10-XII-1994.

Horgoš, exiting Hungary.

One of these days I re... instated, or whatever, my #6 SF stories from an atarist floppy to m$ Word 2.0. Had a lot of work with the beast - not the story, that was easy, but with Word those days, because of the incredible amount of documentation I tried to generate somehow, including some attempts to compile a .hlp file from .rtf, and .rtf was routinely generated from fox. Ouch, that hurt. The .rtf format is just about the worst markup one can imagine, with something akin to tags but... no names, just numbers - for colors, for fonts. So the header has to have a list, and then in the text you use numbered tags to mention the elements of the list. Awful. But yes, most of it managed to be done, with huge consumption of nerves, and then wasn't used much. The documentation wasn't consulted, it just existed.

Then at some point Word 6 came and all the menus were shuffled. And while scouting the menus I learned to hate the windowses paradigm, where a menu closes on selection. So you navigate three levels down just to find something, misclick or just try out an option, and your selection vanishes - not only you have to navigate from scratch, you actually don't remember where you left off. Nightmare.

Ditto for incremental search. What m$ says is that there should be a time interval while it will wait for your next keystroke, and if you type nothing, the search string is back to empty. So you type "typ" and then a phone rings, distracts you for a second, and when you type "e" the item found isn't "type", it's "each". I still hate that, 27 years later. In catal6 the search string is not destroyed by passage of time, only by user action - a click, or use of navigational keys.


Mentions: atariST, catal6, fox, Majkrosoft (m$), SF stories, in serbian