NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/comp/sys/next/software/2523

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-07 | 3.9 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!portal!lll-winken!cert!netnews.upenn.edu!dsinc!cs.widener.edu!eff!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!destroyer!cs.ubc.ca!unixg.ubc.ca!kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca!acs.ucalgary.ca!kthompso
From: [e-mail] (Kelly Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.software
Subject: PasteUp Arrives
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 5 Nov 92 21:59:27 GMT
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Organization: The University of Calgary, Alberta
Lines: 74
Nntp-Posting-Host: acs3.acs.ucalgary.ca

Well, I got PasteUp yesterday. Lots of people asked me to tell
you what I thought about it, so here goes. I read the manual
from beginning to end (don't laugh, I got it in the morning and
had to go to class, so I figured I'd do something 8) Anyway, the
manual is pretty--both as in nice to look at and pretty short.
Since the claim is it does almost everything Quark and PageMaker
do, I expected 5-10 disks, a few tombs for manuals. The manual is
elegant but sparse. There's a few little mistakes, and many of
the diagrams don't look like do in the program. (ie the tab
panel).

The program itself is... buggy and not nearly as fast as I would
have hoped. Graphics seem to be fast (haven't used them a whole
lot yet), but text is really slow and seems buggy.  I imported a
document (about 30 pages) and after about 3-4 minutes I finally
left and came back later(it took PageMaker 30 sec on the same
file). I know it does some conversions (which you have no control
over--I wanted to convert 3 or more spaces to tabs like in
PageMaker, but no-can-do), but it just took far too long. The
document I was trying to do had two columns per page (not linked)
and lots of tab markers in the one column. The tabs were really
weird. The updating when you move a tab marker is really slow
(the text isn't updates, just the little icon of the tab marker).

The text also jumps around--about 1/2 a cm along one side of the
right column always shifted up and down a few pixels while I
edited the text. The text editing is the biggest problem. It's
slow and STRANGE things happen. For example, I was creating a
table of contents by hand and had the info typed in by someone
else. It looked like:
Item <space> <space> <space> <space> 2
So I wanted to take out all the spaces and replace with one tab
which I set to be along the far right margin. I highlighted the
spaces and hit the tab key, thinking the two would jump over to
the correct location on the left margin. Instead the 2 and the
spaces were deleted. I found that if I deleted the spaces and
then hit tab it worked ok. By the way, there are no dot leaders
available on the tabs 8(

Some of the other text manipulations are equally as random. Often
when I press the up arrow key it jumps one or two or once even
three lines. It never seems to move straight up either.

What's it missing most? KERNING!!! I thought it had kerning, but
you can just turn auto kerning on or off as far as I can tell. No
manual move-this-letter-closer-to-this-one that I can find. There
is only one item under K in the index and it isn't kerning.

And there is now grid feature that I can find. I mean you can
snap to the rulers or guide lines, but sometimes it's nice to be
able to see an actual grid.

And here's another mystery. They mention the on-line manual all
the time, but it's not there! It's not on the disk in the
distribution that I can see--ie in the app wrapper, and the item
is greyed out in the menu bar. Hmmm. Did I mess up installing it?
Don't think so...

I haven't tried text flow around graphics yet, but I'll do that
when I get home.

On the up side... Page navigator is cool, it does launch very
quickly. Graphics are handled very well it seems. It's neat that
everything is treated like an object so you can do the same
things to text and graphics.


Well, that's about enough...

Off to test is some more.

Kelly
PS Comments, questions, concerns welcome, as well as any advice
on things I haven't run across yet.