DTP on SUN SPARCstation (Sun-spots v9n254, v9n261)

[Pete Mellor]

Phil Fernandez (v9n261) and Albert Chin (v9n254) both ask for advice on
DTP packages, in particular Interleaf and Framemaker. 

I am sending this to Sun-spots, rather than direct to both the original
enquirers, since I had difficulty getting Albert's mail address to work.

Early on, a widely-dispersed project in which I am involved decided to
standardize on a single DTP system, so that all sites could produce
reports to a common format and e-mail them to one another. Framemaker and
Interleaf were examined. I did not see the Framemaker demo, but I did see
Interleaf, and it was impressive. One of the attractions was that it was
available on Mac as well as Sun, and several sites (including ours) had
that mix of machines.

The drawbacks of Interleaf were cost and size. The package filled up a
very substantial chunk of my 150Mbyte disk during the demo. In fact, we
had to compress all my user files to get it on, and the installation took
one of Interleaf's own experts the best part of a day.

Unfortunately, it did not live up to expectations. Particularly, we have
had problems moving files between Sun and Mac, and sending files by e-mail
(the initial attempts resulted in corruption of files). Other specific
problems were the time taken to change fonts on the Mac, the difficulty of
learning and using Interleaf (Mac users infinitely preferred the Mac
tools, some using, e.g., Micro-Soft Word in conjunction with Micro-soft
Paint), and the persistent non-appearance of an X-windows version of
Interleaf, which meant that sites using X had to close it down to use
Interleaf. This last problem was aggravated by a bug between X and
Interleaf which meant that Interleaf hung if X was not closed down
cleanly.

The result? Well, some of us are using TeX or LaTeX, some are using nroff
or troff, some are using... :-( Interleaf now seems to have been abandoned
by nearly all the members of the project, after heaven knows what
expenditure on licences.

There has also been some stuff on Sun-spots very recently, to do with the
size of the Postscript files generated by Interleaf, which has caused lpr
to run out of store or take 20 minutes to print a modest document. Have a
look at v9n209, v9n210, v9n214, and v9n219.

Peter Mellor,
Centre for Software Reliability,
City University,                 
Northampton Square,              
London EC1V 0HB                  
                                 
  Tel.: +44 (0)71-253-4399 Ext. 4162/3/1
  Fax.: +44 (0)71-253-3861              
E-mail: p.mellor at uk.ac.city (JANET)