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Subject:Re: DTP Shootout From:byfield -at- DIRECT -dot- CA Date:Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:57:30 -0800
David Jones <dvjones -at- KSBE -dot- EDU> wrote:
>Well, here I am, a WP user since WP 4.2. My first encounter with
>WP4.2 was to write and edit 1000+ page technical documentation.
To be exact, in my experience, about 80% of those who favored
WordPerfect produced small or simple documents. I guess you're
in the other 20%.
As for the situation in your workplace, Word has made inroads in
the last couple of years because of Microsoft's aggressive marketing
on the one hand and WordPerfect's corporate reorganizations on the other.
Possibly, my informal figures are obsolete?
>Well, let me see here, what about the full install of MS Office Pro 6
>I have here -- 60MB.
Yes, but that's the full package. WP 7.0 *alone* needs about 60
megabytes. Install everything on the CD, and you need 320 megabytes.
>Since I'm comparing a W95 app suite vs a W31 app suite, a mere 5MB
>increase seems amazing, given the general bloating of executable and
>DLL files caused by moving to 32-bit W95 versions, anyway.
The problem isn't moving to 32 bits--it's in how the new versions were
done. A 32 bit OS/2 word processor called DeScribe does most of what Word 6.0
does, includes about 130 filters, and takes up half the hard drive space.
>(seven? Besides WP and Word, what ones do you have?!).
I should explain that I use a boot manager to run Win95 and OS/2.
On the OS/2 side, I have Clearlook, DeScribe and the Word Pro
beta, as well as WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS and Word 6.0 for Windows.
On the Win95 side, I have Word 7.0, FrameMaker 5.11 and WP 7.0
(looks like eight, actually). If you count help software, HTML
and Acrobat for both operating systems, I have another five.
The reason is simple:
1.) everything doesn't work under both OSes.
2.) I got sick of dealing with translation filters. Almost
everyone of them has so many quirks that I found myself wasting
a lot of time repairing documents after I'd exported them. Now,
whenever possible, I work with whatever the client wants. It helps
that legal copies of older software, such as Word 6.0, can be found
secondhand very cheaply.
----------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Byfield (byfield -at- direct -dot- ca)
Burnaby, BC, Canada
(604) 421-7189
