Re: Lousy Word Procs

["Wayne J. Douglass" <wayned -at- VERITY -dot- COM>]

At 07:56 AM 12/9/96 -0600, Chris Thiessen wrote:
>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!

Anyone who has ever worked with a Markup Language (ML) has gone through this
process. It sucks, but it works and it produces pretty good output (for the
time) so you put up with it and even have a little affection for it once
you've moved on to something better. My own experience was with XICS (Xerox
Integrated Composition System), which drove the 9700 laser typesetter. I
even wrote the guide on how to use our department subset of the language,
colloquially referred to as "The Joy of XICS."

--Wayne Douglass
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