10-Apr-93 1:49:46-GMT,20363;000000000001 Received: from SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU by CAMIS.Stanford.EDU (4.1/inc-1.0) id AA12620; Fri, 9 Apr 93 18:49:45 PDT Full-Name: Info-Mac Moderator Received: by SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU (4.1/inc-1.0) id AA29886; Fri, 9 Apr 93 18:49:45 PDT Resent-Message-Id: <9304100149.AA29886@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU> Return-Path: Received: from Elroy.UH.EDU by CAMIS.Stanford.EDU (4.1/inc-1.0) id AA00123; Fri, 9 Apr 93 06:07:35 PDT Received: from Jetson.UH.EDU by Jetson.UH.EDU (PMDF #3125 ) id <01GWSKEXTHE090ONH0@Jetson.UH.EDU>; Fri, 9 Apr 1993 03:48:02 CDT Date: 09 Apr 1993 03:48:02 -0500 (CDT) From: "William M. Porter" Subject: (*) macwrite-pro-vs-ms-word.txt [for the archives] To: info-mac@sumex-aim.stanford.edu Message-Id: <01GWSKEXTHE290ONH0@Jetson.UH.EDU> X-Vms-To: INFOMAC Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Resent-To: backmod@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU Resent-Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1993 18:49:44 PDT Resent-From: Info-Mac Moderator This is a fairly lengthy (about 18Kb) comparison of the latest entry in the Macintosh word processor wars, MacWrite Pro, to the program generally regarded as "the one to beat," Microsoft Word. This is a plain text file (with line feeds) created in MacWrite Pro itself. Short version: MacWrite Pro lacks some of Word's high-end features but is more muscular than it looks at first, and has some very nice features lacking in Word. I'm not quite prepared to burn Word's disks and manuals yet, but I like MacWrite Pro much more than I thought I would. William Porter / University of Houston -------------- c u t --- h e r e -------------------------------- MacWrite Pro vs. Microsoft Word William Porter, Classical Languages, University of Houston Internet: wmporter@jetson.uh.edu April 1993 This document began somewhat informally, as a letter that I wrote to one of my best friends. I have expanded it partly for my own benefit. Doing so has given me a pretext to put this new program through its paces. This document will end up as a text file, but as I wrote it in MacWriteÊPro, I experimented with just about all of the program's formatting and page-design features. As you will see if you read it, I have not completely made up my mind about MacWrite Pro. I've decided to post this message now, uncertainty and all, rather than wait until I've made up my mind and then justify my decision. I consider and evaluate MacWrite Pro in comparison mainly to Microsoft Word. I have owned and used WordPerfect/Mac as well, but I didn't like it much at all, and for me the question is whether I will switch to MacWrite Pro from Word. I am not familiar enough with Nisus (at the high end) or WriteNow (at the lower end) to be able to say anything about them. Where I have not commented on a feature below, it may be because MacWrite Pro's implementation of it so resembles Microsoft Word's as to make comment pointless. (This is the case with mail merge, for example.) This document is divided into three sections dealing in turn with MacWrite Pro's strengths, those weaknesses or strengths (relative to Word) that don't matter enough to me to make much of a difference, and features of Word lacking in MacWrite Pro that I will really miss, at least when I need them. ----------------------------------------------------------------- STRENGTHS OF MACWRITE PRO First, the features that Microsoft Word utterly lacks. The most significant of these, to me at least, is MacWrite Pro's support for genuine kerning--the removal or addition of space between two characters. This allows you to tuck the period in "T." or the letter 'e' in "Ye" >underneath< the overhang of the preceding letter. It is a very nice feature. To most of the people who will use MacWrite Pro (or who use Microsoft Word now), kerning is hardly noticeable until the point-sizes of the characters get fairly large--above 20 pt. or so. But here it can make a difference indeed; and even at the smaller point sizes, it makes a difference to connoisseurs of the printed word. Word has character spacing only, and limited control over that: you cannot actually tuck a period or a lower-case "e" under the overhang of a preceding "T". MacWrite Pro on the other hand gives you the kind of control over character spacing that hitherto you have had to go to Quark XPress to get. You can control character spacing in em units, a variable measure defined in MacWrite Pro as 1/100 of the width of the capital M in a given font at a given point size. So in a 24-point font, if the capital M were 24 points wide (which it typically would be), then an em-unit would be .24 or roughly 1/4 point. (A "point" is approximately 1/72 of an inch.) If you are interested in learning more about this (the MacWrite Pro manual is rather sketchy about it), a readily available source of basic information is David Blatner's *Desktop Publisher's Survival Kit* (Peachpit Press, 1991), pp. 54-57. Kerning in MacWrite Pro comes in two flavors: auto-kerning and manual. The capability to adjust kerning manually is the more important one to those who have some idea how to do it. Auto-kerning is a useful feature, too, however. It draws upon the fact that certain pairs of characters normally need to be pushed a little closer together to look right: these are the "kerning pairs," and they are often built into the font itself, although many programs, including Microsoft Word, ignore them. Unfortunately, nifty as this feature is in MacWrite Pro, it doesn't seem to work flawlessly. I printed out some heavily and variously formatted text in MacWrite Pro on my 360-dpi StyleWriter. For some reason, once, in the phrase "MacWrite Pro," the second word was printed as if there were a space between the P and the r, thus: "P ro". I checked the text itself: there was no space there, and in fact, it looked fine on screen. This problem did not arise in other occurrences of the same phrase. When I copied the text into Word and printed it, it printed out fine. Auto-kerning, then, in MacWrite Pro, should be used with caution. The other excellent feature of MacWrite Pro that Microsoft Word cannot compete with is editing in reduced view (you can specify any percentage reduction or enlargement between 25% and 400%). Working in 50% reduction, you can't read what you're typing very well, but you can see its effect on the rest of the document immediately. This has been a weakness of Word since version 1.0. MacWrite Pro does not have anything like Word's "Normal" view--in which page margins are not displayed. I like Word's Normal view when I'm editing text in a lengthy document: I can turn auto-repagination off and move blocks of text around without having to wait for the pagination to be corrected. But I can live without this. I turn now to those strengths of MacWrite Pro that compete with virtues of Microsoft Word. One of Microsoft Word's greatest advantages is its use of styles and stylesheets. The good news about MacWrite Pro is that its implementation of styles and stylesheets is about as good as Word's--maybe better. MacWrite Pro distinguishes between character styles and paragraph styles, as does Wordperfect, but I like MacWrite Pro's way of distinguishing them much better. (I still think that character styles, except for note references, are sort of pointless.) I suspect most users will find MacWrite Pro's approach to styles easier to understand than Word's. The default style sheet is stored along with default document formats (margins, &c.) in a special stationery document called "MacWrite Pro Options," which is stored in the same folder as the program. When you create a new document, it is >this< that you get. A weakness of this approach is that changing the default styles--those styles that you want to have available in every new document you create--requires opening this MacWrite Pro Options file and modifying it. In Word, you simply use the "Make Default" button in the styles definition dialog. But redefining or customizing styles within a document is easy--or you can import another document's custom style sheets into your new document. This of course can also be done in Word, but it is done more elegantly in MacWrite Pro. To import a style sheet from another document in Word, you have to bring up the styles dialog, then use the "Open" command in the file menu. This seems a little counter-intuitive to some users. In MacWrite Pro, you control styles from a styles "palette," which has its own little File and Edit menus. You use this palette's File menu to create new styles and open other custom style sheets, and you use its Edit menu to modify existing styles in the current document. MacWrite Pro uses "frames" alone where Word uses both frames and borders. Here I would say that MacWrite Pro's approach is nearly as flexible as Word's, and much, much easier to understand. If you want to put a side-bar in a document, for example, in MacWrite Pro, you simply create a text frame (pull down in the Frame menu to "Insert frame [text]") and type in it. If you want to resize the frame, you simply drag its sides or corners, right in the window in which you type and edit text. The "modify frame" dialog is easy to understand and allows you to anchor the frame to surrounding text or let it sit on the page where you created it. You can specify that text should flow around an irregularly shaped graphic in a picture frame. (This is not possible in Word: you can only flow text around the frame's rectangular border itself.) The same process in Microsoft Word is too complicated to describe and it can be frustratingly difficult to get things right. In MacWrite Pro you use frames to create borders around paragraphs as well. The easiest and probably best way to do this is to insert a text frame into your document and give it a certain border using the tools palette. A text frame will shrink or expand as the text in it shrinks or expands. There is one limitation in MacWrite Pro that I do regret. It is not as easy as it should be to create a border on just one side of a paragraph. For example, if you desire to put a border on just the left side of a paragraph in MacWrite Pro, you will probably find it easiest to create a one-cell, one-row table, since assigning borders to table cells works exactly the way assigning borders to paragraphs works in Word. Putting a thin line beneath a paragraph in MacWrite Pro could be done the same way, or you could create a picture frame and simply collapse it into a horizontal line with the minimum height (which seems to be about .2"). I wish that MacWrite Pro had a line-drawing tool. The tool in MacWrite Pro for inserting tables is easy to use, and formatting them or editing them seems to be as easy and as flexible as it is in Word. Since MacWrite Pro lacks a calculation feature, you can't create a table and do the calculation in MacWrite Pro itself. You'll have to use a calculator--or (using System 7) publish the data you want in your favorite spreadsheet and subscribe to it from within MacWrite Pro. There is one little "feature" of MacWrite Pro that I feel like mentioning. The "document info" dialog, in addition to counting the characters, lines, words and paragraphs in the document (Word can do this too), will tell you how long the document has been open. This is apparently a cumulative figure, that is, if you work on a document for an hour and close it, then work on it for thirty minutes later in the day, the document info dialog will report that you have worked on it for 1:30:00. You may discover that you work much too hard on your documents--or maybe not. By the way, MacWrite Pro comes with a rather complete set of file translators. It is easy to import and export files in both Word and WordPerfect formats, for both Mac and PC platforms. ----------------------------------------------------------------- FEATURES WHOSE PRESENCE OR ABSENCE IN MACWRITE PRO IS NOT DECISIVE Glossaries! I have at times made fairly extensive use of these. When I type a letter, for example, I type command-delete, then "2309" (my street address) and hit Return, and presto! my return address is automatically inserted, right up to the point where I use the "date" glossary to insert the date. I could use QuicKeys and the Scrapbook (which I haven't used for years) to work around this, I suppose, but it wouldn't be as convenient. In place of certain of Word's glossaries (page number, date, time, &c.), MacWrite Pro does have a variety of what it calls "variables," which you can format in a variety of ways. The ruler in MacWrite Pro looks exactly like the ruler in the word processor in ClarisWorks: it is used to set paragraph margins, assign tabs, adjust line spacing, align text, and change the number of columns in a section. Other functions that Word has managed to fit on its ruler, ribbon, and toolbar are provided (if provided at all) in MacWrite Pro via the two palettes (styles and tools) or from the menus. I think Word has the edge here, although editing the Word toolbar is still beyond me. MacWrite does not seem to have a "fast save" feature like Word's. As I create a lot of longish documents, I do like the fact that Word does not make me resave the entire document each time I hit command-S. One of Word's cleverest features is the ability to edit the menus, to add, delete or move commands in just about any menu. However, this is useful mainly because Word is a complex program and one may feel that not all of its commands are placed where you want them. (For example, it seems to obvious to me that Word's Glossary command belongs in the Insert menu rather than the Edit menu. So I moved it.) The layout of MacWrite Pro's menus seems pretty intelligent to me and I don't think I would feel a great desire to alter them. I >do< wish I could assign keystrokes I might mention here a small quirk in MacWrite Pro. My default style (= Word's style 'Normal') is defined as having 16 pt. line spacing. If I increase the font size to something larger than the line spacing--say, to 36 pt. Helvetica--the new characters will be accomodated just fine in that paragraph I'm in when I do this. BUT if I hit return and try to continue typing in the same font size, I will now only see 16 pt.'s worth of it. To see the entire height of the characters in the second paragraph, I have to go to the ruler and change the line spacing to "1 line". The reason for this seems to be that there is in MacWrite nothing to correspond to Word's "Auto" and "At least...." line spacing settings. I should say a word about printing. MacWrite Pro is as hostile to the StyleWriter as Microsoft Word. Neither program will print a hairline, for example, as a hairline, though of course this is quite within the capability of the printer. The MacWrite Pro manual doesn't even mention the StyleWriter, though it does mention the ImageWriter. MacWrite Pro will print pages in reverse order, which is nice. It claims to be able to collate pages when you print multiple copies, but I can't get this to work on my StyleWriter. What I do miss is Word's "print selection only" option, which I frequently find useful. I do like the way that its spellchecker will beep at me immediately when I make a typo. But I could order Thunder and get that, if it really mattered. MacWrite Pro has taken a trick from WordPerfect, in allowing you to assign a "language" to a block of text as a character style. This makes it possible for persons writing documents that contain, say, English and French, to tell the spelling checker which dictionary to consult in various paragraphs. (You can also tell it to skip certain paragraphs, which is what I would do, since I do not have a Latin dictionary.) I am a Latin professor and do frequently create documents with large chunks of non-English text in them. However, this is not that big an advantage for me. What I do now in Word when I run into a block of Latin is simply interrupt the spell-checking process and jump to the start of the next English paragraph, then reinvoke the spelling checker. However, those whose documents include lots of French or German or Spanish may appreciate this feature of MacWrite. Several features of Word that MacWrite Pro lacks will be missed by some people, but not by me. MacWrite Pro lacks an outliner, but I very seldom use Word's outliner and don't think I would use it more often even if it were "better" (whatever that might mean). MacWrite Pro also lacks a true graphics module and a grammar checker. I never use these features of Word. In fact, I wish that I could disable the stupid graphics module. Word's drag-and-drop editing is a nifty feature, I admit, and friends of mine love it. I like the concept, but never use it. ----------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT FEATURES OF MICROSOFT WORD MISSING IN MACWRITE PRO Now we get down to the nitty-gritty, the features that could make (for me at least) a decisive difference. I especially like the fact that Word lets you do almost everything from the keyboard--including pull down menus and issue commands for which there are no predefined command-key equivalents. And in Word I very much like being able to use the keyboard and the numeric keypad to move around in a document and select text. In MacWrite Pro, you can only use the arrow keys (the keys on the keypad type numbers), and there is no way at all to do something I do in Word all the time: select a >sentence<. This is not a minor thing to me, as I rely on it constantly. You cannot change the font of a selection in MacWrite Pro from the keyboard. You can change styles, at least you can change some styles. MacWrite Pro automatically assigns numbered command-keys to the first styles in your list: the default style is command-1, my style "body" is command-2, and so on. In Word, I don't have to remember these numbers. After typing command-shift-S, I can type a few letters of the style name and hit Return. Advantage Word. There are a few "advanced" features of Word that I won't miss every day, but will miss very badly sooner or later, in MacWrite Pro. One is the ability to link documents. I am beginning another book right now (Spring 1993). If I write it in MacWrite Pro, I'll have to put everything in one huge document. Especially coonsidering that MacWrite Pro lacks a "fast save" feature, this would be rather awkward. MacWrite Pro also lacks utilities for creating indexes or table of contents. I don't use these features of Word often, I admit, but when I need them, they are indispensable. ----------------------------------------------------------------- CONCLUSION I have to admit that I like the >feel< of MacWrite Pro and it has grown on me over the last couple days. That is an intangible, but it's worth something to me. I did NOT like the feel of WordPerfect. It seemed to have features crammed in every which way, with little regard for whether taking advantage of them would be pleasant or not. (It was not.) I would say that MacWrite Pro does what it does rather well. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a Macintosh novice, but the truth is that it will probably answer the needs of many very experienced users. It's easy to use: here it certainly has Word and WordPerfect beat. I don't want anyone who has read this far to think that I am a word processing lightweight. I Êhave written three heavily-formatted books in Microsoft Word, and have put Word over the years to various other tasks for which it is admittedly not the ideal program (newsletters, flyers, brochures, concert programs). So I am used to demanding a lot from my word processor. I cannot tell a lie: MacWrite simply does not have all the features that Word has (or WordPerfect, or Nisus). But in the last couple of days I have been trying to practice another kind of honesty, by asking myself if I really >need< all of Word's features all of the time. In regard to many of those features, the answer seems to be, No. It is also quite possible that I could decide to use MacWrite Pro most of the time, but hold on to Word for my longer, more complex documents. Will I keep using it? I don't know yet. I'm going to think about it for a while and give it "the old college try." After all, what have I got to go back to?