Coyote/Harris

[Moderator1]

A friend asked me to post this about upcoming changes at his paper. I know we used Harris at the TD and my desk crew hated it with a passion. They told me many times when they yelled HARRIS SUCKS! they didn't mean me (though I suspect they did). I'm told Harris is cumbersome, not user friendly at all.


My newspaper is switching to Coyote for content management and Harris
for page layout. Is anyone familiar with either program? All tips and
tricks would be appreciated, since I've been using Word and Quark for
a decade.

 

[imjustagirl]

Harris sucks.

Of course, that probably also had to do with the fact the T-D had us working on computers from roughly 1987.

 

[Moderator1]

Yeah, some of those bad boys were my age.

This paper has much newer computers - only a couple of years old.

 

[SportySpice]

Go back to using the AP Leafdesk and you'd have the unholy trinity of newspaper production. Seriously. I can't think of a much worse duo than Coyote and Harris. The little I used of Harris was a long time ago, and it was like trying to design a page while blindfolded. I'm told it wasn't any better in recent years, and I honestly thought Coyote systems went the way of the Tandy TRS-80 Model 100 portable computers.

Wish I had some tips or tricks to help, but hopefully using new-ish computers will lessen the pain.

 

[mediaguy]

My favorite Coyote memory is when you'd (command-J) justify a story and it would just keep on counting -- infinitely -- and you'd have to reboot and would lose whatever you'd written.

Was weaned on Coyote. I'm only comfortably writing in yellow on a blue background ...

 

[buckweaver]

Coyote SUCKS. Should've died in 1997. I hate that ******* system. Don't use spell-check; it'll crash you. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Coyote was my fave in the 1980s-1990s, much better than Atex, in my opinion. Harris was the first pagination system I used, so I didn't know any better, but I did not like Quark by comparison initially. I have no idea what the current generation of either is like, but two points:

1.) Any system will suck if your IT department blows.

2.) WTF difference does it make? If they're buying it, you're using it. You can tell them to ship it back, but they won't.

 

[Barsuk]

I have no idea what this thread is about. I was hoping Mike had teamed up with Wile E. to form another new business venture.

 

[BitterYoungMatador2]

I thought Wlat Harris was spotted at Coyote Ugly.

 

[slappy4428]

I thought Wlat Harris was spotted at Coyote Ugly.

Outstanding...

 

[Bob Crotchet]

A friend asked me to post this about upcoming changes at his paper. I know we used Harris at the TD and my desk crew hated it with a passion. They told me many times when they yelled HARRIS SUCKS! they didn't mean me (though I suspect they did). I'm told Harris is cumbersome, not user friendly at all.

My newspaper is switching to Coyote for content management and Harris
for page layout. Is anyone familiar with either program? All tips and
tricks would be appreciated, since I've been using Word and Quark for
a decade.

Harris as in Jazbox (the new, sorta modern suite) or just the old Harris Pagination System? Haven't used Jazbox; worked on a Harris system on NT4 a while ago. If you're a command-line junkie, Harris is fine. Very powerful. But very unfriendly. Last I heard (a couple of years ago), it wasn't even certified to run on Win XP. Oh, and the editor of choice was Word for Windows 6.0.

 

[rpmmutant]

Coyote is at least 10 years beyond the technology curve, so good luck with that. If your computers are more than 10 years old, they will make the software even more cumbersome. Save a lot. Prepare for crashes. And never, ever, spell check. Kiss of death. Keep a dictionary handy.

 

[fishwrapper]

No one in their right mind would marry Harris with Coyote as the frontend.
What is this, 1990?

 

[Football_Bat]

The last paper I worked at (nine years ago) used Coyote. They also used pica poles, proportion wheels and paste-up boards. And using Quark to paginate was tantamount to a firing offense. I **** you not.

 

[OnTheRiver]

The last paper I worked at (nine years ago) used Coyote. They also used pica poles, proportion wheels and paste-up boards. And using Quark to paginate was tantamount to a firing offense. I **** you not.

Ah, the Luddite Daily Parchment

 

[Full of Shit]

Coyote, back in the day, was Da Bomb (of course, that expression didn't exist back in the day, but whatever).

It had one function I still miss, IIRC. You could have multiple save strings of text - you could save different files on keys a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc. That was infinitely better than the current limitation of Control C, where each thing you save wipes out the previous one (and if such a function does exist in modern computers, somebody please enlighten this dinosaur).

Awesome Trash-100 art, BTW. Talk about nostalgia. Makes me want to break out the pica pole just to measure something in agates.

 

[FreddiePatek]

The Catholic Church endorses Coyote exorcisms.

 

[SixToe]

Buy some anger medication or rid your office of any clubs, bats, bricks and implements of destruction.

Somewhere, there is a computer still counting as it attempts to check the spelling. It will continue through the period of nuclear holocaust and when cockroaches roam the post-modern scorched earth.

The save strings were nice, though.

 

[Football_Bat]

Coyote, back in the day, was Da Bomb (of course, that expression didn't exist back in the day, but whatever).

It had one function I still miss, IIRC. You could have multiple save strings of text - you could save different files on keys a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc. That was infinitely better than the current limitation of Control C, where each thing you save wipes out the previous one (and if such a function does exist in modern computers, somebody please enlighten this dinosaur).

Always wanted to quote Full of ****.

In most Mac programs, you can click on a block of text or art, hold down the shift key and click something else, hit Apple-C and it'll copy the whole lot. Or Apple-V and it'll paste it, etc.

As far as cutting and pasting multiple separate samples of copy, I've never had the occasion to work around that. Or maybe I have done so by just drawing a spare text box or two and using that to hold the intermediate copy. Hell, I dunno.

 

[fishwrapper]

Coyote, back in the day, was Da Bomb (of course, that expression didn't exist back in the day, but whatever).

It had one function I still miss, IIRC. You could have multiple save strings of text - you could save different files on keys a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, etc. That was infinitely better than the current limitation of Control C, where each thing you save wipes out the previous one (and if such a function does exist in modern computers, somebody please enlighten this dinosaur).

Awesome Trash-100 art, BTW. Talk about nostalgia. Makes me want to break out the pica pole just to measure something in agates.

Is that what they're calling these days?