Re: Mailing lists reflect on Developers

From: Benjamin Cramer (truempyi@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Wed Aug 02 2000 - 04:43:51 AEST


On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 13:18:57 -0400, Judyth Mermelstein, espresso@E-
SCAPE.NET, wrote:

>My question to you would be "exactly what do you mean by
>'fully formatted'?". Perhaps I should also ask "exactly what do
>you mean by 'ease'?" -- few things in life are quite as easy as
>we would like them to be but most become easier with practice and
>experience.

Hi Judyth,

Your points are well taken.  In the future I may well spend my money on a
page layout program and use BBEdit for writing.

"Fully formatted" for my purposes means with tables and figures
integrated and with the text wrapping correctly.  "Ease" means that I
shouldn't have to waste a lot of time removing blank space created by
text wrapping around a "ghost" figure after I've removed or added text,
that when I turn text wrap on I shouldn't have to cut and paste the
figure again to make the little checkmark have some effect, that I should
be able to add a caption without making separate text objects for all the
little symbols and any text that has to be italic.  These things can be
done easier in Word98 than in NW5, and I don't think they're all that
complex.  I can't speak for the tradeoff in terms of program stability.
But having to leap through sixteen flaming hoops in order to turn Bob off
and get the damn thing not to underline all my long sentences in red is
enough to make me stick around at least until I see what NW6 has to
offer.  I was almost ready to go after Bob with the rock hammer before I
finally managed to get him to quit appearing.

Ben


--
Benjamin Cramer
Geological Sciences, Rutgers University
Wright Geological Laboratory
610 Taylor Road
Piscataway, NJ  08854
ph: (732)445-0688 / fax: (732)445-3374



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