tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

[Frank Bennett <bennett@example.com>]

Dear all,

I recently moved from London to an academic post in Nagoya.  I
have been using Mule/Emacs and JTeX/JLaTeX under Linux quite
comfortably for several years, but the nature of my work and the
intensity with which I use Japanese has now changed, and I need a
Japanese-capable Suite of Office Productivity Tools to make my
life complete.

>From what I have been able to deduce from a badly fragmenting
encounter with the Web, the options seem to be:

  o Applixware.  Ships for Linux, runs under X, sounds nice
    but costs an utterly outrageous 400,000 for the Japanese
    version.  Pass, unless that price is a typographical error.

  o Run Caldera's Wabi system for Linux, with a Japanese version
    of Windows and Japanese versions of MS Office.  Question is
    whether Wabi will work with Japanese windows.

  o Run Corel Office Professional 7 (Java), which the home page
    of Corel in the US claims supports Japanese.  Problems,
    according to rumor, are that there is a significant performance
    penalty for these Java apps (I rely on a 75mhz Libretto for
    Unix services at the moment), and memory requirements are
    pretty large (well over 20 meg?).  Furthermore, the Japanese
    resellers I called didn't know anything about this product,
    and nothing on a Japanese version of the Java suite turns up
    on a search of AltaVista.

Does anyone know anything further about the options above (has
anyone seen any of them running or had experience in setting them
up?).  Does anyone know of any alternatives that I've missed?
Probably the most critical need I have is to exchange
Japanese-version Excel files with a couple of colleagues, so I'm
leaning toward Door Number Two at the moment ... if I can confirm
that Japanese support will work.
  
Cheers,
-- 
Frank G Bennett, Jr         @@
Faculty of Law, Nagoya Univ () email: bennett@example.com
Tel: (0171)323-6351         () WWW:   http://rumple.soas.ac.uk/~bennett/
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