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From: crs@quail.swcp.com (Charlie Sorsby)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Word Processing
Date: 9 Mar 1997 00:53:39 -0700
Organization: Just me, Los Alamos, NM
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <5ftqa3$lo@quail.swcp.com>
References: <3321C1B5.41C67EA6@connectnet.com> <87ohcucalc.fsf@elmira.functional.com>
Reply-To: crs@swcp.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: lappp14.swcp.com
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:36761
In article <87ohcucalc.fsf@elmira.functional.com>,
Giao Nguyen <grail@elmira.functional.com> wrote:
= "Kenneth M. Roberts" <kmr@connectnet.com> writes:
=
= >
= > What are the options, free or commercial, for doing good word processing
= > on FreeBSD? Is lyx/LaTeX/TeX a good route? Can WordPerfect run on
= > FreeBSD? Pointers to aquisition/configuration info appreciated.
= >
= > If I could get some decent WYSIWYG, I would never need Windows*. (Well,
= > at least not at home, work is another story!)
=
= LaTeX/TeX is great depending on how into it you want to get. Form my
= needs it has done quite well, everything from correspondence to
= technical documentation. Just about anything you want. However, I'd
= get a book on LaTeX and start playing around with it.
=
= It's flexible and powerful, but it's not exactly for the faint of
= heart either.
I tried TeX/LaTeX some years ago and while, as it says above, it is
flexible and powerful, I found typing all those back-slashes and,
to a lesser extent, curly braces, a real pain. The former was in a
hard-to-reach position on the keyboard I was (and am) using. The
latter was just annoying because I dislike typing shifted characters.
It is also very verbose--the formatting requests, being words
require a lot of typing. Maybe that's what I most didn't like
about it--the long command names.
Personally, I find troff and the .me macros easier to type. All of
the troff (and troff macro) requests are prefixed with a simple "."
which is easy to type on every keyboard I've ever used. They are
also short--like the original Unix commands. While short, most are
not hard to remember--most are fairly mnemonic (also like the early
Unix commands). While back-slashes are used, it is only
occasionally, not for every single request.
Of course neither TeX/LaTeX nor troff are WYSIWYG as the original
poster expressed a preference for. Personally, I don't like
WYSIWYG but each to his own... :)
--
Best regards,
Charlie "Older than dirt" Sorsby Los Alamos, NM "I'm the NRA!"
crs@swcp.com www.swcp.com/~crs Life Member since 1965