🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gYK7nty00Uh7Q19X5O@andrew.cmu.edu> ll12+@andrew.cmu.edu (Laura Ann Lemay) writes:
>...
>When I first heard about MS Word, it was said it had complete Desktop
>Publishing capabilities.  Cool, I thought, when I graduate, I won't have
>to break down and buy pagemaker (I've been using my own copy of Word, and
>pagemaker on an appleshare server).
>
>From what I've heard out of previews, MS 4.0 doesn't do nearly as much as it
>had intended to do.  What are the DTP features like?  I realize that it
>can't have nearly the capability of PM, or even Ready, set, go, but is it
>passable?

I think that's a pretty fair assessment. I generally like Word's
philosophy and user interface (I said *generally*), but was put off
by a few quirks in version 3. The most serious of these was the 
degradation in typing and display speed in some files. (The closest
I could come to explaining this was the use of embedded Postscript
pictures and/or fonts that gave Word trouble, like Helvetica Light,
but I'm not totally convinced.) There were also a few inconsistencies
in the way it handled formatting, such as fractional widths and
not applying changes to styles. OK, in a program this complex I could
tolerate a few quirks. I avoided the pseudo-page-layout features (such
as side-by-side paragraphs) because they were just too awkward to use.
And I waited for version 4.0 ...

Had 4.0 arrived two weeks earlier, I would have completed my book,
which was already in Word 3 format, with it. That would have been a
mistake, in retrospect (having had 4.0 for a couple of weeks now.)
While 4.0 does an admirable job of making the existing features easy
to use, many of its 'fixes' are ad hoc. For example, to speed up
scrolling past embedded pictures (it would take two minutes! to scroll
past some of my diagrams) you now have the option of displaying a
grey box instead of the picture. Not what I had in mind. 4.0 breaks no
new ground, as far as I can tell. The inclusion of an obsolete paint/draw
program (along with an insulting offer to upgrade it for $50) is
pitiable. I'd prefer integrated drawing tools but even a desk accessory
such as Canvas DA or DeskDraw is much more useful to me. Same story
for the add-on thesaurus and 'macro' capability.

Word 4.0 is a fine product, a great *word* processor and perhaps the
ultimate refinement of the original Word concept. But perhaps the real
question is: has it kept up with the competition? (Are we reminded of
Excel?) In contrast, I recently received a demo copy of Nisus, and I'm
very impressed so far. It has page-layout capabilities, integrated
drawing tools, built-in thesaurus and a well-designed user interface
(just a notch above 4.0's). And it's faster and less expensive than
Word. (Almost forgot the built-in macro processing and genuine
regular expression patter-matching. I find these essential for
turning a list of words, for example, into a formatted index. I've
been using QUED/M for this purpose.)

Anyway, I'll probably stick with Word for letters, small manuals, etc.
(I'm using Quark XPress for the book, and it keeps improving by
leaps and bounds. Try getting colour separations out of Word!)
Which is unfortunate, because I like the product and it has the
advantage of having a de facto 'standard' format (e.g., XPress
understands Word documents and styles. Who knows when it will
recognize Nisus? Same for Sonar, which I use to generate indices. Etc.)
4.0 is such a disappointment.


-- 
Frank Kolnick,
consulting for, and therefore expressing opinions independent of, Computer X
UUCP: {allegra, linus}!utzoo!mnetor!frank