Re: tlug: Office suite for use under Linux

["Jonathan Byrne" <jpmag@example.com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>
To: tlug@example.com <tlug@example.com>

>Wordprocessors are more difficult. This comes from the fact that
>textprocessors ( in particular TeX ) have a strong foothold in
>the UNIX world, and that for good reason. On the long run a
>textprocessor does a much better job than a wordprocessor. Why ?
>Because it does the whole typesetting automatically. With a
>wordprocessor you, the user, has to do it. While this may be

Well, yes and no.  Any major word processor today offers the ability to have
different style formats for different sections, so you just choose the one
you want, much like doing it manually in TeX.  If I'm writing a book (not
something most people do very often), I can set up style sheets for the
various parts, type it, and forget it.  The sytle sheet will take care of
the formatting automatically.  I will admit to having never bothered doing
any but the most basic style sheets, but they were essentially point and
click.  I'm not sure how long it would take to do a more complex one, but in
the worst case imaginable, it could take no longer than learning to do it in
TeX.  There is very little that can be done under TeX today that cannot be
done with similar or equal quality by a high-end word processor (and I'm not
just talking Mac, Windows, OS/2 here; Applix Words rocks, and it runs on
Linux :-)   ).
I guess you could fairly say that at the current state of the art, both TeX
and the word processor expect you, the user, to do the typesetting.  The
only difference is in the specific way you will do it (unless, of course,
you are just writing the text and someone else will typeste it with TeX;
this could also happen with the word processor.  Either way, someone is
typesetting what you write; maybe you, maybe not).

One of the few areas where this may not be true (or may; it's something I
have no experience with) is typesetting mathematics.  While MS Word's
equation editor is apparently suitable for most equations, this may be an
area in which things like TeX still excel.  But as I say, I have no
experience in that area, and could be completely wrong, and MS equation
editor could be utterly horrible;  perhaps someone who does know about it
can comment on this :-)

>Using LaTeX requires some learning, sure, but in the long run it
>pays off. OR - if you are a lazy one, you use LyX. LyX has a

I'm a lazy one :-)  But I do have learning at least some basic TeX and LaTeX
on my list of Linux goals :-)

>Another problem is capability to handle Microsoft "standards".

Definitely.  This is one of the areas where I do have a beef with MS.  If MS
Word is really the best word processor around, go ahead and publish its file
formatting conventions so that people can easily write good filters for
them.  If MS Word is really better, then people will still buy it instead of
the competition.

What I would really love is to see all of the major office suite vendors get
together and form one cross-platform file formatting standard that they
would all use in common, then compete on features, reliability, and ease of
use.  Not holding my breath.

In the meantime, as you suggested, a Japanese-capable version of LyX would
probably be a nice thing.

I've just very recently started learning programming, and it drives me crazy
to look at all this nice software that would be so much nicer if it were
Japanese-enabled, but I'm very far from having the ability to do it myself.
But this desire to double-byte the whole world is a powerful motivator to
learn :-)

Jonathan

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