Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: What's so bad about Word?

Author:Dave Polaschek
Posted:6/28/1999; 8:17:32 AM
Topic:Hidden failure of Win2k
Msg #:7863 (In response to 7759)
Prev/Next:7862 / 7865

However, it would be useful to me to know in what ways the interface to outlining in Word is superior to that of Frontier. We want to do outlining very well, and will take ideas for improvement from anywhere.

The biggest problem I had with outlining in Frontier was the fact that lines couldn't wrap, and had a maximum length. I'm pretty sure this isn't a problem in the latest versions of Frontier. The old limits meant that I had a special script that would render an outline as a list down to a certain number of levels, at which point things got collapsed to a single list entry. It ended up being a reasonable solution for me, and is still available at http://www.best.com/~davep/frontierbits/nlevelpage.html for those who might be interested.

While being able to assign meaning to the various outline levels is useful in some cases, it's not an end-all, since in my experience, different parts of a document will have different meanings for different levels. I usually have an introduction that comes first and is just minimally formatted text. It's followed by the content of the page, which wants to be an outline. I can ALMOST get to where I want to be by combining WPTexts and outlines in a table, and then rendering the table as a single page, but I need to explicitly build a list of what order the pieces come in. Again, allowing lines in an outline to wrap and be longer solves much of this problem, too.

I think both of these differences boil down to the fact that outlines and "Normal" text in Word are just different representations of the same thing, whereas in Frontier, outlines and WP-texts are different kinds of objects, and there are features in each that just can't be had in the other.

-DaveP



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