OT: Computer Problems

That's useful, thanks. I didn't know about the wild cards. The only thing I've occasionally used recently is the thesaurus.

I still miss it for big complicated and technical documents.

Especially the cross referencing and traceability tables. Even stuff like handling software or design change requests in documentation [1].

If you have to work to documentation standards like DoD-STD-2167A that required a table that lists every requirement and identifies all the sections of the design that implemented it, and then a reverse table that lists every element of design and referenced from which requirement it was derived, and these are cross references between chains of documents that are constantly being revised and all inter-dependant, you have a maintenance nightmare!

(i.e. a system requirement change, will impact a software requirement spec, will affect the high level software design, will affect the detailed design that affects the software test spec etc).

(Arguably a word processor is the wrong tool for the job, and a RDBMS is better with something to automatically assemble the document based on the database and some templates - you get mundane formulaic looking docs, but they all hang together)

LoL, yup played that game. One client I worked for had a tech pubs department straight out of the dark ages. Engineers were expected to hand write docs and hand them to tech pubs to type up on their new fangled Diamond word processors. With the advent of PCs, they had moved to the point that engineers could use Wordstar to produce the draft and print it. They would then re-key the whole thing! By the time it got to software documentation it was hopeless trying to get them to understand that things like levels of indentation, and choice of case mattered. After much delicate negotiations (trying not to upset too many folks who had "always done it that way") we got the point where they agreed we did the whole doc ourselves in WP, but they would just do the front title pages, so that they could make sure they matched the corporate documentation standard.

(even that was not without problems since sometimes the documentation standards we were working to would mandate quite trivial layout requirements that then conflicted with tech pubs "house" style.

Remember the days of the tools for printing out banners on dot matrix fanfold paper? :-)

Yup, that kind of "coach and horses" driver is very crude kludge, but can at least be an easy way of trying out new designs and techniques. It would be massively risky to ship a product using it! (bit like when Sony shipped a rootkit on their audio CDs that then allowed malware authors to hide complete folders such that they were invisible to anything on the client side of the Win32 API!)

WP5.1 was the best word processor *ever*. MS's rather poor attempt to emulate a "what is going on under the bonnet" function with Word just never worked efficiently (I haven't used Word 97 for years, and can't remember what it was called). I can remember solving many problems with documents produced by someone else by using WP5.1's Reveal Codes.

The last time I used WP5.1 was in 2001. It was just a bit of fun with the new XP computer I had bought, which had a 1.6GHz processor. I had something like a 50-page document open in WP5.1, and asked it to replace all the "t"s with a "u" (or something like that). I had barely taken my finger off the Enter key when it had completed the operation! I still have that WP5.1 program on a 3.5" floppy disk. I'd have to run it under Wine today, but would need an external USB FDD to read it.

I've just remembered that somewhere I've got that WP5.1 plastic overlay which can be put above the function keys to show what they do. I wonder where it is?

Try

Chris

I liked the ability to create a number of sub-documents and have them all collected together seamlessly in a master document.

I recall weeks of stress in Word, where it was mandated that we were to produce a series of specification documents, to a defined format, but incorporating sections produced by other departments. The styles would get massively disrupted - one chap's output invariably turned the whole document to strikethrough. :-(

I also still remember a struggle to quote within one document a section from another, and retain its page numbering.

Chris

I have just looked in my very old work files, and found that I had designed similar overlays for the Office programs. I must print them off and see if they are still accurate, or useful.

I used to like to customise the toolbars, including designing the button graphics. It was a disappointment when the ribbon came along and it was all pretty much locked down. :-(

Chris

I've got wordperfect overlays for IBM keyboards with the F-keys on the left, and on the top, plus one for VT320 dumb terminals.

This should have triggered someone to create a set of styles, with it being mandated that everyone use this set of styles.

Other problem is that most people think that a word processor app is just a one-to-one replacement for a typewriter. So they press return twice for a new paragraph, do all the heading formatting (point size, bold, etc), by hand. I've even had people do multi-column layout by hand (in PageMaker, FFS) using tabs and spaces, so that if you made a column wider or narrower, then the entire layout collapsed.

Then you get those who think it really IS a typewriter, so at the end of the doc they hit return 25 times (perhaps they expect printed paper to scroll out of the top of the display). Then they come to me and ask why their doc has a blank page at the end when they print it.

Fortunately the macOS versions of Office kept the menus, so I can pretty much ignore the ribbon bollocks.

Most people have never encountered a typewriter, let alone tried to use typewriter formatting.

The one thing that has not been mentioned about WP5.1 is/was file size. WinWord bloats anything and everything you save, WP just saved the file often 50-75% smaller.

Old, but still good.

UBit Menu is worth a look (it's free):

And:

IME that's just what most people do, in fact, do. Look at any article published in your village magazine (where the editor just bungs it in and doesn't touch the content). It's ALL typewriter formatting.

This is still a problem in authoring HTML. It's bad for accessibility, and means assistive technology has to second guess the real structure of the document. They may pretend to use CSS, but they don't use to allocate styles to structure, just to particular bits of text.

Even better when you're really stuck:

I already have an app on my phone that does that, and with more options. I much prefer locally installed software (it's generaly faster with less cruft) and WP will do fine when I'm on this machine.