CompuServe Thread

It's important to remember that a lot of people online don't know what they're talking about. I think this applies to WPCorp in several ways. First, many people online have little or no understanding of the cost of support and development. WPCorp does, so don't apologize for your decision. Second, I don't think the apparent demand for WYSIWYG word processors applies to Word Perfect. (I can't understand why it's an issue with many other word processors, frankly.) I think maintenance of 4.2 would be fine. It's file compatibility with other PCs that really drives WP sales, I think. Don't bother developing 5.0 or 6.0 for us until they're solid on other machines. I think it's good that your Amiga programmers will be working with programmers for other machines. I think the "I (heart) Amiga" club types should view this as a plus, not a minus. They'll spread the word about what's good and bad with the Amiga, which certainly beats no press at all. Also, Commodore's PR about "units sold" is subject to interpretation. One million what? A500s with joysticks? Finally, your cutbacks in Amiga development will be an educational process for many Amigaheads – so there's still hope.

I'm very disappointed to learn WP won't do a full 5.0 release for Amiga. However, I'll continue to use WP where it makes the most sense, primarily in academic work requiring footnotes, indexes, table of contents, thesaurus, etc.–things no Desktop Publishing program supports. WP is the only word processor on the Amiga at present that does all this with full freedom of page formatting (i.e., intermixing multiple column formats on a page or in a document). I don't particularly care about picture support–I'm not using your program for artwork preparation. However, I do care about WYSIWYG (the reason WP was first invented), color, and font support. Here's why: 1) I use excellence! (another word processor) to prepare 35mm slides. With color and fonts, it's much faster than Aegis' Video Titler, and uses a fraction of the disk space. With color and font support, I could use WP instead. Yes, I would prefer a single program that does all the text things I want to do, instead of having to remember options from multiple programs. 2) For general writing, I set up a page that is one screen in size, two columns wide, and using a font I designed to get maximum information on a single screen. WP and TOPAZ-80 won't let me get as much data on screen at a time. That's important–otherwise we'd all still be using 40-column TV-format screens. I've put off purchasing a DTP program–I was hoping WP would come out with a version that would combine its excellent document features with fonts. Desktop publishing programs can make pretty output–but can they intersperse automatically-numbered footnotes at the bottom of each page and produce a correctly-numbered index and table of contents at the same time? I don't know of any. I'm going to miss having WP 5.0. I thought WP was dedicated enough to its product to make it work on EVERY machine, and I thought that Amiga passing the 1,000,000 production mark would insure we'd be included. I guess not, and I suspect WP will begin to lose market share as a result. Anyway, thanks for being honest with us.

Lynn, one thing I'd really like to see is: When printing a program from within WP, have the print screen come up active. You don't know how amny times I've entered a 'g' in my document when trying to send a {G}o to the printer.