🚀 go-pugleaf

> review of MacA in <694@ucbcad.BERKELEY.EDU> .....

> 1)  You cannot change font from within a paragraph.

yes you can - using the "Style Editor" you can attach any font to the "text"
menu and (optionally) bind a command key to it. You only need to this once,
and save the doc as a "stationery pad" for future use.

> However, it is in need of a version 1.1 to correct a few fairly minor things.

I have received a copy of version 1.1 of MacAuthor, and some people here
have been using it to produce the AISB Quarterly (newsletter of the Soc. for
Study of AI and Simulation of Behaviour), so it's got a good workout.

I posted some comments about MacA to Mactel, a UK BBS, (edited version
given below for brevity), and the author's reply is also given below.
A version 1.2 will be available free to existing owners.

--------
My comments:

First the good news: MacAuthor v1.1 arrived yesterday, and just in time
too. .... 1.1 seems much more stable than 1.0 - it hasn't crashed all day!

Now for the bad news. There are some flaws that are slowing us down quite
badly.  We are probably using MacA the wrong way - maybe what we really need
is PageMaker, but I feel MacA should be able to handle this.  What we are
doing is assembling a series of articles that have been submitted to us by
e-mail into a newsletter whose layout is very simple: two columns + a footer.

Problem 1: how to retain the 2 column layout? [Sak: details omitted]

Problem 2: it won't let you put a right-justified tab on the rh margin. So
we can't match the footers on the existing layout which has the issue no on
the left and the page no on the right.

Problem 3: when reading in a text file & you select the "Return is line break"
option, and you are reading into a para that has both margins justified, MacA
will spread out the last line of each para that you read in. [details omitted]

Problem 4: If you read in a text file that has TABs in it, MacA goes bananas.

Problem 5: Saving a page layout format is not as simple as it may appear.
[Details omitted]

Problem 6: It needs to be able to read in a file at the current insertion
point. What you now have to do is open the text file you want using any
stationery format, select the text, cut it, go back to the doc you were
working on and paste it in.  Even this would be acceptable if...

Problem 7: it didn't run out of memory so quickly. On a 512K Mac, it started
running out of memory around 4000 words (wouldn't let me open any more docs
without closing the one I was working on).  This is about 7 pages, 2 col single
spaced text - if I remember rightly, this was the limitation of MacW on a 128K
Mac when it first came out.

Problem 8: The screen isn't refreshed correctly after a global replace
operation.  We can live with this, since in v1.0 a global replacement resulted
in the program's looping.

Problem 9: "Goto Page No" doesn't work

Problem 10: Could do with a "Start New column" analogous to "Start New Page"
to deal with multi-column layouts.

Having said all this, the end product looks really good.

Sak
---------
Keith's reply (unedited):

Message #:  834
Submitted:  05/28/86 15:39
Submitted by:  KEITH LANDER
Subject:  MacAuthor V1.1 - response to Sak Wathanasin (long)

Dear Sak,
I'm glad that 1.1 is working better than 1.0.  I'll try and respond to
the "bad" news as best I can and, hopefully, turn it into not such bad
news after all.  As an aside,  might I suggest that you post this sort
of info in to MacAuthor files area: that way I won't have to wait for
MacTel to scroll through the news file.

1. In fact you are already using MA in a PageMaker fashion because you are
loading text in from an existing document. One way you could make life a
little easier would be to load just enough text to make sure the first two
cols are created, reposition the right hand col, then load the rest of
 the text. MA will copy the frame positions from the first complete page on
subsequent pages: this is fine if you are typing a doco from scratch.

2. You are right about the RJ tab: a workaraound for headers and footers is to
move the right margin a bit to the right to allow the tab to be placed in the
correct place. Alternatively you could consider using a couple of frames.

3. I think the problem here has to do with the structure of your text file. If
y ou choose the "return is line break" option, then MA will ignore all single
inst ances of CR and expect to find a double CR to terminate a para. The fact
that your doco ends up with the last line of each para fully justified means
that no double CR was found and hence end of para wasn't recognized. Where did
you get the text file from?

4. We haven't had any instances of this problem, and have quite successfully
loaded quite complex spreadsheets from Excel etc without bother. Can you
send me a copy of the text file and stationery pad so that I can investigate.

5. We always intended that text in a document would be saved as part
of a stationery pad : this is useful if you want preprinted stationery
such as headed note paper, memo paper etc. There is no difference
between Save all and Save as stationery at the time of saving: the point
of stationery is that it automatically makes a clone of the stationery
document whan you invoke New. Admittedly you do have to go around the
houses a bit if you just want to save the styles without the text. I accept
that point and shall do something about it in a future upgrade.

6. You can merge text files. If you read a text file into a stationery pad
the text is read in at the insertion point that was in force at the time the
stationery pad was last saved.

7. I think you must have had a problem (maybe your old stationery pad
had damage created by the save bug in 1.0). The other day I loaded a 65
page document into a 325K switcher partition, saved it as text, read
it back in as a text file and reformatted it. The document contained
22000 words!

8. You'll have to clarify the problem here. I am unaware of any refresh
problem after a global replace.

9. Goto page does work. I just tried it on the above mentioned document.
In fact, Dr. Ken Browning ofGlasgow University prepares lecture slides
using MA, and does Goto page to step through them during the lecture.
Have you realised that Goto page uses the same numbering scheme as
the Print command, and not that set up by the Make Title Page command?

10. OK. We might be able to do that in the next version.

I hope that this helps.  As you say, the end result is worth it I think.

If you use the scrapbook for saving text from MA, MAcWrite, PageMaker
or whatever, beware of a bug in the scrapbook manager. You may have
noticed some obscure four letter codes at the bottom right of each
scrapbook page. For MAcWrite text this will be MWRT,TEXT and for
MA it will be MATX,TEXT. These are the resource types defining the entry
(one is the formatting info, the other is the ASCII text).
If you delete such
a page the scrapbook only throws away the text resource. You can then
get into a situation where the remaining formatting resource beomes
attached to the wrong text resource with bizarre results. Appleare
aware of the problem and are supposed to be correcting it.

Chers
Keith
-------------
I sent some further comments complaining (among other things) about
the slow speed of redisplay, and included comments from Mike Sharples, the
editor of the AISB Q. This is part of the reply (sorry for the editing,
but this is getting very long).

--------------------------
From:  KEITH LANDER
Subject:  Re your gripes

[Sak: preamble deleted]... I agree that MA is not ideal for the job at the
moment either, because (a) it is slow at handling simple highlight commands
and (b) it clears the screen below the insertion point whenever you
insert/delete text (although you can minimize the effect of this by
working from the end of the text forwards).  As Mike Sharples points out,
MA is better at dealing with text typed directly (which is what it was
designed for).

That said,  you will be pleased (I hope) to learn that I am speeding the
thing up in precisely the two areas just mentionedn  Tie`improvements will
be incorporated into v1.2 due to be released as a (free) upgrade at the
end of June.  ....
-- 
Sak Wathanasin, U of Sussex, Cognitive Studies, Falmer, Sussex BN1 9QN, UK
uucp:  ...mcvax!ukc!cvaxa!sakw
arpa:  sakw%cvaxa.sussex.ac.uk@ucl.cs.ac.uk
janet: sakw@uk.ac.sussex.cvaxa