -- Tony


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| EMAIL:       tonyrich@cs.wisc.edu     | The essence of learning is  |
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