10-Jun-82 21:08:00,1797;000000000000
Date:     10 June 1982 2308-edt
From:     Brian N. Hess              <Hess.Unicorn at MIT-MULTICS>
Subject:  Perfect Writer
To:       info-cpm at MIT-MC
Cc:       Amethyst-Users at MIT-AI

For those of you who want reassurance about Perfect Writer, here's
another useful piece of information:

Perfect Writer is substantially the same as Mark of the Unicorn's Mince
and Scribble package.  Therefore, if you know someone who swears up and
down that Mince and Scribble are good Emacs and Scribe clones, then you
can rest assured that so is Perfect Writer.  It has had a menu system
put on front of it, has (as Barry said) USER-redefinable (rather than
programmer-redefinable) key bindings, and in my opinion, the year of
work that was put into Perfect Writer after their (Perfect Software)
initial purchase of Mince and Scribble has been well-spent in producing
a VERY good word-processing-style manual, and that (even more than the
technical improvements) makes it a winner!

However, if you are a hacker type, you will probably still want to buy
Mince and Scribble ($275) instead, because you get the C source code to
play with!  Alas, the manual is written more for the technical type than
the secretary.  Perhaps Unicorn's FinalWord product will turn out to fill the
business word processing category, but there have been no reviews on it
to date.

As I understand it, the $389 price includes only Perfect Writer, and
Perfect Speller is extra?  The ads aren't clear on that point, and we
(Mark of the Unicorn) have only a version 1.01 Perfect Writer to hack
with.  Since the price just went up from $289, perhaps they are
including "spell mode" and Perfect Speller in with it now?  Anybody have
a recently purchased model?

                              Brian
13-Jun-82 11:51:00,2152;000000000000
Date: 13 Jun 1982 at 1251-CDT
From: awd at UTEXAS-11 (BADOB@AI)
Subject: Perfect Writer
To: info-cpm at ai,amethyst-users at mc


	As BNH and PGA noted, PW is Mince and Scirbbel warmed over. 
However, Source code is not avaailable for any part of PW or PS at all.
What this means ia that in some cases, which are ever decreasing, PW may
prove to be inadaquate. eg:

	1. Apples without an 80 column board can actually be supported,
	however it is not reccommended since most screens of text are 
	trimmed for a 79 column terminal. This means that the menu system is 
	difficult if not impossible to use on an apple with 40 columns, 
	and the configuration process is hard.

	2. Without the source to Crayon, The MotU printer driver, new printer
	drivers are impossible to add. This is not all bad: PW and Crayon will
	indeed support any printer in monospaced modes of operation. Only
	those printers which can proportional space and are not currently 
	supported lose.

	3. The PW editor is roughly 4K bigger than Mince, and all the config
	programs are significantly more verbose... This means that PW MUST HAVE
	a genuine 56K to run in. Many Morrow systems have a CP/M which proclaims
	56K, but indeed has less.

	4. In rebuttal to the InfoWorld article - PW is now being shipped with
	inch and a half binders instead of one-inch ones. We may also include 
	Hardcopy of the lessons, but did not do so for two reasons:

		a. We felt that the lessons are meant to be learned off disk
		and having hardcopy would encourage thair use in an improper
		manner.

		b. The lessons are constantly being revised. Sigh. We would
		have spent as much typesetting the lessons as the rest of the
		wntire manual.

	this policy on the lessons may change in the future...

	5. Obviously, all of PW is in BDS C. All of the other products in the
	Perfect (frob) line are also in C, and we are working on ports to other
	machines and operating systems which support C. Expect to see at least
	a few ??nix versions of PW and the other programs in the PSI stable by
	years' end

	-Barry A. Dobyns
	<BADOB @ AI>

-------
18-Jun-82 15:17:03,557;000000000000
Date: Fri Jun 18 17:17:03 1982
From: decvax!duke!alr at Berkeley

I have been told that I might be able to get an evaluation by
you of the Mince screen editor for the IBM pc.  My main
interest is in an editor that can handle large (>60K) text
files, do all the necessary buffering, etc, and, perhaps even
allow editing of multiple files.  I currently use vi on UNIX,
and it's ok; I found IBM's spf even better when I was there.
I'd really appreciate any info you're willing to share.
	Arny Rosenberg
	Duke University Computer Science
	duke!alr
