July 2008

From: Dr Christopher Mabb, Scientific Word Ltd.
To: Our Scientific Word/WorkPlace/Notebook Technical Typesetting list

 

1. The Apology.    Firstly, we're wanting to apologise to those of you who tried to contact us via the forms on our website over the last couple of weeks. Ever since 19th June, a fault at our Internet Service Provider has disabled the forms - preventing users from submitting questions to us (eg. at https://www.sciword.co.uk/scientificworkplace.htm ) or placing orders directly from our Licence Calculator ;. The good news is that everything was back to normal as of Wednesday 2nd. July; please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused you.



2. The Assurance.    For those of you worried about the present economic situation - interest rates, fuel costs, food bills - we're writing to assure you that we have no intention of increasing our prices to follow suit. For the foreseeable future (certainly for 3 months, and possibly for the rest of 2008) we will hold our prices firm at the levels they have been at since 2004.



3. The Request.    One of the Professors on our mailing list Emailed this week to thank us for some Technical Support we had given the day before. We responded:

       "You're welcome! The best way you can thank us is by recommending us to all your colleagues and co-authors not yet using our software - telling them we're a real company in these days of online fraudsters... that we know the software we sell inside out... that we provide a prompt, reliable service.
       Hope this gives you some ideas - you could even use the link below to do it painlessly!"

    

   Perhaps we could invite you, too, to consider recommending us - especially to contacts, co-authors, lecturers and teachers in other countries, where perhaps not everyone has yet come across Scientific Word, Scientific WorkPlace and their little brother Scientific Notebook? We only receive your friends' details once they choose to take advantage of the free 30-day trial (available from the link they'll receive), so you won't be compromising their privacy in any way.



4. More information.    We included a paragraph last time for the many people who have been asking about Windows Vista, and we referred you to http://www.mackichan.com/techtalk/737.htm . Another distinguished academic - one of our users since the early 1990s - Emailed to make sure that upgrading to the current version 5.5 under Vista would not cause problems with old Scientific Word files:

       "My main use of SW is for writing maths papers - I almost always use portable latex, and the ability to also convert directly to pdf files without having to transfer to our Unix machines, will be very useful. I have files from many old versions of SW (2?).
       Thanks for your help."

   We were able to reassure him that the old file he sent us went straight through Scientific WorkPlace v5.5 on Vista without a single message or error, producing a beautifully typeset PDF document. That's good news for those who are still needing to upgrade to the current v5.5 - do please visit our Version 5.0 and Version 5.5 pages to see the new features added in.