One other way to bridge the gap is to use a light weight Virtual Machine such as Netraverse's Win4Lin. Win4Lin allows you to run Windows 9x as a Linux process. Since it runs as a Linux process with its directory tree in your home directory, it is easier to share resources, than using a dual boot or a heavy weight VM solution. http://www.netraverse.com/ On 28 Mar 2002 at 12:19, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

On Wednesday 27 March 2002 2:26 pm, Derek Fountain wrote:

...

I think not somehow. Most SUSE users want proper Linux systems, not clunky ways to use Windows applications. Crossover is, relatively speaking, a niche product. Let those who need it buy it.

Hmm - interesting thought, but I'm not so sure. At present, if you change to Linux on the desktop you have to get used to a new browser/mailer, a new way of dealing with the OS (unmounting a floppy seems to be virtually impossible for ordinary users to remember), and a new set of office apps. A tall order for most places.

On the other hand, suppose you started the migration by installing Mozilla for Windows as the default/supported browser/mailclient. Then after a while you move the underlying OS to Linux (thereby simplifying IT support), using Mozilla for Linux and including the Codeweavers plugin. Users can still use their existing Office apps, but you can rest assured if SO or OO is on the desktop some of them will open it up to see what it does, and start teaching themselves, secure in the knowledge that their "real" work can still be done in Office. After another while, Office can be presented as the only thing that's still keeping the place tied to MS, so the Linux desktop becomes an argument for getting rid of Office, rather than Office being an argument for not installing Linux.

Appealing.

Kevin

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-- Jerry Feldman Portfolio Partner Engineering 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/ Compaq Computer Corp. 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1 Marlboro, Ma. 01752

I agree with most of your premises except #1. For the most part, I found thast Star Office is able to import most MS Word documents. However, there is always the maverick document that does escape the conversion. On 28 Mar 2002 at 10:13, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

I use Win4Lin and I'm extremely happy with it. I have no love for Microsoft, but there are still reasons I have to use Windows products:

1. MS Word is necessary if you have to import and export Word documents generated by other people whose systems you have no control over.

-- Jerry Feldman Portfolio Partner Engineering 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/ Compaq Computer Corp. 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1 Marlboro, Ma. 01752

I guess I don't use too many features, but all of my classroom syllabuses export fine to Windows (and back). I export my presentations to Power Point and they are also fine. But, having Win4Lin gives you the capability to use MS Office and just about all of its features. On 28 Mar 2002 at 13:11, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:

On Thursday 28 March 2002 10:26 am, Jerry Feldman wrote:

...

I agree with most of your premises except #1. For the most part, I found thast Star Office is able to import most MS Word documents. However, there is always the maverick document that does escape the conversion.

Alas, too many Word documents are mavericks because its internal workings are so buggy and mysterious (e.g., the strange things it sometimes does with numbered lists when you try to modify them). But the bigger problem is export. My impression is that StarOffice does export of Word documents badly or not at all, and that's an issue when you're exchanging works in progress with someone else.

Paul

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-- Jerry Feldman Portfolio Partner Engineering 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/ Compaq Computer Corp. 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1 Marlboro, Ma. 01752

fountai@hursley.ibm.com wrote:

On Wednesday 27 March 2002 2:12 pm, you wrote:

...

<snip>

I know its probably not going to happen, but how about a future version of SuSE being bundled with these products?

I think not somehow. Most SUSE users want proper Linux systems, not clunky ways to use Windows applications. Crossover is, relatively speaking, a niche product. Let those who need it buy it.

If you call all of the people who invested in Windows software before switching to linux--which is almost everyone-- a niche, then so it is. I personally don't know anyone using linux today who didn't buy their first computer with windows and some other software. I'm sure there are a few who started in college with unix, but the one thing most people who switch complain about, is having to discard all of the software they've invested hundres-to-thousands in purchasing and months-to-years in learning. I'm never going to buy another copy of MS Office, but since I *did* pay $329 for Office 97 and it still does everything I need, there is no reason not to use it (though I doubt I will). Secondly, if you read columns on LinuxPlanet.com, LinuxToday.com, LinuxJournal, ZDNet et. al., you see a real who's who of the linux community saying, if only they could get their wife/mother/child to forsake AOL/Quicken/Photoshop they wouldn't have windows at home at all. Now they won't have to forsake anything. Once they prove they no longer need Windows, they will no longer buy Windows. Remember, everyone who has someone else in their house or office who "needs" Windows has already tried to convince them that the linux equivalent is "just as good" and failed. When you can show your wife she can use AOL on the kde desktop, you'll be in business. In the long run, this will make linux more financially viable for software companies who only support Windows today. This can only be good for the rest of us. Keep an open mind. JHS

You forget that windows has already trained most of the general populace to use its products, people don't want to unlearn how to do things, you would need to create a desktop that looks and feels like microsoft but it is a part of linux. That is the only way it would work. -----Original Message----- From: Kevin McLauchlan [mailto:kmclauchlan@chrysalis-its.com] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 2:35 PM To: John Scott Cc: SLE-list Subject: Re: [SLE] This should turn some heads.... On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 12:28, John Scott wrote:

Secondly, if you read columns on LinuxPlanet.com, LinuxToday.com, LinuxJournal, ZDNet et. al., you see a real who's who of the linux community saying, if only they could get their wife/mother/child to forsake AOL/Quicken/Photoshop they wouldn't have windows at home at all. Now they won't have to forsake anything. Once they prove they no longer need Windows, they will no longer buy Windows. Remember, everyone who has someone else in their house or office who "needs" Windows has already tried to convince them that the linux equivalent is "just as good" and failed. When you can show your wife she can use AOL on the kde desktop, you'll be in business. In the long run, this will

make linux more financially viable for software companies who only support Windows today. This can only be good for the rest of us. Keep an open mind.

Did you notice who you used as examples of the people who need to be weaned from Windows/AOL? Probably only two percent of the people in this list would have made a statement like that in reference to fathers, brothers and nephews. OK, everybody, pause for a moment, shake your head, and then look around you. How many of the people posting to this list -- either asking or answering -- are women? Bingo. There you have the target audience. Sure, there are plenty of savvy women entering programming and IT-support jobs, but they are still vastly outnumbered in two ways. In the software and IT trades, they are still, by far, the minority. In the rest of the workforce, they are the practical people to whom the OS and the tools are just something that either helps or hinders them in "getting the job done"... whatever "the job" might happen to be. For the most part, they are not the people who willingly (even eagerly...) spend time tinkering with the OS and the tools, and only grudgingly return to their "real work" when they absolutely hafta. I just described most of you, didn't I.... <g> Well, it's women and non-techy men who need to see the value in Linux on the desktop, and from where I sit, they are still staying away in droves. And for you few women who happen to read this... bless you! but you probably don't understand the non-techy women and men any better than do most of the people on this list, to whom figuring out why their printing no longer works is actually the FUN part of the day. Y'see, it's all very well to say how stable and secure Linux is, compared to Windoze, but that's just not an impressive statement to the average Windoze user. As far as they are concerned, downtime because a config file got hosed, or because the RPMs got confused about dependencies again... is no different from downtime because Word has a memory leak that causes the accounting system to freeze. When you think about it, there's a lot of truth to the idea that open source applications have many more hackers eagerly fixing every bug that is discovered... but then you have the other side of the coin... many more people introducing new bugs... I mean, I try to avoid pre-release stuff and the unstable versions and all that, but still, it's no exaggeration to say that I've got something broken on my Linux system about twice a week, and that I waste a good 25% of my work week on trying to find/apply the fixes or learn the workarounds. Compare that with something going blooey every couple of months in Windoze. My boss -- a woman -- would just not stand for that amount of ongoing trouble. She doesn't want to learn the OS. She'd be willing to learn some tips and tricks to get the most out of her apps, but that's it. If you tried to tell her that her latest grief is not a bug or bad OS design (Windoze?), but just a config problem that doesn't need more than a couple of hours of web searching and tinkering (just like the one on Monday, and the other problem last Thursday and...)... she'd boot you out of her office, and rightly so. That's who needs to be convinced regarding Linux on the desktop. Not somebody who loves to tinker, but rather somebody who has a demanding job to perform, and needs the OS and the apps to get the hell out of the way. However, Uncle Bill is certainly doing his part to push people away from Windoze (look at XP, after all), so the only corporate options would seem to be either Linux on millions of desktops, or else a return to UNIX terminals everywhere, working off of big central servers. There's a damn good economic case to be made for the UNIX solution. If you switch everybody to Linux with independent OS and application suites on every desktop, you need at least as many trained IT people to keep them all working as you do in a Windows environment. BUT, if everybody has an expensive terminal that can only run applications from UNIX servers in the IT room, then a sizable company requires only a couple of IT/admin wonks in the server room and they might need to fix a desktop terminal every other month or so, from a population of 1000+. In other words, the hardware is costly, but it hardly ever breaks, and all of the software is maintained (untouchable) on the servers, so it hardly ever breaks. You (a corporation) pay up front, but you save on downtime and IT personnel). THAT is the competition in the struggle to get people away from Windoze. Guess which one my boss would approve? Cheerio, /kevin -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com

But what I am sayin gis if you standardize by international means, other than microsoft products, then give concessions to the large companies to use the products with those standards, then you could essentially change the market by administrative means, and thereby cause a scramble to make suites that utilize the new formats, and the companies making the products will have to work together to make sure that the formats can go between systems. -----Original Message----- From: Jerry Feldman [mailto:gerry.feldman@compaq.com] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 3:54 PM To: 'SLE-list' Subject: RE: [SLE] This should turn some heads.... There is a distro that tries to do that, Lindows. They just successfully defended a lawsuit brought by Microsoft. But, I don't entirely agree. Windows does change things on every release. On 28 Mar 2002 at 15:11, Michael Garabedian wrote:

You forget that windows has already trained most of the general populace to use its products, people don't want to unlearn how to do things, you would need to create a desktop that looks and feels like microsoft but it is a part of linux. That is the only way it would work.

-----Original Message----- From: Kevin McLauchlan [mailto:kmclauchlan@chrysalis-its.com] Sent: Thursday, March 28, 2002 2:35 PM To: John Scott Cc: SLE-list Subject: Re: [SLE] This should turn some heads....

On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 12:28, John Scott wrote:

...

Secondly, if you read columns on LinuxPlanet.com, LinuxToday.com, LinuxJournal, ZDNet et. al., you see a real who's who of the linux community saying, if only they could get their wife/mother/child to forsake AOL/Quicken/Photoshop they wouldn't have windows at home at all. Now they won't have to forsake anything. Once they prove they no longer need Windows, they will no longer buy Windows. Remember, everyone who has someone else in their house or office who "needs" Windows has already tried to convince them that the linux equivalent is "just as good" and failed. When you can show your wife she can use AOL on the kde desktop, you'll be in business. In the long run, this will

...

make linux more financially viable for software companies who only support Windows today. This can only be good for the rest of us. Keep an open mind.

Did you notice who you used as examples of the people who need to be weaned from Windows/AOL? Probably only two percent of the people in this list would have made a statement like that in reference to fathers, brothers and nephews.

OK, everybody, pause for a moment, shake your head, and then look around you. How many of the people posting to this list -- either asking or answering -- are women?

Bingo.

There you have the target audience. Sure, there are plenty of savvy women entering programming and IT-support jobs, but they are still vastly outnumbered in two ways.

In the software and IT trades, they are still, by far, the minority. In the rest of the workforce, they are the practical people to whom the OS and the tools are just something that either helps or hinders them in "getting the job done"... whatever "the job" might happen to be. For the most part, they are not the people who willingly (even eagerly...) spend time tinkering with the OS and the tools, and only grudgingly return to their "real work" when they absolutely hafta.

I just described most of you, didn't I.... <g>

Well, it's women and non-techy men who need to see the value in Linux on the desktop, and from where I sit, they are still staying away in droves.

And for you few women who happen to read this... bless you! but you probably don't understand the non-techy women and men any better than do most of the people on this list, to whom figuring out why their printing no longer works is actually the FUN part of the day.

Y'see, it's all very well to say how stable and secure Linux is, compared to Windoze, but that's just not an impressive statement to the average Windoze user. As far as they are concerned, downtime because a config file got hosed, or because the RPMs got confused about dependencies again... is no different from downtime because Word has a memory leak that causes the accounting system to freeze.

When you think about it, there's a lot of truth to the idea that open source applications have many more hackers eagerly fixing every bug that is discovered... but then you have the other side of the coin... many more people introducing new bugs...

I mean, I try to avoid pre-release stuff and the unstable versions and all that, but still, it's no exaggeration to say that I've got something broken on my Linux system about twice a week, and that I waste a good 25% of my work week on trying to find/apply the fixes or learn the workarounds. Compare that with something going blooey every couple of months in Windoze.

My boss -- a woman -- would just not stand for that amount of ongoing trouble. She doesn't want to learn the OS. She'd be willing to learn some tips and tricks to get the most out of her apps, but that's it. If you tried to tell her that her latest grief is not a bug or bad OS design (Windoze?), but just a config problem that doesn't need more than a couple of hours of web searching and tinkering (just like the one on Monday, and the other problem last Thursday and...)... she'd boot you out of her office, and rightly so.

That's who needs to be convinced regarding Linux on the desktop. Not somebody who loves to tinker, but rather somebody who has a demanding job to perform, and needs the OS and the apps to get the hell out of the way.

However, Uncle Bill is certainly doing his part to push people away from Windoze (look at XP, after all), so the only corporate options would seem to be either Linux on millions of desktops, or else a return to UNIX terminals everywhere, working off of big central servers.

There's a damn good economic case to be made for the UNIX solution. If you switch everybody to Linux with independent OS and application suites on every desktop, you need at least as many trained IT people to keep them all working as you do in a Windows environment. BUT, if everybody has an expensive terminal that can only run applications from UNIX servers in the IT room, then a sizable company requires only a couple of IT/admin wonks in the server room and they might need to fix a desktop terminal every other month or so, from a population of 1000+. In other words, the hardware is costly, but it hardly ever breaks, and all of the software is maintained (untouchable) on the servers, so it hardly ever breaks. You (a corporation) pay up front, but you save on downtime and IT personnel).

THAT is the competition in the struggle to get people away from Windoze. Guess which one my boss would approve?

Cheerio,

/kevin

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Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com

-- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com

Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com

-- Jerry Feldman Portfolio Partner Engineering 508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/ Compaq Computer Corp. 200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1 Marlboro, Ma. 01752 -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com

But with a standard set by international means that is adopted by the industries outside of IT then they won't try to subert them, but help them along, and with everyone working together it could be another open source project. Like a big sap network, with each industry getting its own brand but being able to send it to other modules and industries. It would be nice, I'd like to buy the world a coke.

I didn't say it would be easy. Possible, but never easy.

kmclauchlan@chrysalis-its.com wrote:

On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 12:28, John Scott wrote:

<snip>

That's who needs to be convinced regarding Linux on the desktop. Not somebody who loves to tinker, but rather somebody who has a demanding job to perform, and needs the OS and the apps to get the hell out of the way.

Cheerio,

/kevin

This paragraph is basically what I said in a nutshell. The point is, if hubby happens to like to tinker along with a couple of the kids, the neighbor, the uncle, cousins, and the dog, it doesn't mean squat when it comes to getting rid of windows once and for all. At the end of the day, wife has the ultimate veto power. If she wants quicken and AOL email, windows aint goin' nowhere! (forgive the double negative, but I just like saying that) :) In the office, substitute boss for wife and then ditto. JHS

On Wednesday 27 March 2002 15:45, you wrote:

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 06:12:33AM -0800, Matthew Johnson wrote:

...

CrossOver Office will make it possible to install and use popular Windows applications as easily as CrossOver Plugin has made it to use Windows plugins, all without a Microsoft Windows Operating System license.

Like many people, this does not do much for me. While it is cheaper than vmware and similar options, the real answer is to get open/star/k office up to the point where it replaces MS office. I wonder if it will propagate windows viruses correcly through outlook ;)

Best Regards, Keith

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! Cheers, Steve.

While all the linux office suites except koffice and the gnome equivalents are generally too slow, people should remember though that Office 97 is 5 years old, and Office XP is immensely slow on anything below a P4 with 256MB of RAM (my Duron 800 with 650MB suffers on it).

Hopefully once openoffice reaches feature completion, there can be some serious work put into speed optimisation by Sun to make it operate at somewhere near the speed of the more lightweight systems.

It's not an easy problem to solve. The issue is with libraries - things like OpenOffice need all their code loading from scratch because they don't use standard libraries. Koffice and the GNOME equivalents have the huge advantage that much of their code (Qt and GTK respectively) is already in memory on many systems. This makes load time and the application footprint much smaller. Couple this with the slow link time C++ programs suffer because of limitations of GCC compiled code, and you have a system which is sluggish to load at the best of times, and requires lot of memory. -- 9:26am up 22 days, 18:53, 2 users, load average: 0.17, 0.07, 0.02

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

Last time I tried it, MS Word did not have most of these features. Large documents frequently corrupt themselves. Changing a style requires touching every use of it to update. Hyphenation is manual. Justification sucks. Diagrams are not portable between Mac and PC versions. Etc. Word is not capable of handling real documents. Great for cranking out font laden memos and letters, though. Framemaker is written for creating large, complex documents. And has the learning curve to go with it. If you can learn Frame Maker, you can learn TeX or LaTeX. The TeX book by Knuth, the original LaTeX by Leslie Lamport, and "A Guide to LaTeX2e" by Kopka and Daly are all excellent technical guides. DocBook has approximately the same amount of learning. But TeX/LaTeX is a more mature technology and the software is better integrated. And TeX/LaTeX is much better than anything besides a live, experienced human being at producing beautifully laid out typesetting. Just my 2 cents USD, Jeffrey

TeX is basically a high powered macro processor. It comes with a plain set of macros that are fairly physical oriented. LaTeX is more logically oriented set of macros. Same core processor. For document classes LaTeX supports, it is much easier to use. For things it doesn't, like resumes, TeX is easier to use. Having used TeX/LaTeX for over a decade, I find the integration in Linux very nice (font bitmaps are generated automagically, where to put local extensions fairly obvious, support in Emacs, etc.). There was a limited time port of FrameMaker to Linux. They decided not to market it. I suspect a cracked version (with the limited time taken out) is available on the Internet somewhere. For perspective on my perspective, the largest LaTeX document I have written is 180 pages (my dreams for a year, with ToC and index). The largest FM document is probably around 60 pages (Lockheed-Martin's proposal for Realtime CORBA). MS Word has shot me in the foot every time I have been forced to use it for anything larger than a 2 page letter. I am a software engineer and part time writer. I am shift to be a full-time writer in the near future. HTH, Jeffrey Quoting Kevin McLauchlan :

Thanks very much. With all the info and options out there, it's nice to hear from people who have some experience with the various systems.

I've met the "features" you mention with Word -- though it's certainly more robust than it used to be... as long as you don't try to use that Master docs feature. Frame is a rock. Almost never breaks, and if it does, you just ask it to fix itself, and it does. :-)

But, Frame is not going to be ported to Linux and I'm trying to escape Windoze. I kept hearing about how various word processors on Linux have finally "arrived", and I want to believe it. And then I try them, only to find out that an enthusiast's understanding of "arrived" is a lot more forgiving and a lot less demanding than mine -- where it's my livelihood.

Both Docbook and TeX/LaTeX are sounding quite interesting (I just ordered the O'Reilly book about Docbook). What's with TeX and LaTeX? I had always thought that TeX was the original, crusty, unfriendly thing and LaTeX was somebody's user-friendlier version of same... sorta vi and vim ... assembler and BASIC.... ?

/kevin

On Wed, 2002-03-27 at 22:53, Jeffrey Taylor wrote:

...

Last time I tried it, MS Word did not have most of these features. Large documents frequently corrupt themselves. Changing a style requires touching every use of it to update. Hyphenation is manual. Justification sucks. Diagrams are not portable between Mac and PC versions. Etc. Word is not capable of handling real documents. Great for cranking out font laden memos and letters, though.

Framemaker is written for creating large, complex documents. And has the learning curve to go with it. If you can learn Frame Maker, you can learn TeX or LaTeX. The TeX book by Knuth, the original LaTeX by Leslie Lamport, and "A Guide to LaTeX2e" by Kopka and Daly are all excellent technical guides.

DocBook has approximately the same amount of learning. But TeX/LaTeX is a more mature technology and the software is better integrated. And TeX/LaTeX is much better than anything besides a live, experienced human being at producing beautifully laid out typesetting.

* Paul W. Abrahams; on 28 Mar, 2002 wrote:

On Thursday 28 March 2002 10:39 am, Jeffrey Taylor wrote: I guess with all of these things, an essential question is how much effort you're willing to invest in your tools. It sometimes feels like opening an auto repair shop. For casual use of a document generator, almost anything will work. But when you really have a high stake in the typographical quality of the result, an investment of lots of time in your tools may be unavoidable.

Totally agree and altough I really want to learn TeX I can not afford it write now as I can now write faster with Docbook using Emacs+psgml, that does not mean I have grasped everyhing with Docbook yet better then my TeX ,(to get Fop do the hyphenation I had to get the Turkish hyphenation from the TeX module) For some people out in the wild we have to learn the tool and find a way to get it accept our langauge also since taht part seems always missing. Double edge sword , you know it can do it yet it cannot since support for the language is missing. Just to give an example inorder to have basic spelling checking capability I had to create the dictionary ,there is no ispell-turkish and since the affix compression means lots of work I turned to Aspell and now have a basic dictionary of roughly 100.000 words. The milegae varies yet it is available with MS Word and I choose to use a better OS and a better editor. Just my 24.000 Turkish liras -- Togan Muftuoglu

Adobe did a beta of FrameMaker version 5.6, which was mostly usable, but this was after they'd released 6.0 for all other platforms... It was well-received, but revealed two problems that caused Adobe to yank the beta and close the project: a) It turned out that most of the immediate market for the Linux version was people who already use it on Windoze or Mac, so there was very little net gain for Adobe --- for every Linux license they sold, they'd no longer sell a Win or Mac license. No fun there. b) FrameMaker costs about $600 USD, and the history of Linux has led to a mass of users who expect not only open-source apps, but free (pay-no-money) apps. This was not a very enticing market from their perspective. Like pushing string uphill, and not getting paid for your trouble -- attractive to enthusiasts and masochists only... There was considerable work left, just to do a proper release of 5.6, and a s**tload of work to get a Linux version of 6.x released. It wasn't viable. Not even remotely. Unlike people who run Solaris and Windoze, Linux users were not generally prepared to cough up the big bucks. The core of the existing FrameMaker market is vertical... big corporations and government departments. The bulk of the Linux market -- desktop -- is individuals, most of whom don't have the bucks (after all, why was a free OS so attractive in the first place??). As well, the OS is not merely ONE cumbersome and slowly moving target, it is a fragmented bunch of fast-moving targets (all those distros, the options of GNOME, KDE, other, etc.). It would be somewhat lucrative for the Adobe third-party industry that sells training and some add-ons for the few things that Frame does not do marvelously. But, that still doesn't put revenue in the Adobe corporate coffers. Thus, there was never a release, and there probably won't be until Adobe change their entire business model. I'm not holding my breath. Finally, somebody mentioned the possibility of locating a cracked copy of the beta, with the lockout removed. Well, try to put yourself in the position of somebody who actually PAID for a legal copy for Windows ($900+ of my Canadian bucks, by the way), and who would be using it to earn a living... i.e., depending upon it. Also, keep in mind that the beta was a full version behind (soon to be two, if rumor is accurate) and a little broken. All existing docs would have to be downgraded, since 5.6 cannot import 6.0 docs. You need to be in 6.0 to "Save-as..." the earlier version. Any cow-orkers and collaborators would need to forgo the extremely handy book-level features of their copies of version 6, etc., etc. In other words, I would be happy to search for that cracked beta if I was just a geek who got a kick out of such things, but I'm a guy with a mortgage who depends on his tools to satisfy his employer's [mostly] reasonable demands -- and to get my job done in finite time, so that I can also have a life. :-) Regards, /kevin On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 13:23, schuetzen - RKBA! wrote:

On 28 Mar 2002 10:09:43 -0500, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:

...

But, Frame is not going to be ported to Linux and I'm trying to escape Windoze. I kept hearing about how various word processors on Linux have finally "arrived", and I want to believe it. And then I try them, only to find out that an enthusiast's understanding of "arrived" is a lot more forgiving and a lot less demanding than mine -- where it's my livelihood.

am I out in the ether or hasn't Adobe ported its software to Linux.?? If so, that ain't a bad way to go. Actually, an old copy of Wordstar or the Legacy version could be handled in Wine or ?? and do most of what you want done. Check on Adobe. Can't beat the way it handles tables and pix and so on.

On Thu, 2002-03-28 at 06:57, Kevin Donnelly wrote:

On Wednesday 27 March 2002 9:28 pm, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:

...

- written a 150-page document with 6 or seven <large snip> - export (clean, comprehensive and not broken) of industry-standard file formats...??

Seems to me this is a wish-list, rather than a comparison with what MS Word can actually do. Numbered lists, for instance, were a hair-tugging disaster the last time I used them, particularly if you changed formatting for one item in the list. As regards PDF output, SO+PS/PDF viewer makes this as easy as cake - I doubt if Word could do it easier.

Kevin

Heh, heh... Part of it is certainly a wish-list when I'm working with Word -- though Word has improved dramatically with recent releases (maybe someday they'll learn to do tables... sigh... moan). But, that list was basically a minimal feature description from FrameMaker and Ventura. Unfortunately, neither of them is being ported to Linux. Actually, come to think of it, WordPerfect did rather well in most of those departments. But, it's not open source AND I'm not sure how secure its future is. (Yah, I know those other apps are not open source either, but I'd be prepared to forgive FrameMaker that little indiscretion if only Adobe could find a business-case for porting it over. But, NO-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o... :-) /kevin