Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 01:36:40 -0500 (CDT)
From: "William M. Porter" <WMPORTER@Jetson.UH.EDU>
Subject: MacWrite Pro 1.5 review (text file)
This is a text file explaining why a rational person (well, most of the
time) with heavy-duty word processing needs finally abandoned Microsoft
Word and embraced MacWrite Pro--and why that same person feels that he
has made a step UP. If you are curious about MacWrite Pro, you may find
this text document helpful. This is in some ways an update of the
comparison of Word and MacWrite Pro that I posted in the Archives a year
ago, when I was still somewhat ambivalent about MacWrite Pro.
Will Porter / University of Houston
---- Cut here: what follows is for the Archives, not the Digest -----
What follows is a long e-letter I wrote on April 25, 1994, to my
friend Paul in Boston, who knows that a couple of months I gave up
on Microsoft Word and began to use MacWrite Pro as my primary word
processor--indeed, as virtually my only word processor. Paul knows
that a few years ago I was very enthusiastic about Word and wrote
to ask my opinion about MacWrite Pro. Here is my response. In a way
this updates a document I wrote comparing MacWrite Pro and Word in
April 1993 and uploaded last year.
Let me make two things clear up front. First, I do not hate
Microsoft Word. I have used it since 1985, constantly. I've written
three books in it and started a fourth. I have urged folks to buy
it in the past. I have written minimanuals explaining its use for
the benefit of my colleagues at the University of Houston. It is a
fine piece of work, no doubt about it. I liked the PC counterpart
somewhat better, but let's not get started on that.
Second, I do not work for Claris, not even as a beta-tester, nor do
I own stock in the company. I do this only because (a) I think
others might find this useful and (b) I obviously have too much
time on my hands.
This document was written in MacWrite Pro 1.5.
Will Porter / Houston, Texas
wmporter@jetson.uh.edu (Internet)
75430,1351 (Compuserve)
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Paul,
Here are some tips concerning MacWrite Pro version 1.5. I have used
MacWrite Pro for over a year now, and around Christmas 1993 (even
before I got version 1.5) I finally began to regard it as my
primary word processor. I now regard it as virtually my only word
processor. Weeks go by now in which I do not launch Word. I will
read the press releases when Word/Mac ver. 6 comes out. I'm betting
on Spring 1995, although Microsoft swears it'll be out this summer.
I think they have their fingers crossed behind their backs as they
say it, but actually I don't give a darn if it comes out next week.
Right now, unless it will write my papers FOR me, I doubt that I
will shell out another $100 or so for an upgrade that will
immediately lay claim to several megabytes of RAM and something on
the order of 15Mb of disk space. What a dinosaur!
In the rambling essay that follows, I update my "MacWrite Pros and
Cons" essay of twelve months ago. First, I discuss MacWrite Pro's
weaknesses (most of which are more apparent than real); then I
enumerate MacWrite Pro's strengths or what I like about it; and
finally, I give you a few tips on how to use it, tailored to the
prejudices of a long-time user of Word.
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I. Cons
There were lots of things that I missed from Word when I began to
use MacWrite Pro heavily: a non-page-layout "Normal" view; the
Ribbon; Word's glossaries; the ability to apply so many commands
from the keyboard; and the ability to edit the menus and assign
keystrokes to almost any command. I have gotten used to all of
these things, surprisingly quickly. I hardly miss Word's Normal
view at all. The ability to assign keystrokes to commands and/or
edit menus is less important if the interface of the program is so
well designed already that there are not many improvements or
changes needed.
Word's glossaries have been replaced by three things: the glossary
functions of both Thunder 7 and Riccardo Ettore's "TypeIt4Me"
shareware program, and by MacWrite Pro's Insert file command. I
like TypeIt4Me, in fact, even better than Word's glossaries now. I
occasionally miss the fact that Word's glossaries include
formatting, but in general TypeIt4Me's glossaries are much easier
to use.
Word's Ribbon and Ruler are adequately replaced by MacWrite Pro's
palettes, which in many ways are more intelligently laid out.
(There are so many little quirks involved in the use of Word's
Ribbon and Ruler. Using the Ruler's styles list to create a new
style or modify an old one is easy once you've figured out how to
do it, but who ever figured this out on his own?)
I don't miss Word's outliner. It stunk. I was for a while one of
its very few defenders, but in all honesty I have to admit that I
almost never used it myself. ClarisWorks 2.x has an outliner, I
understand, but I haven't used it. Joan needs an outliner
occasionally, and I am wondering if upgrading to ClarisWorks 2 (we
have version 1) would be useful to her.
I cannot honestly say that I miss Word's indexing tool, although I
have an occasional need for such a tool, and MacWrite Pro does not
provide one. However, one of the main things I have come to
appreciate about MacWrite Pro is that it is not attempting to do
everything. It is a great word processor, with many advanced
functions. For writing books, it is inadequate in some respects.
But I do not spend most of my time writing books. (MacWrite Pro 1.5
has a table of contents feature, but I have not used it.)
There are exactly three things I do not like about MacWrite Pro:
1. It is easier to move the insertion point around from the
keyboard in Word. I regret that MacWrite Pro didn't take advantage
of the numeric keypad the way Word does: the arrow keys are so
awkwardly placed. (This complaint was remedied with QuicKeys
aliases.) I miss being able to move by sentences (i.e. to jump from
one period to the next period). I really do not like what MacWrite
Pro does when you are selecting text from the keyboard and you
overshoot your target. When you do this in Word or for that matter
in FileMaker Pro, you can pull the selection back a word or a few
characters as needed. But if you try to do this in MacWrite Pro,
instead of pulling the selection back, you start expanding it at
the other end. This is just stupid. This could only be useful to
somebody who wants to select text from the middle of the target
string.
2. MacWrite Pro's Define Styles dialog needs an "Okay" or "Define"
button. After you edit a style's formatting, you just click on
inert white space somewhere. Somebody on Claris's normally
brilliant interface team was out sick on the day this dialog was
finished.
3. Word offers more control over footnotes, note superscripts, and
paragraph formatting of notes. I can live with MacWrite Pro's
limitations here, but I miss Word's flexibility.
That is it. Really. Okay, I might mention one more thing which is
not very important to me. Overall, Word's table features are
superior. I miss the way that Word's tables knew that I would
probably want the text in row 4, column 1, to be formatted the same
way the text in row 3 of the same column was formatted. Adding
another row to a column seems to challenge MacWrite Pro, which
responds a bit reluctantly. My work does not involve lots of long
tables, but if it did, this might be a factor weighing heavily in
favor of Word. On the other hand, small tables are easier to create
in MacWrite Pro and much easier to edit. Word's three-level ruler
seems to confuse a lot of people. In MacWrite Pro, you can change
the width of a column in a table by--get this--just dragging the
column separator! Why didn't Bill Gates think of that? You can
merge cells easily too, for some neat effects. My suspicion is that
90% of the users out there will find MacWrite Pro's tables actually
better implemented and easier to use. The other 10% who need real
table power will prefer Word or WordPerfect, and with good reason.
There are a few things that I miss in MacWrite Pro. Occasionally I
would like to be able to number a group of lines automatically. I
can work around this pretty easily however with a section that has
two columns, one of which is very narrow. In fact, such an approach
gives me considerably more flexibility than Word's auto-numbering
scheme. And of course I can view the line numbers on the page as I
work (unlike Word).
I miss Word's "hidden text" character format, because it made it
possible for me to create footnotes whose reference numbers were
not visible. (I used this all the time in Latin texts that I
annotate for my students.) This is admittedly a very specialized
need.
There is nothing in MacWrite Pro to correspond to Word's "first
page special" section format. You can indicate in a MacWrite Pro
section that you want a title page, but what that means is that
headers and footers will not print on that page at all.
This last complaint, however, is instructive. At first, this lack
of separate headers and footers for "title pages" struck me as a
terrible failing of MacWrite Pro. I soon learned however how to
compensate for this lack using one of MacWrite Pro's real
strengths: text frames. You simply set up a text frame on page 1 of
a section, and place into it whatever header or footer text you
want. I am so used to this now that I actually prefer it.
Another example of using a strength of the program to overcome a
weakness. As I said, long tables are not MacWrite Pro's forte.
Actually, no table can be very long in MacWrite Pro: a table is a
type of frame in MacWrite Pro, and no frame can straddle a page
break, so no table can be more than one page long. This can be
somewhat inconvenient: it means that you have to regard tables more
or less as graphic elements, rather than as continuations of your
body text.
Now Joan's paralegal had been using Word's tables to create
summaries of documents and these were often more than one page
long. I discovered a work-around that takes advantage of MacWrite
Pro's superior section formatting. In MacWrite Pro, the columns in
a multi-column section do not have to be the same width as they do
in Word. Furthermore, there is in MacWrite Pro a "column break"
character that you can use to force text in column 1 (say) of a
three-column section to stop and jump up to the top of column 2. (I
often wanted to do this in Word and couldn't, except clumsily, by
inserting Returns.) With these features in mind, I came upon the
idea of creating many short sections (each starting "next line"
rather than "next page") with multiple columns of varying widths,
and using these column breaks to move from column to column
(instead of tabs, as in a table). I haven't created a ten-page
document this way, and I fear that if I did it would be an
inordinately large file for all the formatting involved, but it
seems to work fineQin some respects, better than using tables.
In general, I have decided that MacWrite Pro deserves the name
"pro" if you allow it to compete only in the word processing
category, and do not require it to compete in the category of
book-processing, which it is not designed for. (You may remember
that Word back in version 3 or so began to call itself a "document
processor" rather than word processor.) I have to say, however,
that Word's book or document-processing skills are not all that
great either--or all that necessary. University of Nebraska Press
did not set the pages of my book from my Word files, as of course I
did not expect them to. And if you *were* actually going to do page
layout for a book, well, using a page-layout program rather than a
"document processor" might be advisable. The only considerable
advantage I can see to Word is its indexing function, and I am not
planning to have need of that again any time soon. AND Mike Steiner
on the development team for MacWrite Pro at Claris is working on an
AppleScript script that will index MacWrite Pro documents.
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II. MacWrite Pro's strengths, or what I like about it
Lots. Really. I like this program a lot. It is fun to use, most of
the time. It reminds me of what I liked about the Macintosh when I
used one for the first time in 1985--when I wrote my first paper
(an article on Horace) in MacWrite (version 4, I think). I feel
like MacWrite Pro gets in my way much less than Word did. Using
Word was like flying a commercial jetliner, while using MacWrite
Pro is like driving a sportscar. If you need to move 150 people
cross country, you need the jetliner. And flying a jetliner does
give you a sense of power. My word processor's bigger than your
word processor! But for ordinary running about, the sportscar is
both more fun and more efficient. And if you get into the Zen of
the thing, you can also begin to sense that MacWrite Pro's
intelligence is a kind of power, but a more subtle, civilized kind.
Sure, you can't expect to do color separations, create a
fully-functioning spreadsheet with graphs, or compose music in
MacWrite Pro. But if you want to kern a couple of letters, you have
no alternative. Neither Word nor WordPerfect offers true kerning.
To me it boils down to how much you care about text.
I like working in any number of reduced views. I work at 80% a lot.
If my default font is Palatino 12, the type onscreen is quite
legible, and I can view over two-thirds of a page. I have to go
down to 70% or so to view an entire page on screen at once.
MacWrite Pro's frames are infinitely easier to work with than
Word's and I use them all the time, especially the text frames.
Placement, editing, text-wraparound, and the rest--MacWrite Pro
beats the heck out of Word in this department. Today I created a
piece of stationery for printing 30 small Avery labels. Every label
was a frame: there was no actual text in the document at all. The
document had one, three-column section, and there were ten
label-sized frames in each column of the page. Doing this in Word
would have been a nightmare.
MacWrite Pro's "variables" are more flexible and much easier to use
than Word's glossaries for page number, date, time, &c. It is easy
in MacWrite Pro, for example, to have a footer showing the page
numbers in this format: "Page x of y" where "y" is the total number
of pages in the document. MacWrite Pro has a variable that shows
you the last time a document was modified, which I am now making
heavy use of. Variables are a good example of the intelligence of
MacWrite Pro's interface. Word's variables are glossaries. To view
the date glossary options, you have no choice but to go into the
glossary list and scroll through them. They are numerous, to be
sure, but also somewhat bewildering, and they are in a list with
the glossaries for times, pages, versions, and several other
things.
MacWrite Pro's variable options appear to be less numerous than
Word's but only because they are so unobtrusively provided for you.
You get to them in the Edit menu via the "Insert variable" pop-out.
Date is one of the options. Normally you just pull over to "date"
and MacWrite Pro inserts the date, formatted as you have previously
specified in your Preferences file. However, you can override the
default format by holding down the Option key while you pull down
to this command (or while you type the keyboard command). This
brings up a little dialog that has three options for you to choose
among:
Format: 4/25/94 or April 25, 1994, &c.
Order (for 4/25/94 format): mm/dd/yy, dd/mm/yy, yy/mm/dd
Update: never, always, when modified, next open
All in all, this produces TWENTY-EIGHT permutations. And Word? Word
has exactly seven date glossaries. Hmmm.
Text handling? Forget the competition. MacWrite Pro offers
letterspace justification. It doesn't kick in always or
immediately, but it kicks in when its needed. For working with
narrow columns of text especially, this is imperative. In a narrow
column of justified text, Word will leave a gap at the end of a
line that contains a single word MacWrite Pro on the other hand
will distribute the slack among the characters within that single
line.
MacWrite Pro's kerning and character space options are without
parallel. This is admittedly a somewhat esoteric feature. But I
absolutely love it. It's what attracted me to MacWrite Pro
initially more than anything else.
Character styles are useful, although it has taken me some time to
understand how and why, and I haven't quite mastered them yet. One
use I make however is this: I create two character styles called
"Default" and "Latin." Latin is exactly like Default (say, Times
12) except that Latin has the Language attribute "None." When I
start to type some Latin, I just type Option-Command-2 to switch to
the Latin character style--and then MacWrite Pro's spelling checker
does not beep at me after every word. When I'm done with the Latin
text, typing Option-Command-1 puts me back into my default, which
has the Language attribute "U.S. English" and thus invites
spell-checking.
MacWrite Pro's autosave and automatic backup options are excellent,
superior to Word's.
Printing? How about back-to-font printing--something Word should
have gotten around to years ago, but hasn't yet. Also you can
collate pages if you print multiple copies of the same document.
(One weakness of MacWrite Pro here: You cannot specify that it
print an individual section of a multi-section document. You cannot
print just the current selection, either. However you can SAVE the
current selection, which you cannot in Word. This is a toss-up.)
Finally, I very much like the fact that MacWrite Pro is fully
scriptable. AppleScript and OSA are clearly the way of the future.
Big applications like WordPerfect and Word that do everything you
can imagine wanting to do with your computer and some things you
cannot, are the way of the past. I think this "bigger is better"
neurosis goes back to WordPerfect for DOS. DOS was such a pain to
deal with that the average user was abjectly grateful for a program
that did things like file management, printing envelopes and
labels, and so on. But that was then and this is now. With any
luck, Microsoft's domination of the Mac word processing market will
end with Word 6. Power Mac users are already checking out
WordPerfect, which has the only nativized Power Mac word processor
on the market. But WordPerfect 3 clearly is NOT "it." MacWrite Pro
maythe thing I like about MacWrite Pro most of all is its graceful
self-confidence, its lack of pretension or ostentation. This may be
a marketing weakness, I am afraid. MacWrite Pro could add a few
feature without selling its soul, but it could not start touting
those features the way Word and WordPerfect do. MacWrite Pro's
greatest strength is precisely that it does NOT rub your nose in
all its power. It is there to serve you, not to challenge you.
People who look to their word processor to provide life's next big
challenge need to get outdoors more.
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III. Getting started with MacWrite Pro
Set this aside until you own MacWrite Pro, then look here first. In
general, MacWrite Pro is so splendidly designed that it explains
itself. However, like native English-speakers learning Latin, users
of Word coming to MacWrite Pro may encounter problems that arise
from the traumas of their earlier experience.
The first thing to do when you start using MacWrite Pro is edit the
"MacWrite Pro Options" document. This is the default document that
appears when you use the "New" command to create a new document.
Various defaults--document margins, default styles, even options
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