🚀 go-pugleaf

A status report, of sort, for those folks who follow the Word Processor
wars. If you don't care, don't read.

People on the net for a while probably remember that I've been a fan of
FullWrite Professional since the day the shrinkwrap shipped. I've been
using the program exclusively since then in my writing and in the
development of OtherRealms. Having moved about 100,000 words of
material through it in the last six months, I can now look at how well
the program works in a production world rather than dealing with the
euphoria of the first few weeks.

After this time, I still *really* like FullWrite. It's a clean, well-thought
out interface with relatively few botches. And I've decided to put Word 3.01
back on my hard disk and convert back to it.

The reasons for that are complex. While I'm not a big fan of the Word user
interface, it's functional. While I AM a big fan of the FullWrite interface,
there are other problems that outweigh the advantages to the point where I'm
willing to go back to a lesser interface. Why? Because I need to get work
done, and Fullwrite, much as I like it, puts up too many barriers to my
productivity. 

My primary problem with FWP is speed. I've gotten to the point where I
actively hate the "Updating Document" box that shows up every time you try
to scroll around the document. Make a one word change in a 20 page document
and then scroll to the end. Sit and wait, even though no line breaks
changed. Do some writing, then jump to a bookmark to check on something
somewhere else. Sit and wait....

The curse of WYSIWYG. FWP is so locked into the WYSIWYG concept that it
creates problems when you don't *care* how it looks. When you're working on
an article with half a dozen bookmarks over 20 pages and need to reference
various places, FWP becomes a royal pain because you can't turn the WYSIWYG
off. When I'm in the middle of writing a story, I don't care how it looks,
and a program that breaks my train of thought to keep up the WYSIWYG concept
impacts my writing. It wasn't until the other night when I started watching
myself that I realized how much time I was losing to this. It's a little bit
here and there, but it adds up quickly (note: what set me going on this
search was the realization that I'd gotten into the habit of keeping a book
near me while I was writing, and reading while waiting for FullWrite to
finish updating itself... I was getting a lot more reading and a lot less
writing done than I wanted).

To me, performance is the major problem holding FWP back today. If I could
just turn off WYSIWYG, or if it was fast enough that I didn't have to wait
for it all the time, I'd keep it. Word may not be pretty, but it gets out of
my way while I'm writing. For a serious writer, that's critical. This is the
killer for FWP for me. The interface is wonderful, but it's not enough. Too
much of the system is dedicated to keeping the interface alive, and there's
not enough resource left for me, the user.

That's not the only place where speed bothers me. FWP is not just sludgy
starting up, it's downright painful. Double-click and wait. Eventually, you
get the copyright notice, then you wait. Eventually, it tells you it's
opening the document, and you wait. Eventually, the document comes up. 

When you're popping in and out of the word processor (which you have to do
because Fullwrite doesn't leave enough memory to do much of anything
else....) this starts REALLY getting to you. 45 second to a minute to start
up a program and open a document is just too slow.

And speaking of memory.... Fullwrite's hunger has been well-documented.
Believe it or not, it doesn't particularly bother me, except in a really
strange way. 

Imagine this scenario: you're in your layout program. You start up a
background print job with 50 pages of your newsletter (I LOVE background
printing!) and exit the program so you can go back to writing something
else. Except the layout program uses 800K and Fullwrite uses 1100 and
PrintMonitor is loaded in after where the layout program used to be so
memory is fragmented and there's no room for Fullwrite. argh! [Hint: if you
set all of the programs you use in sequence to have the same memory
requirement you may not be able to run them together, but they'll load when
PrintMonitor is active.... Apple: here's a suggestion. Create a new bit for
an application that tells Multifinder to load it at the top of memory so
that things like PrintMonitor can load high and applications can load low
and never the twain shall meet, we hope!] The large amount of memory FWP
uses has, it turns out, strange side-effects, even in a large memory
environment.

The final reasonably major hassle I have with FWP is stability. I still
crash the program with some reliability (about once a week). Bang! ID=3. I
wish I knew why, but I've never found a trend. It just every so often barfs.
I'd be happier if it died reliably, becaus then I could avoid doing what
kills it. On the PLUS side, I've never lost significant data to it, partly
because of the auto-save/backup features of FWP and partly because I'm
hyper-paranoid about saving work to disk.

So there's a triad of major gripes with FWP: performance, memory and
stability. If the performance was there, none of the rest would matter.

There are lots of little things about FWP that bother me, too. The
weaknesses in the formatting and style-sheets are, for a program that's
heavily into display and layout, inexplicable. Lack of real postscript
support makes using letterheads difficult. The stationary feature is really
good -- and the lack of a "work" menu item to bring them up significantly
inhibits the utility. What use is having read-only stationary when you have
to go searching for it with SFGetFile?

While I prefer the FWP spellchecker, it's modality makes it harder to use
effectively, and it's somewhat slow. Thesaurus? I don't use it.

A funny little bitch. When you start FWP, it brings up an untitled window.
So does word. If you then open a file, Word gets rid of the untitled window.
FWP opens up a second window. Don't ask me why, but that really bothers me.

The outlining is a lot better than Word, but I still use Acta -- it's
available in any application, which outweighs any advantage an integrated
outline might have. Nothing special.

One of the big disappointments to me is the change bars. Again, the problem
ties into the WYSIWYG concept. If you change the format instead of the text,
it logs it in the change bar. This isn't always a good idea. For instance:
when I write, I use single spacing to keep as much text on the screen as
possible. When I print, I print double-space for editing. This involves
selecting the entire document and setting the line spacing (itself a
relatively slow operation, come to think of it), printing, then setting it
all back. The change in spacing, though, sets the changebar for the entire
document. The changes are lost. foo.

Yes, you *could* lock the changebar, most stuff around and then unlock it.
That's too much hassle -- changebars aren't worth it to me. You ought to be
able to set it up so that changebars change on text changes only. 

Search/replace functions are very powerful, but can get exceptionally slow,
and there's not status monitor like Word has. Try loading 50K of text
downloaded from Unix into FWP and s/r all occurances of -- to an em-dash.
Starting it just before dinner is a good idea.

Which reminds me. FWP *needs* an expert mode where you get get it to stop
nattering at you. Not just the "updating document" note above, but things
like "Change all is not undoable. Are you sure?" -- when you're doing some
complex text manipulation, that message gets rather tired after a while. A
month of using FWP, I'd figured out that Change All wasn't undoable, and I
really didn't want to see that dialog box any more. One night, my wife came
running into the den because she heard me yelling at the top of my voice
"Yes, Dammit, I DO want to do it!" -- these are nice beginner features, but
for expert users, you can start driving them crazy.

Another real problem I have with FWP is importing non-FWP stuff. With
OtherRealms, it's not unusual for me to end up working with 200K

FWP has lots of potential. If they realize that potential in the next
release, it'll be a killer product. To do that, though, they're going to
have to do two things:

	o fix the performance problems. A word processor has to be fast.
	  writing is hard enough to do when you aren't constantly being
	  interrupted by the program. Every time I lose my train of thought,
	  my writing suffers. A word processor that bitches at me or forces
	  me to way hurts.

	o find some way to get away from the WYSIWYG format. When the 
	  primary purpose is writing and getting the words into the computer
	  with as little delay and hassle as possible. When I'm writing a
	  memo or a letter, WYSIWYG is fine. When I'm writing a novel, it
	  isn't. Let me turn it off and worry about later. Writing and
	  formatting are separate chores. you can do them together, but you
	  don't HAVE to, and many times I prefer not to. A program that
	  forces me to is getting in the way.

So, for now, I'm going back to Word 3, and then to Word 4. And when the new
FWP comes out, I'll probably switch back if Ashton-Tate does what they
should do to the program. Until then, I'm going to bitch about Word's user
interface, but I won't be sitting and waiting on my Word Processor, either.
Pretty and Slow loses this time.




Chuq Von Rospach	Editor/Publisher, OtherRealms		chuq@sun.COM

It's not justice you want, Roderick! It's blood!