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Subject:Re: Lousy Word Procs From:"Thiessen, Christopher E" <Christopher -dot- E -dot- Thiessen -at- CDEV -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 9 Dec 1996 07:56:10 -0600
After having used IBM's DCF/GML (a/k/a SCRIPT) for about four years (and
teaching others to use it), I will admit it was counter-intuitive. But once
you had crossed the training curve and learned to anticipate what the
control words and tags would do (which took about six weeks), I found it to
be one of the most powerful and flexible wordprocessing tools I have ever
used. Not, of course, that I'd like go back to using DCF/GML, but it had
some very strong points. On the other hand, WordStar was my personal
non-favorite; especially pesky was its habit of simply dropping formatting
for apparently no discernible reason at all. Delightful marketing plus!
Chris Thiessen
christopher -dot- e -dot- thiessen -at- cdev -dot- com
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From: David Elrick
To: Technical Writers List; for al
Subject: Re: Lousy Word Procs
Date: Monday, December 09, 1996 3:42AM
> Actually, I'd like to nominate something I consider worse than
> WordPerfect or Word. AmiPro.... Ack! (Yvonne hacks up a furball).
> Oh yeah, and Interleaf for DOS can be a real nightmare to use at
> times...
I'd like to nominate IBM's DCF (Documentation Composition Facility),
which was really just a programming language to allow you to lay out text
on a page. You just had files full of text and DCF codes (plus comments,
in the same way as program code has comments) with no idea, unless you
printed it, of how it looked on the page.
As bad as Ventura 2 was (especially without training), it was a great
relief after DCF.
Kind Regards
David Elrick
Technical Writer
Peterborough Software
