Date: Wed, 27 Apr 1994 01:36:40 -0500 (CDT) From: "William M. Porter" 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) ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 concerning backups and autosave--are apparently stored in this document. Personally, I think the users guide should have a fuller explanation of the importance of this thing. Here's what I have figured out. Create a new document, then edit its format the way you would like your default new document to be. Look especially at the following: 1. Check the document margins. If you would like to add a default footer, go ahead and do so. You do not have to actually put any text in that footer, but you might find it convenient to have it there. 2. Go to the Preferences dialog (Edit menu) and set the document preferences. Be sure that you do not have both Fractional Widths and Automatic Kerning turned on. Apparently because of some bug in the program, these two options are not very compatible. I use fractional widths, then kern individual words or pairs of letters when I feel the need. 3. Create a default character style. I create a character style called "normal" (to distinguish it from "default", which is a paragraph style). Use the Define Styles dialog to do this, not the palette. Your definition of Normal should specify only two things: a font and a size (e.g. Palatino 12). Do not include any character style as part of the definition--not even "plain"--or you will be alerted to a modification in the current style every time you apply italics to a single word. 4. Edit your Default paragraph style. "Default" is the only preexistent style. Use the Define Styles dialog again, not the palette. Select Default in the list, check "Use character info," and then click on the Character button. Use the base styles list there to attach the character style Normal to the paragraph style Default. Now you're set. 5. Use the Autosave command in the File menu to set your auto-save and backup options. These apparently are stored in the Options file, too. 6. Look in the View menu and set the options there that you want. Do you want to view the page-margin outline? Do you want "view invisibles" on by default (= Word's 'Show paragraph')? You should also move the window around on screen to where you want it: zoom it or crop it as you prefer. If you want any of the palettes to be visible by default, be sure to get them visible now. Now save this document. When you are in the standard file dialog, do not give the document a name. Instead, click on the pop-up menu above the name-entry field and select file type "MacWrite Pro Options." That name will automatically be assigned to the document, and you will notice also that the program automatically saves the Options file to the Claris folder inside your System folder. This is in effect a stationery document. When you have saved it, you will still have open an apparently unsaved window titled "Document1". Close it without saving. Open a new document and check its options to make sure that they are what you wanted. Here is a tip for the MacWrite Pro options file that I consider really worthwhile. Add to its stylesheet half a dozen basic paragraph styles. You can apply paragraph styles from the keyboard using Command + numeral shortcuts: the numeral indicates the position of the style in the stylesheet list. (Command-1 is always Default.) Now styles are listed not alphabetically, but in the order of creation. So if you do not have the same styles in every document, created in the same order, you will never get particularly comfortable with these keyboard shortcuts. Is Command-5 "block quote" in this document, or "hanging indent"? The solution to this problem is to define in your MacWrite Pro Options file the half dozen or so most basic paragraph formats. I take these to be: 1 Default 2 Body ( = Default, but with a small first-line indent) 3 part title (like Default, but perhaps bold and with some space before) 4 hanging indent (useful for lists like this) 5 block quotation You could go ahead and define your footer style as number 6. To do so you'll have to insert a footer and format it, to serve as a basis for redefining the style. You can then remove the text from the footer before resaving the Options file. Anyway, saving these five or six styles in your MacWrite Pro Options document means that you will soon learn that Command-3 means "part title," and Command-5 is "block quotation." Always. You can of course redefine these styles in particular documents, but their names and their order in the list will remain the same. I really only have one other tip, and it's really more of a warning. There is something about MacWrite Pro's styles that I still don't fully understand. It seems like a bug or at least a mistake, but I've figured out how to avoid it, so it's not fatal. Here is the problem. I do not have a predefined style for "document title" (to use at the top of page 1 of a formal document of some sort). Instead, I tend to format that one paragraph ad hoc. Its underlying style is Default, but I usually change the alignment to Centered and increase the point size of the text. Sometimes I add a character format such as italics or bold. Now if later on I redefine the Default style--say I change the font from Palatino to Helvetica--the charcter formatting of that first paragraph (the one containing the title of the document) will automatically get reformatted. In other words, it will change from Palatino 24 Italic to (say) Helvetica 12 Plain. The centered alignment will remain. Similar problems occur in other similar circumstances, when you create an ad hoc paragraph format that is based on some defined style, and then you redefine that base style. The workaround is to strip the paragraph with the ad hoc formatting of any connection to styles using the "No style" paragraword processing, before Microsoft Word introduced paragraph styles. You can still copy that paragraph's formatting using the "Copy Ruler" command, if you wish to paste it somewhere else in the document without creating a named style. I think the rest of the program can be figured out by any Mac user with prior word processing experience. When you get the software, look at the manual. In general I think it is excellent. And when you don't find the answer, let me know or contact Claris Tech Support on Compuserve. The folks they have answering questions on CIS are about the best I've ever seen represent a company. Good luck. Will