{fb1000000               Footnotes

{fb10000ffW4W handles footnotes in a very intuitive manner. As the page layout changes, it will move the footnotes so that they behave sensibly.

{fb1000000            Revision Marks

{fb10000ffW4W can remember what has changed since a previous version of a document, and print out a copy with revision marks. It looks disgusting, but at work, for certain controlled formal documents such marks are an audit requirement.

{fb1000000               Spelling

{fb10000ffW4W has an excellent spelling system, but is let down by the windowing system. In some situations (e.g. a spelling error in the footer) the windows need to be rearranged, if you don't anticipate this and click on a spelling window icon too soon then your click will end up doing something completely different because the window moves to a different position before your click is interpreted. {fb1ff0000Impression has an excellent spelling system, but is let down by the custom dictionary management. Sometimes Impression will start up with all my custom dictionaries known to it, and sometimes I have to wade inside the !Impression.Auto directory and drag them in. It doesn't remind me that I have not saved any new words I have added to my custom dictionaries on closedown.

{fb1000000              Thesaurus

{fb10000ffW4W has a thesaurus. It does its job but isn't particularly spectacular. {fb1ff0000Impression's "WordWorks" thesaurus is spectacular, with full dictionary definitions, and a powerful hypertext control system which makes navigating thesaurus space easy and intuitive. WordWorks runs as a separate hot-linked application, so you can use it outside Impression.

{fb1000000            Grammar Checker

{fb10000ffI think it's amazing that a computer can understand enough about the syntax of what I write to be able to comment sensibly on the grammar. So far I've never actually agreed with any of the comments that W4W has made, but I like to watch it try. It's not very quick.

{fb1000000              Ease of use

{fb1ff0000This is where Impression (thanks in large part to the facilities of RiscOs) really scores. Everything is reasonably close at hand and does just about what you would expect it to do. One trivial example is that when you want to select a different style or font, you can pop up a menu that shows you the list of all the ones that are available. You only get a partial list if the whole list is too long to fit on the screen. {fb10000ffWindows doesn't seem to allow variable length menus, so the style and font menus always have exactly 10 entries in them, and you may need to scroll up and down. This may seem like a very trivial difference, but I've just spent the better part of a week converting a computer manual from Tgal to W4W, which involved changing the style on almost every paragraph. If you add together all the time I spent clicking up and down the little style sheet menu it would come to about 8 hours.

{fb1000000             On line Help

{fb10000ffW4W has excellent on line help. {fb1ff0000Impression has excellent on line help.
{n3
{fb1000000                 Speed

{fb1ff0000There's a noticeable effect in Impression if you do something to an early page of a large document which causes layout changes to ripple through the later pages. The program responds somewhat sluggishly to any new changes while the ripple runs through other pages in the background. This can be avoided by splitting the document into chapters. {fb10000ff W4W doesn't propagate layout changes until you explicitly tell it to "repaginate" the document. This repagination can take a long time for large documents, but you don't need to do it very often. On my 386, W4W starts to become quite lethargic when dealing with documents over about 60k. It also takes an inordinate amount of time when failing to find a suitable spelling suggestion for very long words, e.g. words like "OS{_SWINumberFrom- String" will make it think for ages (this got so bad that I had to switch off automatic spelling suggestions).

{fb1000000            Large Documents

{fb1ff0000Impression will cope quite happily with just about anything you can fit in memory. A 300 page document with 100,000 words is just as easy to handle as a one page memo. {fb10000ffIn W4W you need to create large documents as separate files. We created a large computer manual as a series of separate files, then told it to link all the files together. We borrowed an 8Mb Pentium machine, but it could only cope with 1Mb of text at once, so we had to split the manual into three separate sections and adjust the page numbering and contents by hand.









