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From: bkogawa@primenet.com (Bryan Ogawa)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What would it take to replace MS Office?
Date: 12 Oct 1996 01:55:03 -0700
Organization: Primenet Services for the Internet
Lines: 88
Message-ID: <53nmd7$r70@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>
References: <53nca4$shi@agate.berkeley.edu>
Keywords: MS Office, personal productivity, word processing
X-Posted-By: bkogawa@206.165.5.108 (bkogawa)
bob@nemesis.its.berkeley.edu (bob prohaska) writes:
>Hi all,
>This is an admittedly inane question, motivated by acute boredom.
>Having used Macintoshes, WinDoze, A/UX, WinNT, OS/2 and 386/FreeBSD,
>I'm left wondering what it would take to provide the functionality
>of Win95 plus MS Office on FreeBSD for the usual run of things people use
>personal computers for. That would seem to be mostly document preparation.
>As a marketing gimmick, FreeBSD might be well served by an installer
>option titled "Office Droid" which downloaded and configured (very
>important!) software to provide roughly the functionality of MicroSoft
>Office. It needn't be "What you see is what you get", but it would
>have to do the same job, meaning good-looking output on PostScript
>or PCL printers. The ability to easily insert graphics in documents
>(something easier than \special in TeX) would be highly desirable.
Depending on whether WYSI{W|A}YG is important or not, the answer is either
it's rather close, or terribly far away.
Since nearly complete postscript support is available on FreeBSD,
excellent graphics can be printed on many printers. You can even use
ghostview to see your output, making it easy to preview documents.
Unfortunately, that requires fluency in postscript as a programming and
document formatting language to be useful. However, you can do just about
anything you want. :)
There is LyX, a LaTeX based "WYSIWYG" interface (not exactly). I applaud
the effort, but I think that most people will find LaTeX and other
content-based markup hard to grasp. (Look at HTML--how many people use
tables for formatting?)
I think that I understand the basic idea of content-based markup.
However, I write many of my documents using the -me macros to groff,
because I do a lot of writing in which things that LaTeX does
(specifically, the margins) bug me to no end. Yes, I may be better served
in the long term by content-based markup. If I were writing something for
multiple output formats (ascii, paper, and html, for example) I'd need to
do it (although I'd probably learn sgml at that point). However, if I'm
writing a letter (even a business letter), what I'm looking to do is to
conform to a bunch of visual style constraints, many of my own opinion.
People _want_ format based tools, not just for multi-format documentations
(even though there are people who use them for those sort of thing), but
for stuff without complicated formatting requirements. I want to sit
down, crank up some program, be able to type in my stuff without worrying
too much about what it looks like, then later be able to print it out in
Times Roman 12 with 1" margins. Or, if I need to later, in Helvetica 10
with .5" ones.
Many people using word processors need to write 1-3 page business letters,
and 3-20 page papers without glossaries, indexes, binding, tables of
contents or diagrams.
I think that a good WYSIWYG word processor for *nix would need to be built
around groff or rtf instead of LaTeX or sgml, since people WANT format
based tools. I've been playing around with the idea of starting this sort
of thing in Tk, but haven't gotten very serious about it.
Oddly enough, I think that this sort of concentration can be liberating,
since you no longer need to throw in junk like Table Of Contents
builders, math formatting tools, outliners, and glossary builders. Anyone
who needs these sorts of functions is obviously in need of content-based
markup and documents. :) :) :)
Of course, people coming over from Win/Mac may expect these features, so a
WYSIWYG-style editor for these formats would be great.
>I've never felt the need to do this, owning a Mac 8-), but I'm
>becoming curious as to whether FreeBSD and its collection of
>ported software offers the required tools given the gradual
>decline of Apple's fortunes and my growing dislike of MicroSoft.
>Opinions?
Well, here's mine. I'm afraid I kinda ranted, but I've been wishing for a
simple word processor to do things like letters and resumes and high
school/college papers and stuff. I know the existing tools can be used to
do these things, but I don't think most folks are willing to learn to use
groff macros or TeX to write their letters.
>bob
--
bryan k. ogawa <bkogawa@primenet.com> <bkogawa@netvoyage.net>