🚀 go-pugleaf

Ted,

I'm afraid you have simply exhibited an ignorance of the way
Word is used.  I would have replied directly but you have badly
misrepresented Word publicly and that's unfair to those who have
never seen the program.


In article <504@imsvax.UUCP> ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden) writes:
>
>MSWord's spell checker, aside from not having the pheonetic capabilities at
>all, actually takes the words it feels are misspelled in a document and 
>presents them to you in a list TOTALLY OUT OF CONTEXT, for YOU to fix;  it 
>can't fix them.

This is simply wrong.  Word splits the screen, displays the
context in the top portion, the mispelled word in the bottom,
and possible alternatives in the middle.  You can then choose
whether you want Word to fix the error or not.  If the word is
correctly spelled but is not in recognized as such by Word, you
have the option of adding it to one of three dictionaries, the
main dictionary, a user dictionary (optionally included when
you run the spelling checker), or the document dictionary
(automatically included whenever you check this particular
document.)

When you get all the way through the document you have one last
chance to tell Word to apply all the changes you made or throw
them away.

I'm not sure where you saw a version of Word which could not
correct spelling mistakes.  Perhaps you saw Word v1 (which was
distributed without a spelling checker) and a second vendor's
spelling checker.  The spelling checker which comes with Word v2
is one of the most pleasant that I have ever used (Turbo
Lightening is possibly better but would not understand Word's
hyphenation).

By the way, the *best* spelling checker I have seen is included
with IBM's DisplayWrite 3.  You can check any word as you type
it by simply hitting a function key.  It consults the on-disk
dictionary (only one, not three, unfortunately), offers
alternatives on screen, and fixes the error immediately.  Very
useful.


>The other thing which kills MSWord is its total lack of any reasonable indent
>function.  Govt. and military documents are filled with the following kind
>of construction:
>
>      a. a tab, followed by a letter or number and a period, and then an indent
>	 beginning on the exact same line, as you are seeing now.  MSWord has 
>	 no rational way of doing this;  you have to type the whole paragraph
>	 sans indents, indent the whole paragraph forward, and then indent the
>	 "tab a." back, like a Polish two-step or something.  A military 
>	 secretary or attache would go ape-**** trying to use MSWord.

This is also simply wrong.  I would define a paragraph type which
has a left indent of (for example) 1 inch but with the first
line indented -0.5 inches.  A tab is automatically created at
the 1 inch point.  I would simply type "a.<TAB>a tab,
followed..." to get the paragraph you have described.

One of the nicest features of Word is style sheets.  I can
collect all of the various paragraph definitions into a style
sheet which I can attach to various documents.  I might, for
example, define the above indented paragraph as type "IP".  To
begin writing indented paragraphs I would simply type <ALT-i><p>
and forget about any messy reformatting or margin adjusting.

For you Nroff/Troff gurus out there, style sheets are roughly
equivalent to a macro package.  They are not as general but you
define what the document looks like in the style sheet and just
enter the text in the document.

Finally, both my wife and I worked at TRW (defense division) for
a number of years and are both intimately familiar with the
formatting requirements of MIL-STD documentation.  There is only
one thing which Word does not automatically do for you when
writing such documents; it does not automatically number the
paragraphs.  I guess "troff -mm" still wins, but not by much
since Word very nicely drives both the Apple and the HP laser
printers.
-- 
	-- Art Zemon
	   FileNet Corp.
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