Multiple undo (was Re: Microsoft Documentation)

[k k <turnleftatnowhere -at- yahoo -dot- com>]

--- Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:
> 
> Since then Adobe has put lots of effort into tacking
> things onto
> the edges of FrameMaker, but making changes to its
> basic 
> operations - for example, adding those multiple
> levels of Undo - 
> seem to escape them.
> 

This may sound strange, but the one-level undo is one
thing about FrameMaker that I like. At first I didn't.
WhenI was learning how to use FM, having only one
level of undo function forced me to work slower and
more carefully. At first I hated it. But then I
realized that in cases where I had to undo multiple
previous operations, most things being undone were so
simple (removing an erroneous paragraph tag, for
example) that reversing them manually was very close
to being as quick as using the undo function. And in
absolute terms, maybe it's a good thing to be a touch
more careful about how I line things up before I start
pounding the keys.

The single-level undo is, I believe, almost all of the
reason FM is demonstrably more stable than MS Word. My
experience with Word 2002 on an XP system has
convinced me that Word's multiple undo levels are
largely responsible for all the problems with
autonumbering, style, and other stability problems,
because of the memory management requirements. There's
no way to shut off undo tracking or even reduce the
number of levels. Word insists on tracking every last
operation no matter what its scope or nature - that
fills up the available memory pretty fast and must be
terribly difficult to manage.

In addition to causing stability problems (I'm sure),
it also causes the program to hang constantly when I
try to generate a PDF. During generation I keep
getting messages that Word doesn't have enough memory
to undo changes, and prompting me to confirm if I want
to continue. For one of my average documents, it takes
about 40 minutes to generate a PDF, and during that
time I have to click "OK" at least a dozen times to
finish the process. I can't just start the generation
and let it run while I do something else, I have to
constantly come back to it and check to see if it's
hung.

John Posada: thanks for starting the thread on looking
for arguments on FM versus Word. Because of that I can
find some other sources that I can use for ammunition
in making another attempt to pry my bosses loose from
Word. 


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it!
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/