On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 15:59, steve wrote:
It really is a pity that we do not have anything stable or acceptably fast enough to compete with ms office. My students would rather use office 97 on our old samba p233 boxes any day compared to our p733 linux boxes also under Samba running star, oo or hancom. The latter being only marginally slower however. A vast improvement. Why are Linux based office applications so slow? Is there a single answer? Not everyone can afford a P IV with 256MB upon which admittedly all of the above really fly out of the screen!
I've wondered that, myself. I used to hear so much about how Linux and Linux apps were so much leaner and quicker than Windoze and its apps. Yet, when I try to get basic functionality out of the apps that I need to perform my day job (mostly writing, editing, page layout and drawing), I find that necessary basic features are either missing or not documented (KWord, for example, sounds great in the blurbs, but is 2/3 undocumented... SO is better documented, but lacks the features for efficient writing, indexing, modularization/re-use... Hancom... well, I haven't tried, but except for one enthusiast, on this list, who gives no workaday details, I haven't seen a review that tempts me enough to invest my time -- never mind money). Actually, when I've tried to use some Linux office apps for trial projects, I've had to spend more of my time fixing OS/distro and X and GNOME settings just to get the office apps to run and to look passable -- still not really there, yet. All my font setup broke when I upgraded to SuSE 7.3. I have high hopes for SO version 6 and/or for OO, but I'm still doing my bread'n'butter work in Windoze, with FrameMaker or MS-Word. Has anybody taken Hancom for a real spin yet? - written a 150-page document with 6 or seven chapters and a couple of appendixes, - auto-generated/auto-updated index, - auto-generated/auto-updated Table-of-Contents, - auto-generated List-of-Figures, - auto-generated List-of-Tables, - dozens of illustrations (imported, precisely placed, cropped/resized as needed) in floating frames that move with the text (bitmaps and vector drawings), - several multi-page tables that dynamically re-size when data are added or removed (and that also move with the body text, just like the illustrations...), - fixed-frame headers, footers and navigation aids, - system variables (like date/time), - user variables (so that global text like product names and document references can be changed instantly, globally in chapter or book), - independent paragraph formats/styles (i.e., so that a named format does not need to change if a change is made to the format from which it was derived) that can be globally updated i.e., you change the parameters of a named format, it changes all future paragraphs that are tagged with that format, as well as all existing paragraphs with the same-name format, - character formats/styles that can be globally updated, but that can survive unchanged the updating of paragraph formats/styles, (in other words, if I have a paragraph tagged with format/style "ugly", having a certain font, size, color, etc., and I apply the character format "emphasis" to one word in that paragraph, the word retains the font of the paragraph, but becomes bold-italic, and if I assign the paragraph format/style "pretty", the whole paragraph takes on the new font and size, but the tagged word still has bold-italic attributes applied to the new font ---- but I also need the other kind of character tagging that keeps all character attributes constant no matter what the paragraph formats might say, underneath) - para and char formats that are fully searchable, independent of the document text with which they are labeled, - support of both continuous and restarting page numbering, both simple and compound (i.e., the page numbers could go from 1 to 150, or they could be 1-1, 1-2... 4-1, 4-2... A-1, A-2, A-3...), - support of chapter- and section-headings in both plain and numbered formats, - support for multiple, nestable styles of numbered and bulleted lists with clean assignment of numbering parameters and of associated text and attributes, - easy and clean export to postscript and PDF, - export to clean, tidy HTML and XML, - import (clean, comprehensive and not broken) of industry-standard file formats... - export (clean, comprehensive and not broken) of industry-standard file formats...?? If anybody, including Hancom employees, has done that, then please tell me, and I'll throw money at Hancom to buy the package and to finally abandon Microsoft. Please.... Or, if somebody knows how to make KWord or SO Writer sit up and perform like that, then I'll be enormously grateful to hear about it. I didn't find that kind of hardcore functionality in their docs (which isn't saying a lot w.r.t. KWord, since there are basically no docs anyway.... just a bunch of headings waiting for somebody to figure out how the features work (if they do...) and to explain 'em). I guess I'm wanting FrameMaker or Ventura on Linux, cuz I know how valuable their big-document features have been. I don't spend my time writing memos and form letters and wedding invitations, and if I need to submit a report, then I use the standard ones that we have created in-house. So, I don't use a word processor for most of the things that "office people" are expected to do. If I use mail-merge, it's not for mail, it's for database publishing. And so on. Maybe TeX????? But, I understand that the self-learning curve is pretty steep for TeX/LaTeX. /kevin