On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Robert Heller wrote:
To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org From: Robert Heller heller@deepsoft.com Subject: Re: [CentOS] Novell sale news?
At Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:10:41 -0500 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 14:42 -0500, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Barry Brimer wrote:
Just saw that today. I wonder if any of those assets is the superior
(and utterly badly marketed) WordPerfect. I thought Novell sold WordPerfect to Corel a long time ago.
Maybe - I've lost track. I'm still waiting for *anyone* to actually market the damn thing - I'd *buy* it (or rather, upgrade from 6.0.c for DOS).... I'll take it over Word *or* OO.o, any day.
It is nearly antique at this point.
Why do you call it that? What features are missing (and I haven't looked at a current copy in 10 years, btw). In general, I don't see *anything* I couldn't have done with the one from back then.
Recent OOo has worked extremely well for me; editing complex 200+ page documents with refereces, TOCs, & indexes. I've really become a fan of OOo starting in the 3.2.x series.
I guarantee WP 10-12 years ago could handle all that - most City of Chicago, and I think federal contracts, used to specify that documents be in WP format.
Besides, the files were always *much* smaller, and you could always beat it into submission with <alt><F3>, I think it was, and the way it revealed formatting... I was amazed that they didn't market that straight for designing web pages. AND not a single word processor or web page building I've seen writes them clean: both Word and OO.o write out *crap*, with font size and font and color and every damn thing on every single line, rather than only when something changes.
And I *still* use LaTeX. *I* won't touch a "word processor" (I tried OO *once* to create a mess-word version of my resume and it was a total disaster). I routinely create documents with something close to 1000 pages, with refereces, TOCs, & indexes, etc. Way back when I've created rather large documents with LaTeX *on a 10mhz 68000* with only 1Meg (yes *one* meg) of RAM (this was an Atari 1040ST running OS-9/68000). And a 40 *meg* hard drive. Talk about small footprint software. With pdflatex and tex4ht I can generate PDF directly and *clean* HTML. And both using Makefiles with automated tools. And TeX/LaTeX is open source.
Are you aware of lyx, a front end to Latex?
I used it to create the Kickstart User Guide in PDF format.
LyX combines the power and flexibility of TeX/LaTeX with the ease of use of a graphical interface. This results in world-class support for creation of mathematical content (via a fully integrated equation editor) and structured documents like academic articles, theses, and books. In addition, staples of scientific authoring such as reference list and index creation come standard. But you can also use LyX to create a letter or a novel or a theatre play or film script. A broad array of ready, well-designed document layouts are built in.
LyX is released under a Free Software/Open Source license, runs on Linux/Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X, and is available in several languages.
It's in the EPEL repo.
Name : lyx Arch : i386 Version : 1.6.6.1 Release : 1.el5 Size : 9.9 M Repo : installed Summary : WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) document processor URL : http://www.lyx.org/ License : GPLv2+ Description: LyX is a modern approach to writing documents : which breaks with the : obsolete "typewriter paradigm" of most other : document preparation systems.
Keith