Full Write Professional - History - Design

Design

FullWrite addressed each of these concepts and problems.

To start with, FullWrite replaced MacWrite's GUI with one that was a true WYSIWYG display, optionally allowing the entire page to be displayed exactly as it would on the printer. Unlike other programs with similar features implemented as a "preview" mode, in FullWrite the document remained fully editable in this view. The only reason not to use it would be to reclaim some screen space, an important consideration on the small-screen Macs of the era. To this day, many word processors retain preview modes or do not allow editing a real page view.

FullWrite also included a number of advanced layout features, such as user-adjustable kerning and automatic hyphenation. Text could be marked for inclusion in footnotes/endnotes, the table of contents or an index, all of which were automatically maintained. FullWrite also featured change bars, allowing users to track changes to the documents. Most of these features have since appeared on other high-end products, but at the time FullWrite was considerably more advanced than any competing products on the Mac, matching or beating the feature set of the high-end DOS products.

One of the primary "selling features" of their new word processor was its well-integrated outliner. Unlike competing designs, FullWrite's solution supported not only one document outline, but any number of them, allowing the document to be arranged in several different ways. Additionally, the outlines were not separate from the document, but parts of it, and could be displayed or hidden as the user wished. In contrast, a more traditional outliner, like the one in Microsoft Word, uses portions of the document itself as the outliner's data, often header text. This forces the outline to have a 1-to-1 relationship between the document text and its logical organization. FullWrite's system was more flexible than competing solutions, and it continues to appear in discussions about outliners to this day.

FullWrite also included the ability to attach notes to any object in the document, whether that be paragraphs, images or outliner items. Users could attach notes to the outline headers, to remind themselves what to put into that section when they came back to it later. The program also included a basic graphics editor, allowing users to add simple drawings to their documents without leaving the application. Its ability to wrap text around graphics was also notable; it did not simply move the text to the outline of the image container, it examined the image for the "drawn area" and could use that as the margin, tightly wrapping the image.

The only notable outright missing feature was that the program did not include a built-in table editor.