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From: crs@lanl.gov (Charlie Sorsby)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What would it take to replace MS Office?
Date: 12 Oct 1996 18:53:16 GMT
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 55
Message-ID: <53opes$g8o@newshost.lanl.gov>
References: <53nca4$shi@agate.berkeley.edu> <53nmd7$r70@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hamlet.lanl.gov
Keywords: MS Office, personal productivity, word processing
In article <53nmd7$r70@nnrp1.news.primenet.com>,
Bryan Ogawa <bkogawa@primenet.com> wrote:
= 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.
On the other hand, I prefer [tg]roff. I, too, use -me and I find
remembering a few simple *mnemonic* requests far easier than
remembering, e.g, which shifted variant of which function key does
what. (Does that tell you how long it's been since I looked at a
"word processor"? :)
It's easy, for example to remember (and to type) .pp for paragraph
because that's the proof-readers' symbol for start of a paragraph.
From that, it's easy to associate .lp as "left paragraph" (i.e. no
indent). Equally easy to remember that .ce is center, etc.
Many years ago, I created several variants of a basic skeleton that
includes a centered letterhead in bold. There are a few easily
found lines to put the date, recipient name and address,
salutation, and body of the letter (or which ever of those are
appropriate to the letter that I'm writing) so vi's search and
replace commands put me at the right place and allow me to enter
the variable part of the letter once I've read in the skeleton.
It's quick and easy and I don't have to remember the more esoteric
[tg]roff or macro requests.
I'm a touch typist but not a very good one so I don't like to have
to take my hands from the home keys. Thus I don't like to use
point-and-click, cursor keys (thank you Bill Joy for using keys near
the home keys for cursor control in vi), etc. Netscape's modeless
e-mail reply forms give me fits and I much prefer the approach lynx
takes of putting you into the text editor of your choice. Every
glitzy approach to text processing that I've tried only seems to
get in my way. I tried TeX/LaTeX some years ago and, while I like
what it can do, I find it very difficult to type the command escape
character (\) which is rarely in a convenient location on the
keyboard--much easier to type ".something" alone on a line. (Yes,
"\" is used in [tg]roff and the macros but not for *everything*.
Well, just a little babbling from an anachronism...
=
= --
= bryan k. ogawa <bkogawa@primenet.com> <bkogawa@netvoyage.net>
--
Best,
Charlie "Older than dirt" Sorsby "I'm the NRA!"
crs@swcp.com crs@hamlet.lanl.gov Life Member since 1965