I love Q10, but... (some feedback)

[tin can alley]

I love this program, and it's great to hear that the developer is
getting back into the game. I especially like the Word Count features
(setting starting points at different places in the document) and the
automatic replacement of things like em-dashes.

But a few quirks keep me from using Q10 full time.

1) Something's not right with UTF-8 encoding. I can type or paste
Chinese characters in a document, but they won't save. They turn into
question marks when I re-open the document. Please expand language
support -- I noticed a Polish, Korean and Vietnamese speakers posted
on this board, if that counts for anything.

2) Fullscreen is the best way to use this program, but it would be
nice to have the option to turn it off. For some projects, I need to
compare multiple documents.

3) It would be nice to have Rich Text support. Sometimes I need to see
italics and bold.

[samokhov]

I don't think it's an awfully good idea to make Q10 able to do a lot
of things. Extra features take valuable time to implement and debug,
they add memory footprint and what's more important, the more stuff an
app can do, the better chances that you're gonna fool around instead
of just typing new text.
If I need to edit something, there's a lot of word processors around.
Q10 is great for churning out new text, and I think that's what it
should keep its focus upon.
(If you're afraid of forgetting where you want your bold and italics
to go you can use some markup, like asterisks for *bold* and slashes
for /italics/. Sure, you're probably gonna have to convert it to
proper font formatting manually once you import it into a word
processor but if you're serious about copy editing that's not the most
time- or thought-consuming task.)

[wednesday]

Like tincanalley, I would love for this program to italicize and/or
underline, and bold. I don't want to take the time to use a second
program (text editor) to convert * and _ to bold and underline. It
slows me down because first I have to type it in Q10, then I have to
convert it in a text editor, then I have to take it into a word
processor to convert it.

It's gotten to to the point where I will run wordperfect 5.1 on a
virtual computer just to get the basic RTF formatting I need. I love
the "I get out of your way" features for Q10, but those two features
would really nail the program for me and let me abandon WP5.1 that's
literally 25 years old, but is the only word processor that gets out
of the way and stays out of the way and actually underlines/bolds text
for a manuscript.

It's not like a writer wants tables and outlines (okay, sometimes I
want outlines, but I'll use Liquid Story Binder or Word for that). Is
streamlining the format and adding bold, underline and italic really
that much to ask?

[Gun Metal Gray]

having no .rtf support is a major irritation i have with most
distraction free text editors. One thing i did notice about Q10 is
that it will open and save to .rtf. But it removes all formatting.
Also you can set bold and italics in the properties menu, but it
changes the font for the whole document. I would defiantly pay (or
donate) for a Q10 like editor with .rtf support.

[samokhov]

Why not just take some word processor like Atlantis or, God forbids,
MS Word and run it in full screen?

[Gun Metal Gray]

Words fullscreen view dosen't cover the taskbar. Settings and colors
are a pain to configure correctly each time you launch word. And when
in draft view all text defaults to the far left of the screen, you
can't change this as far i have discoverd. You also lose the status
bar.
Atlanis is the same as Word except its old school look and colors are
hard on the eyes. I would rather use Word 2007 over Atlantis. Trust me
i tried. Writespace seems a promising addin for word but it sill
leaves Word with no status bar or Bold/Italics while writing with it.
For these reasons i keep coming back to Q10. I'm probably going to
have to look into Multimarkdown for this reason.

> > > that much to ask?- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[samokhov]

Atlantis is somewhat better than Word. It hides the taskbar, the
colors are customizable (you're not bound to the pre-made color
schemes) and you can turn on the status bar in fullscreen (Options-
>View->"Full Screen" mode hides:).
Other than that, yes, the icons look dated, there are things you can't
do without a mouse and the draft mode has the text to the left. You
can cheat and leave on a "Control Panel" in fullscreen, and that will
push text to the right, but it kinda defies the purpose.
Then again, I've yet to find anything vastly better for note-pushing
and outlining. Outline 4D is huge and uglier than anything (it's got
timelines, though), EverNote gone south a long time ago, and plain
text editors just don't structure the data at all. I mean, WriteMonkey
has things like navigation by headers etc. but it's not quite there
yet.
Speaking of WriteMonkey, it can export Markdown- or Textile-formatted
text into .html or .doc. Editing-wise it's about as wysiwyg as Q10
though, so if you got something to import Markdown, you can use Q10 as
well.

[BC]

It seems to me that full-screen is the whole point of the application.
Rather than changing the editor into an ordinary windowed application,
it seems to me being able to split the screen (as with vim, for
example) would be wonderful -- then you could compare documents, or
different sections of the same document.

In regard to rtf, I don't think you're going to get much traction with
requesting that a text editor become a word processor.

I haven't tried Q10 in quite a while; I thought it was no longer in
development. Have to see how it's going. If there's still no auto-
indent, I can't use it much though.

UTF support is crucial.

- B

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