Re: [tlug] CrossOver Office

["Micheal E Cooper" <mecooper@example.com>]

I don't mind learning LaTeX, and I like the idea of separating content from
form, but the folks I work for and with are not of the same mind. They use
Word like a glorified typewriter. WYSIWYG encourages this behavior.

Micheal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Gushee" <mgushee@example.com>
To: <tlug@example.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 2:44 AM
Subject: Re: [tlug] CrossOver Office


> On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 06:19:57PM +0900, Micheal E Cooper wrote:
> >
> > But I do understand what some mean by not having any choice but to use
> > Office because of their clients. In my case, my company uses Office, and
all
> > documents must be accessible from all computers. All the data entry that
our
> > clients request is for Excel, or rarely Word. Is there an open
publishing
> > standard like xhtml for word processing?
>
> 1) Are you asking the right question? I.e., why is the notion of "word
>    processing" important--to you, that is--not speaking of ordinary users
>    here? The point of this question is that if you open up the field a
>    bit, you find things like LaTeX--bear with me a moment--which is an
>    open publishing standard, but is considered to be something a bit
>    different from "word processing."
>
>    I'm not suggesting anyone try to make the whole word type LaTeX by
>    hand. I think that battle's been fought and lost already. But there
>    are more user-friendly solutions, like LyX (www.lyx.org), which is
>    a word-processoresque GUI that generates LaTeX output. It's a very
>    solid and full-featured application. Unfortunately, in addition to
>    asking users to learn new concepts about working with documents (new
>    concepts! scary!), it isn't user-friendly enough: it uses the clunky
>    (and I believe non-free) XForms GUI toolkit, and the default shortcut
>    keys are, AFAIK, unprecedented in either the Unix or the Windows
>    world. Still, if you were doing primarily print-oriented work, it
>    might be worth checking out. I've never seriously attempted to inter-
>    operated LyX with foreign document formats.
>
> 2) Can you use RTF? It's sort of open. At least, being text-based, you
>    can decipher it the next time MS makes undocumented changes. And I
>    did an experiment a couple of weeks ago where I saved a document in
>    RTF, gave it a .doc file extension, and, やっぱり, I could double-
>    click on it and Word stated up and loaded the doc without comment,
>    just as if it were a real .doc. Maybe you can do something similar
>    with Excel and a text-based file format pretending to be an .xls.
>    Opens up possibilities, doesn't it? Of course, if this practice
>    becomes widespread, MS will undoubtedly invent the
>    msOfficeIncorrectFileExtensionError (for your protection, of course!).
>
> --
> Matt Gushee
> Englewood, Colorado, USA
> mgushee@example.com
> http://www.havenrock.com/
>
>