Re: Fonts for NB

["William H. TeBrake" tebrake@xxxxxxxx]

Bill Troop wrote:

> Michael, thank you for re-sending that snipped from NB's tech support.
> I had missed it. It is the most pathetic confession of total
> inadequacy I have seen in 20 years of computer journalism. No wonder
> this company is going nowhere! Of course the entire program needs an
> entire rewrite! Land sakes! With the GPFs mentioned before, this
> sounds like a minimally modified XyWin, with all the fundamental
> problems intact.
>
> 'huge performance hit' indeed! What absolute garbage. How can they
> think anyone would take this seriously? Or is their business model to
> prey on the unsound of mind? Bad enough if it doesn't work with
> Verdana -- but not with PS Courier either? Then it's not to to be
> taken seriously. We're better off with XyDos!

As someone who uses NotaBene daily, I find the material quoted above a bit
over-the-top. The program works beautifully in its recent incarnations,
and I cannot remember the last time it generated a GPF. I cannot say the
same thing about Word, Firefox, PowerPoint or a number of other programs I
use on a regular basis. I realize that not everyone on this list
appreciates the "add-ons" to NotaBene, but for an academic writer as I am,
I simply could not work without NotaBene's bibliographical and textual
indexing modules. Besides, it prints to any printer you install in a
Windows environment, and you can strip it down to the basic editor (just
like XyDos IV) if you so choose. At the moment, NotaBene has a fairly
solid niche market and it produces and enhances for that market. It seems
to me that it is really is going somewhere. Besides, you can actually get
real technical support. Perhaps NotaBene is not for everyone, but it does
what it is marketed to do very well. Have you actually used the program
that you so roundly denounce?

So some fonts don't work as advertised, but others do. Wasn't it
Robert who said he had encountered the same problem in MSWord? In
any case, why blame NotaBene if some fonts behave poorly. I just now
tested 8 fonts chosen because these are some I have used from time to
time. Of these, 2 misbehaved (Tahoma and Verdana) and 6 behaved (Arial,
Bookman Old Style, Garamond; Georgia, Goudy, and Times New Roman). Even
Tahoma and Verdana are usable; it's a cosmetic thing, as far as I am
concerned.

My two cents,

William H. TeBrake
UMaine History
---
William H. TeBrake
Department of History        E-Mail: tebrake@xxxxxxxx
University of Maine      Telephone: (Int+1) 207-581-1914
Orono, Maine 04469-5774 USA    Fax: (Int+1) 207-581-1817