Panorama and SGML

[Erwin Wodarczak]

At 05:36 27/02/97 -0800, you wrote:
>     
>I went to a "Panorama presentation" yesterday at the Canadian Embassy in 
>Washington.  Panorama is made by Soft Quad - which is a Canadian firm - and
they
>were showing a US Department of Defense application.  Attendees included
people 
>from IBM, several major publishers, various DOD offices, and a collection of 
>consultants.  The Chairman and the major technical people from SoftQuad were 
>also there.
>
>There was a roundtable discussion after the presentation.  The summary is that 
>Panorama works.

Not quite - Panorama Pro might work - Panorama Viewer still doesn't (for me
on Win3.1 and Netscape Gold 3.0 anyway).

<snippage>

>There is a difference between Panorama Pro and the viewer you can download
from 
>their site.

No kidding  ;-)

  They are trying to generate revenue in order to support more 
>development - like all other software firms - and we talked at length about 
>their pricing model.  But I would caution against deciding about the product 
>based on experience with only their "free, downloadable" viewer.  It is a
niche 
>product - designed to provide the ability to view SGML - but it does not have 
>the flexibility of their Panorama Pro product.

Isn't a freeware version supposed to develop a market for the "pro" version?
If so, so far it's failed in our case - I can't (and won't) justify paying
for Panorama Pro if I can't use and demonstrate at least some of its
features on the free viewer.

<more snippage>

>We do not run 3.1 on any of our development machines because most of the
recent 
>software demands at least 95.  The 3.1 configuration was discussed
yesterday as 
>an "annoyance" item - briefly.  Have you tried emailing SoftQuad about the 
>problem?

An "annoyance" - great.  And, yes, I have e-mailed SoftQuad, and received no
reply.  While they do say the free viewer is unsupported, I had hoped for
some response at least.

I'm still waiting to hear about another SGML viewer to come on the market,
myself.

***************************************************************************
Erwin Wodarczak - Records Analyst / Archivist
UBC Library - Special Collections and University Archives Division
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
URL: http://www.library.ubc.ca/spcoll/
E-mail: ewodar at unixg.ubc.ca
Tel: (604)822-5877   Fax: (604)822-9587

We do precision guesswork based on vague assumptions and unreliable data
of dubious accuracy
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