🚀 go-pugleaf

>Personally, I find Interleaf to be an extremely abrasive product.

Boy, do you get some kind of award for understatement.

If indeed Interleaf for the Mac is fully compatible with Interleaf on the Sun,
then the product is about as far from Mac-like as you're gonna get without
wandering into Wordstar.

Their user interface design is poor, to say the least, and has obviously
"grown" with the product.  Their documentation is pretty bad, especially the
introductory material which is absolutely hopeless.

The problem seems to be that they grew into this market, not from a publication
background, but from a computer technology orientation.  Thus they developed an
approach to the subject "all their own" without reference to anyone elses
ideas, not even typographers.  That's not all bad, printing and typography are
full of arcana from centuries of history, and a lot of it should be thrown out.
But, Interleaf seems unaware of the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the
traditional approaches.  And by this I not only mean printing, but things like
PageMaker and Word.

If functionality and human interface concerns don't make the point, Interleaf
documentation does.  The comments about publishing tools in the hands of those
who don't know enough to use them all ring true here, especially if you look
at their user documentation.  It goes especially for their annual report, which
appears to have been produced by people who don't know anything about the field
they are producing tools for.  They brag that their own products did all of the
stuff in the annual report.  Look closely for yourself to see if these are the
people you think should be producing your layout, markup, and typography tools.

The product is unix-based, and every once in a while you need to dip into the
underlying unix to do things you should be able to do from your desktop, like
moving documents in from someone else's desktop.  However, a clever system
admin can cover for a lot of this stuff, and what he can't cover for is made
less odious because getting to unix from the desktop is fairly easy.

Not all is bad.  The product is very powerful, and contains everything.  It is
a draw tool, a word processor, and a page layout system all in one.  It works
fairly reliably.  It can do many things that requre several current Mac pro-
grams to do.  But in some cases, especially side-by-side columns, you have to
take what are essentially "bugs" in their system and use them as features to
get the desired results.  For simple things it is WSYIWYG, sort of.  For complex
things, it's about 60% WYSIWYG.  This is not an indictment, because WSYIWYG is
not the be-all and end-all of typography/layout.

After using Macs for several years, and then using Interleaf for about 3 months,
I can say that the Interleaf is a little easier to accomplish the task of some
complex layouts we are using.  However, while it took me 2 hours to learn
PageMaker from scratch, and 6 hours to go through Word 3.0 from a non-word
background, it took me 2 weeks to learn the Interleaf to the point where I
could do anything beyond the trivial, and I still don't know all the aspects
of it 3 months later.  The functionality that is there does not warrant this
learning curve - it should take about 2 days (16 hours) to learn a product of
this functionality completely.

All my comments on Interleaf come from usage of the Sun version, so take them
with a grain of salt.  I will be seeing a Mac II version sometime in November,
so I can report then.  However, they SAY that the Mac II version is identical,
and I tend to believe it because they are porting from one unix to another.

Final disclaimer - these are my opinions only!  My employer has paid for me to
learn this system and use it, and satisfaction is high with the system and with
what is coming out of it - other than we have too few workstations for the size
of the department.  And I'm not saying it's a bad product, I'm saying that if 
you are used to friendly Mac programs and systems, look closely at this before
buying it.
-- 
-Brian Diehm     (SDA - Standard Disclaimers Apply)
Tektronix, Inc.
briand@tekig4.TEK.COM   or  {decvax,cae780,uw-beaver}!tektronix!tekig4!briand