[CentOS] Latex - was Novell sale news?

Tue Nov 23 13:02:35 UTC 2010
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Robert Heller wrote:

> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
> From: Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Novell sale news?
> 
> At Mon, 22 Nov 2010 15:10:41 -0500 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 14:42 -0500, m.roth at 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

-- 
In theory, theory and practice are the same;
in practice they are not.

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