From: Normand_Beaudoin@UQTR.UQuebec.CA
Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1993 17:58:18 -0400
Subject: Word or Nisus(Summary of answers)


Hi! Netters.

Few weeks ago I sent a message at info-mac about word
processors.
I received so many answers that I cannot send a personal reply to
each of them. I received so many answers and so many of them were
full of attention, full of details and explainations that it make me
feel great.

So I think the best way to say a usefull "Thank you" is to give you a
summary of answers. ( Upon request I could send all the complete
answers I received to personal e-mail address)

It is not possible to summarize all the comments, details and
explaination about each word processor. So I decided to give you a
statistical view of what I received.

Before doing it I must warn you about the fact that these "statistics"
are based on particulars answers to a particular question, so they are
certainly biased a little bit. Moreover this bias is probably distorted
by the way I compiled answers. So if your favorite word processor
received a low score, please don't be angry, but try to get the  sweet
feeling of the forever ununderstanded poet, alone with the truth  and
with his/her thousands of friends. Also you should be aware about the
fact that these statistic compare very different things: small word
processors, large word processors, and software for edition.
Incidentally, this is a very deep philosophical problem which bug me 
all the time and prevent me from sleeping... If you compare totally 
identical things, it is useless... If you compare completely different 
things, it is meaningless... How things must be different and how they 
must be similar for a comparizon to be valid ?????? 

To fix your mind, I reproduce here the text of the question I
sent to infomac.

****************
Subject: Microsoft Word or Nisus?

I plan to buy, learn, and use a word processor, particularly
for a doctoral thesis which will contain text, graphics and
pictures. I have a limited time for that job, so I absolutely
must not do a mistake with the choice of the word
processor I will use. Is there other word processors better
than Word or Nisus? What Nisus can do that Word cannot and
vice versa? Which one should I choose?????

Thank you very much!

*****************

Now the statistics! Let me explain shortly the way I did that.

When someone recommended a particular software, I gave it a 
+1 score.
For a non recommendation, a -1 score were allowed.
For a neutral opinion, I gave a 0. (It happened when one talk about
several word processors)

After that I compiled the results and normalized to 100%.
This gave the unweighted column. It is the base for others columns.

Second, I thought that opinions of those who knows and use several
word processors should be considered more strongly. So for those how
knows n different software, I gave a weight of n to their answers.
This gave the linear weight columns.

Finally, it seems to me that the opinion of those how knows, say,
10 different software is better but probably not 5 times better
than that of those how knows 2.  Deeply inspired, probably by
information theory, I used (log in base 2) n weight. This gave the
logarithmic weight columns.

Note.( Some results may seems inconsistent; for exemple,
unweighted and logarithmic weight for Nisus are the same!
That is because I normalised each columns to 100%.

Here are the results!
( To see the goods numbers in the goods columns,
display it with a font like Courier)

Name          unweighted   linear weight   logarithmic weight

Word             6.0            3.5                2.9
Nisus           30.0           28.5               30.0
FrameMaker      18.0           22.2               22.5
Texture          2.0            2.1                2.3
MacWrite         6.0            8.3                8.6
OzTex            2.0            1.4                1.5
FullWrite       10.0            9.7                8.0
WriteNow        18.0           16.7               16.3
WordPerfect      6.0            6.2                6.6
PageMaker        2.0            1.4                1.5

Thank you for your attention!
Thank you very much to all of those how sent me so usefull answer.

Normand Beaudoin

beaudoin@neptune.uqtr.uquebec.ca