All is not completely rosy in Perfect land. The new Perfect has lost some of the old Perfect’s advantages. For example, the old Perfect had an automatic feature that told you where in your document you were—35 percent of the way through, or whatever. Moreover, the old Perfect had a command that let you know how long the document was in terms of both number of lines and number of characters, and where your cursor was in all this. I’ve searched the new Perfect manual and haven’t been able to find any equivalent new command. The closest I’ve been able to come is a command that lets you know only how many characters there are in the file, not where you are, or anything else; and the command isn’t listed in the index, nor is there any equivalent command that I can find. Great work, guys. This is what I call a major frustration. It’s maybe bad programming, and it’s certainly bad documentation.
The new manual is slightly better organized than the old one, but that’s not saying a lot. I’ve rarely been able to divine the new name for the old command in the new manual, and when I’ve found it, it’s usually been by accident. It would have been an enormous service if the Perfect people had put in some sort of comparison chart for us old-Perfect old pros.
Like the old Perfect, the new Perfect is very cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves after a period or colon; sometimes it’s the two you typed in, and sometimes it magically gets transformed into one. The new Perfect goes the old Perfect three better and is randomly cavalier about the number of spaces it leaves behind a period, colon, quotation mark, question mark, and parenthesis—not only deleting spaces where you do want them but also inserting them where you don’t want them. Instead of mildly annoying, this quirk is now big-league annoying. May whoever thought it up and liked it so much he/she expanded it spend eternity brushing gnats out of his/her face!
You still can’t tell the Search feature to search for something X number of times. For example, if three times you use the word “pishtosh” and want to change it to “nuts,” you can’t tell the search-and-replace feature to “do this three times”—as with the old Perfect, you have to do it twice with the “Ask me” and then “Cancel” the third time and do it by hand, or do it three times and then have Perfect search wastefully through the rest of the document for something you know is not there.
The new Perfect’s printing menu is better than the one the old Perfect came with but not nearly as good as the menu that David Hite developed in 1983 for the old Perfect Writer. The only improvements are the “compare” feature mentioned earlier and the ability to step outside Perfect for a while into Perfect Calc, Perfect Filer, or a telecommunications program—nothing I’d write home about.
We’ve lost the “one word” command—a serious blow for those of us who used it to get around Perfect Writer’s cavalier treatment of periods and colons. This command caused the characters placed within it to be considered one word, so that Perfect Filer wouldn’t split certain words between lines.
Perfect Speller, which is now on the same diskette with Perfect Writer, Perfect Formatter, and Perfect Printer, is much faster than it used to be. Alas, it is just as stupid. Unlike better spelling checkers, Perfect Speller works on the system of prefixes, suffixes, and roots. In other words, if the word “check” is an acceptable root, then “checker” and “recheck” are acceptable. So are “checkment” and “checkation.” And like the old Perfect Speller, the new Perfect Speller doesn’t recognize its own vocabulary—it queried words like “blankline” and “ux,” which are Perfect Writer commands and ought rightly to be ignored. My recommendation is to get The WORD Plus, which can be renamed to be accessed as if it were Perfect Speller and which is far superior.
An interesting—I don’t say terrific—addition to the Perfect family is Perfect Thesaurus. You substitute the Perfect Thesaurus diskette for your document diskette in drive B, position the cursor on the word you want to look up, type Escape-S-T, and Perfect Thesaurus checks its dictionary. If the word is there, you may substitute any of the synonyms for your original word, type in your own replacement, or say “forget it” and go on to look for another synonym. The hype says that Perfect Thesaurus “holds nearly 50,000 words (entries plus synonyms).”
The parenthetical remark is the key one to home in on. I asked Perfect Thesaurus to look up “transform,” and it did; one of the synonyms it offered was “metamorphose.” When I asked it to look up “metamorphose,” it told me, “Word not found.” (Perfect Thesaurus has also never heard of “fanatic,” “asinine,” “pop,” “airy,” “bypass,” “instantaneous,” or “shrug,” among about fifteen others of the forty-five words I tried.) I’d estimate that the average number of synonyms offered for each word is between five and ten—if we compromise and say seven, that’s only 6,000 or so words that Perfect Thesaurus can recognize. Moreover, Perfect Thesaurus can only look up fifteen words before it starts yelling, “No more marks,” and refuses to cooperate any further.
In other words, Perfect Thesaurus is a nice toy, but I question its usefulness for serious writers. Having a copy of The Synonym Finder by your desk offers you about a million words that you can recognize, and is about as fast to use.