🚀 go-pugleaf

After playing with the "don't panic" prerelease release of FullWrite,
which finally arrived on the second attempt at shipping, I have
conflicting impressions.

The overall concept is very well done, with good abstractions (Notes,
Sidebars, Styles, Classifications, Rulers).  The icon bar is great,
although distinguishing the type of a 5x5 icon requires more practice
than I have.  All the different ways of moving around the document
will be useful--browsing, bookmarks, and "jumping" (which is
essentially Emacs incremental search, or Raskin's "leaping").  The
bibliography, index, and table of contents are done well.  I think
the design of this program is generally good.

But there are some severe deficiencies with the implementation I got
in the mail.  I hope all these things will be resolved before
release.  By the way, if any of these problems are actually
nonexistent, please let me know what I should be doing.

You can't set the height of a sidebar attached to text without typing
a number into a dialog box.  Why is it necessary for me to figure out
by trial and error (or by holding a ruler up to the screen) how many
inches high my figure or table is?  Admittedly, you can graphically
set the size of a page-specific sidebar, but that's just a slightly
easier form of trial and error.  I would like an "automatic" setting
for height and width.

While text does flow nicely around sidebars as advertised, it is
impossible to make text *NOT* flow nicely around sidebars.  You can't
place a 2x2 figure at the top of a page with no text on either side
unless you type a bunch of blank lines next to it, which defeats the
purpose of a page-specific sidebar.

Line heights keep changing at random when I move the insertion point.
Just clicking the mouse in the text causes nearby lines to move up
and down, apparently at random.  I can only get them back the way I
want by randomly clicking around, trying to tickle the bug again, and
this usually makes some other line change.  Sometimes whole blank
lines appear and disappear.  This is especially a problem in
sidebars, since the size is fixed, and when a blank line appears at
the top, the last line falls off the bottom and vanishes.

The *only* place you can set paragraph spacing is in the Document
Base Style.  It is therefore *global*.  You can pick exactly one
paragraph spacing for everything in the document.  Needless to say,
it practically always has to be zero, eliminating the paragraph
spacing feature.

As everyone knows, the thing is slooooooooow.  But that's strictly an
implementation issue.

That's all I can think of right now, but I'll be sure to let everyone
know if something else shows up.  I hope AAS is out there somewhere.

- Walt
--
       Walter Smith, CS graduate student, Carnegie-Mellon University
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