Writing a high-end Mac word processor appears to be a difficult task. Only two companies have had any real success, the behemoth Microsoft with Word and tiny Paragon with Nisus. Other large companies have fallen on their faces. In addition to several products that were rumored but never released, there have been two public failures, Ashton-Tate with FullWrite and WordPerfect Corporation with version 1 of WordPerfect for the Mac. Although Ashton-Tate appears to be allowing FullWrite to languish, WordPerfect is to be commended for returning to the drawing board and completely redoing the program.
There’s no need to dwell on version 1 of WordPerfect. Suffice it to say it was a dog, not only sporting an awkward, unMaclike face but lacking many abilities expected of a high-end word processor. The company’s new puppy, WordPerfect 2.0, is an entirely different animal. It shares some heritage with its progenitors on the Mac and other computers, but benefits from a substantial infusion of new genetic code and presents a more agreeable and friendly phenotype. At first glance, WP 2.0 even looks like a contender for best of show, though you might not want to kick your old breed out the door just yet. WP is still not completely Mac-broken, and its qualities (and cost) may not be to everyone’s needs or taste.
If I can drop the canine metaphor, I’ll try to discuss some of WP’s many features and compare them with those of Nisus and Microsoft Word. The designers of WordPerfect 2 clearly studied those two programs carefully and not only incorporated some of their advantages, but improved on them in some respects.
Layout and formatting
Where WP particularly excels is in its formidable powers of layout and formatting. Column manipulation is particularly flexible and is accomplished easily from the ruler. The columns are shown on screen in the normal editing mode, unlike Word or Nisus, where you need to go to a special print preview or page view. The number of text columns can be changed at any time in a document and column widths can be unequal, in contrast to Word or Nisus where the number of columns is fixed in each section. Columns can snake as in a newspaper, or they can run parallel and extend over several pages.
The parallel columns, lacking in Word or Nisus, are useful for things like resumés and screenplays. They also give WP a way to make tables similar to Word’s table feature. Simple tables are not too difficult (WP provides a macro for generating a table with a specified number of rows and columns), though things can get confusing. For instance, after first setting a number of columns from the ruler, you move from column to column by inserting column breaks with Command-Shift-Return. Once the cells have been created with column breaks, however, you move between them with arrow keys (you can also just click in a cell to edit it). Before I understood that, which necessitated a call to WP (the manual is inadequate on this point), I found myself inserting gaps in the table.
WP provides a wide variety of options for bordering and filling columns, paragraphs, characters and pages. With these, you can shade rows and cells and border them in many ways not possible with Word’s tables. It can be tricky to do this, however, and require many trips through dialog boxes.
The “tables” in WP do lack some features of those in Word. Columns cannot be selected as a whole, there is no way to do calculations on numbers and tables cannot be directly created using data imported from a spreadsheet. (There is an indirect way to do this by using Find/Change to replace tabs with column breaks.)
Graphics
WP includes a capable drawing environment and good graphics handling. Clicking an icon converts the document window to a blank drawing easel. After making your drawing, you click again on the icon and are returned to your text with the drawing pasted in at the insertion point. Text automatically wraps around the bounding box of the graphic, though not around the graphic itself. You can also paste an external graphic directly into the text. By default the graphic flows with the text as a character, but it can also be dragged anywhere on the page and anchored either to the paragraph or the page. It cannot be dragged between pages, however, as graphics can in Nisus.
Graphics can also be overlaid on text through a separate menu option which brings up the drawing easel, but the overlay is fixed to the page and text does not flow around it. In addition, a graphic can be placed underneath the text on each page as a “watermark” option accessed through the Header/Footer menu.
Microsoft Word, of course, lacks a drawing environment and falls short of WordPerfect in its graphics handling capabilities. Nisus’ graphics features are similar to those in WP, but I think better designed and more appropriate. Nisus does lack the fashionable spline curve as well as the color drawing of WP, but it has arrows, which seem to me more useful in a word processor.
I actually wonder if there is that much reason for WP’s inclusion of a drawing module. I think you would be better off using a separate drawing program and pasting your graphics into WP. It’s actually a little faster to switch to a drawing program under MultiFinder than it is to turn on the drawing environment in WP. When you consider that WP costs $100 more than its competitors, you could buy a drawing program for not much more than that which is considerably more capable than the drawing toolset in WP. The linking of programs possible with System 7.0 makes it even less important to provide drawing with a word processor.
Where it does make sense to have drawing built-in to a word processor is to provide the ability to draw directly on or under the text. WP’s abilities in that regard are very limited. In the recent MacUser review of WP 2.0, the author points out that the overlay feature is handy for “positioning comments or correction suggestions without modifying the original document.” That’s true, but if anyone changes the text on page 1, the comments on page 3 will no longer be in place. With Nisus, all drawing is done within the text, each individual object can be anchored to the paragraph or the page, the object can optionally displace text as you draw and it can either overlay or underlie the text. You can type in some comments on the draw layer, point to the relevant text with an arrow and your commentary will remain attached to text no matter what editing is done. You can easily draw lines, shaded boxes and so forth to mark text or table items in flexible ways that would be difficult or impossible in WP or Word.
I don’t mean to turn this article into a review of Nisus, but I think it is worth pointing out that the drawing capabilities of WP, which impress people at first glance, as they did me, are not as well conceived or useful as they might be and perhaps should not play much role in any purchase decision.
WP does have one additional graphic feature, however, which is quite useful. You can associate a wide variety of border patterns and fills with ranges of text, paragraphs, pages, columns or with graphic or text boxes (vi). This capability handles many of the situations where, with Nisus, you would need to draw a graphic yourself.
Text boxes
Another nice layout feature is text boxes. These are easily created by a menu selection and provide what are really minidocuments, with all the textual, graphic and formatting capabilities of the main document. Tables could be included in text boxes, for instance, and they can serve as sidebars. Text boxes can be treated just like a graphic and moved anywhere and anchored to the page or to a character or paragraph. Word’s Position command is clumsy in comparison. Nisus has a similar text box feature, but each box is a separate file, which gets awkward if you have many of them in a document.
Captions and numbers
Graphic and text boxes can have captions attached to them, and WP maintains a numbered list of the boxes internally. This permits the caption automatically to include the number of the box, as, for instance, “Figure 4.” If another figure is inserted before a box, then its caption number is changed automatically. In addition, the numbers are accessible for cross-reference elsewhere in the text and the cross-reference number is also changed if the figure position changes. Word and Nisus both lack a feature like this, though it can be simulated in Nisus with macros.
Style sheets
Style sheets provide a convenient way to automate text formatting tasks. You might, for instance, have one style for body text set to 10 point Times with a paragraph indent of 0.25 inches, while a subheading style might be 12 point Helvetica bold and no indent. A single menu selection or keystroke suffices, then, to set all those formatting details. If you ever decide to change body font to Palatino, all you need do is edit the style sheet and the text is changed throughout the document. Further, WP, like Word and Nisus, can link styles, so that a subheading is automatically followed by body text (the next style). WP, in fact, can link several styles in a chain, while the other two word processors are limited to a single link.
WP style sheets can include essentially any formatting option, including borders and fills and number of columns. Text can even be attached to the WP styles. For instance, a figure caption style can include “Figure” in the style. When you apply the style, the word “Figure,” then, appears automatically. If you decide to caption your figures as “Fig.,” you just edit the style sheet.
To define a style you can format some text then choose “New style” from the menu. The character formats are automatically copied to the style sheet, although, strangely, and unlike Word or Nisus, the ruler settings are not. You must set them in an edit window for the style. This is awkward since you can’t see the settings in the context of your text. Other formatting options can also be set for the style by selections from the standard document menus. The infamous WP formatting codes appear in the edit window, though I found them more helpful then fearsome there. For instance, when you base one style on another, a handy feature shared with Word, it can get confusing if there are conflicting attributes in the two styles. The sequence of formatting codes reveals which attributes will take precedence and permits changing precedence if desired.
In WP, as in Nisus, styles can apply either to whole paragraphs or to ranges of text (characters) within a paragraph, while Word is limited to paragraph styles. Character styles can be quite useful. For instance, you can define a style to apply to words you want to emphasize. Emphasis is commonly handled in printed text with italics, but that style is hard to read on screen. So the Emphasis style can be defined as something like bold or a color for editing, then changed to italics before printing. The emphasis can be applied over any other style, such as one for body text, and if the font of the underlying style is changed, the font of the emphasized words changes also, while the emphasis itself is maintained. I find character styles quite handy in Nisus for a lot of things, including comments, grammar checking, indexing, etc.
It is unfortunate, then, that character styles are accessible only through separate modes in WP. If you want a style sheet to apply to a range of text within a paragraph, you have to call up a dialog from the Preferences menu and set the mode to Character. If you want a style to apply to a whole paragraph, so the indent, say, is set properly, then you have to go back and change the mode to Paragraph or Single Paragraph. These modes are apparently a clumsy attempt to reconcile Word-like paragraph styles with the way WP handles styles on the PC.
WP does have the best style sheet management of any program, however. Styles can be stored in a document, in a Private Library on your own machine or in a Common Library which is shared over a network. In Word or Nisus, styles are local to a document, while in WP, changes in a Private Library are reflected in all documents and changes in the Common Library are applied in all documents on the network. These Libraries make it much easier to maintain style consistency on your documents or within an office. There seems to be no way to disconnect a document from these Libraries, however. It might be disconcerting to open an older document and find all its formatting suddenly changed to reflect new style sheets.
Style sheets are accessed through a hierarchical menu selection, or they can be assigned a keystroke. Word’s popup menu for styles would be a handy addition.
Kerning
You can kern letters in WP, but only through a dialog box and only in one-point increments, so the feature’s not too useful.
Standard word processing features
Headers and footers
Fairly standard, but with two possible per page, and, as in Nisus, the ability to have a different header or footer on each page.
Footnotes and endnotes
WP is unique in permitting footnotes and endnotes to coexist. Word and Nisus restrict you to one or the other in a document or section. You can define character or number sequences for the notes, and there is a predefined, modifiable style sheet to govern their formatting. Since WP lacks the ability of Word to break a document into sections, endnotes can only be placed at the end of the document, not at the end of chapters. Footnotes are not displayed in the regular editing window, but only in page preview.
Speller and thesaurus
WP surpasses Word on these tools, but falls short of Nisus. The spell checker does consider phonetic as well as alphabetic matches and automatically makes suggestions, but it is quite a bit slower than the one in Nisus. The thesaurus is conveniently built-in; it’s not a DA as with Word. It offers a three pane window with synonyms and antonyms for a different word in each pane. This feature is eclipsed, however, by the larger number of ’nyms in Nisus’ thesaurus and by its provision of definitions and ’nyms for the several different meanings and uses of a word. Further, the thesaurus in Nisus, unlike that of WP or Word, recognizes word endings (plurals, tenses, cases) and adds them to the replacement words pasted into your text. In the other two programs, you’ve got to edit the words yourself after pasting.
WP’s thesaurus is in a non-modal window (Nisus’ is modal), but the value of this feature is reduced by the fact that clicking on another word in your text does not transfer it to the thesaurus. You need to copy it from the text, paste it into the thesaurus and click the Look Up button. It seemed strange to me that there was no convenient way to get a new word into the non-modal thesaurus (the manual describes none), so I decided to try choosing a word in the text, then selecting Thesaurus… from the menu again while the thesaurus was already open. That was a mistake. The first time I tried it the watch spun for quite a while, then the document window scrolled to the top, the first word of the file suddenly highlighted and then popped into the thesaurus. I tried it again, thinking I may have somehow selected the first word myself without realizing it. This time, after a brief spin, a message came up that the document was corrupted and would be closed, which it was. Fortunately, the file was just one of the samples that came with WP.
Outliner
Outlining in WP, as in Nisus, is static. You can make a multilevel outline with various formatting options, but there’s no direct way to drag entries around or collapse items to hide detail as there is in Word.
Search and replace
As with the speller, WP goes way beyond Word in this feature but still falls well short of Nisus. WP does permit you to search on attributes, and these can be applied to the text in the find box through a menu selection. It also supports simple wild cards and offers a menu for inserting them so you don’t need to remember a code as in Word. But Nisus, in addition, offers a large range of wild cards, permits search on user defined styles, can refer to the search text in replacement (supporting replacement on styles and attributes), can replace all in a selected region of text, can index all found items, etc., etc. I could go on and on about the features and usefulness of search and replace in Nisus, but this is a WordPerfect review, right?
Editing conveniences
WP, like Nisus, sports intelligent cut-and-paste. When you cut a word to the clipboard, WP leaves only a single space remaining. It doesn’t just cut a space along with the word, as does Word, because when you paste the word, WP ensures that there is exactly one space between it and surrounding words and no space if you happen to paste it before punctuation. WP isn’t quite as intelligent as Nisus, though, which also removes the extra space when you delete a word.
WP offers an option to append text to the clipboard when copying, which can be handy. Unlike Nisus, this works only for Copy and not for Cut. WP has only one clipboard, as opposed to 10 in Nisus.
One quality of Nisus I’ve always appreciated is the intelligent and consistent use of key combinations for editing. For instance, the option key has the general significance of replication. While the arrow key moves the cursor one character, option-arrow moves it along all the characters of the word to the end of the word. I was pleased, and a little surprised, to find that option-arrow acted the same in WP. Unfortunately, WP has not maintained any consistency with the option key. In Nisus, option-delete deletes the whole preceding word but in WP, it deletes either the following word or the preceding word depending where the cursor is. If the cursor is not on a word, option-delete doesn’t move the cursor. The Del key on the extended keyboard deletes forward in either application, as expected in Nisus, option-Del deletes the whole following word while in WP, adding option just kills the Del key.
Editing inconveniences
WP doesn’t let you define your own command key equivalents for menu items as you can in Word or Nisus. You can assign keystrokes to macros and styles, however. WP also provides a built-in set of command equivalents which you can use if you like remembering things like command-F14 for the superscript style.
Multiple clicking beyond double doesn’t select increasingly larger sections of text, sentences and paragraphs, as it does in Nisus.
There is no glossary.
Unlike Nisus, but like Word, WP doesn’t return you to your previous editing position when you reopen a document. Instead it starts at the beginning of the file.
WP, like Word, offers only a single undo, in contrast to Nisus, where you can have up to 32,000 levels of undo.
Sorting
WP has a uniquely powerful sort capability. You can sort at once on up to 9 individual fields or words within lines or records. For instance, if you had a set of names and addresses and wanted to sort by last name, you could tell WP to sort on the last word of the first line of each record. The sort can also act as a filter, for instance, selecting out only those lines or records where the state is Wisconsin.
Mail merge
Merge supports named fields and can prompt for text to be entered. Unlike Word or Nisus, however, it lacks conditionals (if/then), which provide the ability to merge in different text depending on the individual merge record. For instance, you might want a different letter for people who owe money than for those who have paid up. The filtering ability of WP’s Sort can handle some situations where conditionals are needed.
Indices and tables of contents
Words can be marked for an Index or Table of Contents (up to 5 levels) through a function key or a dialog box, which can remain open while you work. Items can also be marked for a Table of Authorities (useful for lawyers) or for a user defined list. Nisus offers the ability to go further and generate an unlimited number of user defined lists. An advantage of WP is that lists of figures and graphics can be generated automatically. WP doesn’t have Word’s ability to generate a Table of Contents automatically from an outline, however.
One limitation in WP is that there is no way to create a Table Of Contents entry for text that doesn’t appear explicitly in the document. This can be done in Nisus or Word by using invisible text. Indexed items in WP, however, can be listed under other names, as they can be in Nisus. “Stallion,” for instance, can be indexed under “horse.” A nice feature in WP is the ability to mark text for indexing through a concordance. You simply prepare a file containing all the words you want indexed, and WP will do it for you. A similar feature is available in Nisus, though less conveniently.
In order to remove an item from the index or other lists in WP, you’ve unfortunately got to get down and dirty with the invisible formatting codes. They can be shown in a codes window or searched for in a Find Codes dialog.
Unfortunately none of these programs provide direct support for citations and bibliographies. FullWrite does, but in such a rigid manner as to be useless for most people.
Cross-references
WP, like Nisus and unlike Word, allows you to cross-reference items. That is, you can say “See Figure 3 on page 28,” and if Figure 3 becomes Figure 4 and moves to page 35, the reference is automatically updated. To cross-reference an item you just mark it as you would for an index entry. Unfortunately, to refer to both the item’s text and its page number requires two marks, while in Nisus one suffices. Cross-referencing reliably in WP can also require close attention to the formatting codes.
Basic character styles and ruler options
In addition to the standard styles, bold, underline, etc., WP can place a redline along text to mark it for attention. WP lacks a number of the useful styles found in Nisus or Word, such as, small caps and invisible text. When I mentioned the invisible style to a WordPerfect representative, he thought it was absurd to make text invisible. Actually it’s quite useful for things like adding comments which can be revealed on demand or, in Nisus, for collapsing outline levels or reducing paragraphs to their first sentences in order to check on the logical flow of your text. Some character attributes, such as color, are available in WP only through dialog boxes unless you access them through a macro or style sheet.
WP does have very nice ways of dealing with tabs in a ruler. The feature I was most happy to see was the ability to specify the alignment character for a tab. Most word processors provide a tab that will align items on decimal points. When I make tables, however, I often have entries like this “2.31±0.034, 10.7±0.9” They look much better if the entries are aligned on the “±” signs than on the decimal points.
File compatibility
WP is somewhat limited in its ability to import and export in other file formats. The initial version didn’t even support Microsoft Word, though the 2.01 upgrade does. The problem here, however, was that WordPerfect Corp. was depending on Claris’ unfulfilled promise to make its file translators available. I think there’s no question that WP will before long deal with its file compatibility limitations.
Miscellaneous features
Macros
A macro is a way to carry out a whole sequence of tasks with a single command. WP’s macros are very powerful. You can generate them with a recorder which watches your actions, and you can also enter and edit them directly in the macro editor. The macro language is quite rich and includes conditionals, loops and easy access to a variety of document variables. Programmers will not be too pleased to find that you can’t name your own variables, as in Nisus, but must make do with a predefined set labeled Var1, Var2, etc. You also can’t step through a macro for debugging as you can in Nisus.
Macros in WP provide good control over the drawing environment. Nisus’ macros lack that feature, but compensate by offering much more powerful text reformatting and cleanup capabilities through search and replace.
WP comes with a number of useful prebuilt macros. One caveat is that undo apparently only applies to the last action in a macro, while in Nisus, undo undoes all the macro’s changes. I lost some text not realizing that point. Some of the pre-built macros didn’t always work. The macro to change all bold text to italics just sat on the first bold text in a couple of tries. Incidently, that macro takes 60 lines of code and a long time to do what a Nisus macro can do quickly in one line.
Character map
Like PopChar, this presents you with a table of all the characters in a font. You can click on one and it will be entered at the insertion point in your text. It is conveniently a floating windoid and doesn’t go away when you enter a character. Nisus has a character chart as well, but it’s a skinny scrolling list and it’s tedious to find the letter you want.
File management
WP provides a dialog which enables you to carry out a number of tasks on files from within the program. You can create folders and open, copy, delete or rename files or folders. From the dialog you can also search for a text string of up to 35 characters in a selected file or folder or in all files. Nisus has a file manager window with similar functions, but some advantages as well. It’s non-modal, so you can keep it open all the time, which, along with the ability to open more than one file at once, is useful when you’re working with lots of files. Further, from the file manager, you can add any number of specific files to a search list, then invoke the full power of the standard search-and-replace to go through them all looking for text and replacing it if desired.
Backup
WP can automatically save your file to disk at set intervals. Nisus can do the same after a set number of keystrokes, which is a little more sensible. Both programs can optionally save the older version of a file as a backup.
Cute things
Animated icons. The pen and fill icons on the drawing palette both go through a little animated routine when you turn pen or fill on or off.
Not so cute things
Scrolling a window can look a little flaky. Sometimes the thumb box moves in retrograde motion, and a single click on the arrow can produce varying degrees of scrolling. Various menu actions or dialog boxes can cause the text to scroll away from where you had set it, for no apparent reason. Back spacing with the shift key down can skip words, and text pasted in from another source can have carriage returns thrown out of position. All document windows have “Doc #:” preceding the file name.
Performance
Speed
Speed was generally adequate on a Mac II. A friend on a Plus found typing speed unacceptable, however. Even on a II, I occasionally experienced strange and annoying delays after simple things like selecting text. The latest version of the program, 2.01, seems less prone to this problem, though I have experienced one case of persistent hesitations in a file. I haven’t run any speed benchmarks, but ones I’ve seen reported suggest that WP is of middling speed in most things, not the best, not the worst. I wouldn’t consider speed a serious concern, at least for any Mac as faster or faster than a II.
Reliability
Version 2.00 crashed or hung up a number of times for me, taking the Finder with it in one instance. I’ve not had any crashes with the latest version, 2.01, although the thesaurus anomaly I mentioned above did occur with it. After one crash, the program acted really screwy on restarting. I found that I could restore sanity be replacing the WP default file in the system folder. Word, also, apparently can suffer from corrupted preferences, so it’s a good idea to keep a copy around. Incidently, WP, like Word, leaves a lot of temp files in the System folder after a crash. WP is smart enough to remove them itself, however.
Even in the latest version, WP can have problems with screen updates, though it’s improved over 2.00. Manipulating several columns, graphics and text boxes at once seems to give it problems, and I got in a couple of situations where I just had to start over. A friend who has used WP 1 for some time, started to transfer his thesis over to WP 2 to use its new layout capabilities. After a number of crashes, even when trying to open a WP 1 file, and a lot of difficulty placing graphics where he wanted them, he gave up and went back to version 1. With 2.01, however, I haven’t been able to duplicate his problems.
Error handling could be better. I once got a dialog box that said something about “functions,” “graphic box” and others, which I couldn’t understand at all, even after referring to the manual. WP lost track of the thesaurus file for some reason once (corrupted defaults?) and put up a window which was headed “Get path.” I’m familiar enough with computer jargon to know what that means, but it might confuse many users.
Though WP is still not bug free, WordPerfect Corp. has an excellent reputation for dealing with problems, and I wouldn’t be too concerned about bugs if I liked the other features of the product.
Manual and support
Both are excellent. There are several manuals, two of which go into great detail on drawing and macros. The help facility in the program is also outstanding.
WordPerfect provides a toll-free number for support, and it is manned by knowledgeable and helpful people.
Conclusions
I was quite impressed with WordPerfect when I first began using it. I thought there was a good chance it might be suitable for much of my word processing. As I worked further, however, I found too many disappointments and too many ways in which it falls short of Nisus, the program I have been using for a couple of years. Not that there aren’t features in WP I’d love to see in Nisus. But for my most important needs Nisus still best fits the bill.
For other people WordPerfect might be the ideal word processor. If you need flexible columns, particularly parallel ones, WP is a clear choice. WP also has, in many ways, the best layout capabilities of any Mac word processor. It could save you from buying a layout program, and it’s certainly a decent word processor.
In fact, to a large extent, WP is superior as a word processor to Word, the most commonly used high-end program (It also lists at $100 more). Word is still ahead in tables, though only slightly, and in outlining. If you like to compose with an outliner, then the static outline of WP is unsuitable and you need one like Word’s that lets you drag items around and collapse them. If you really depend on outlining, though, you will probably want to look at MindWrite, which undoubtedly has the best and easiest to use outlining features in any word processor.
No single high-end word processor on the Mac is a clear cut winner in all categories. In some things, there are even cheaper programs that beat them all. Still, each of them is a powerful program, with a lot to recommend it. To choose among them, you’ve just got to look at the features that matter the most to you. (And don’t, whatever you do, just pick Word because other people you know use it.)
