Re: OT: Rant
On 16-Jan-02 Kent West wrote:
>> Go with LaTeX. It works great. It isn't too hard to start learning,
>> as long as you let go with of trying to control the _exact_ appearance
>> of each letter on the page.
>
> But that's just it; I need to be able to control the _exact_ appearance
> of each letter. WP could adjust leading and kerning and everything.
> It's just a solid workhorse that I just haven't found in the open
> source world.
Hi Kent (et al),
I've been following this thread with interest.
WP-5.1 used to be a trusted workhorse of mine,
for very much the reasons Kent (and a few others)
have given. I reckon that the "Windowised" version
(from 6 on, but especially 8) have lost the ease
of use which 5.1 on DOS had; and they have also
lost some of the functionality (you can no longer
edit a printer driver file as comprehensively as
you could). And the GUI is much clumsier than the
old function-key method.
I taught a number of people how to use WP-5.1 by
a very simple method.
1. Have it configured to show the menu bar.
2. Tell people: Alt-F10 (or whatever it was) for the menu;
F3 ("Help") then the initial letter of what you want
for anything else (and so on down the tree).
3. Apart from that, just type at it.
Within a short time, people taught themselves to
be very slick and clever at using it. Doing it
all with keystrokes led to very fast working.
(As my friend Charles Curran once put it:
"I can touch-type, but I can't touch-mouse")
I think it's a great shame that this very competent
word-processing program is now sidelined.
But, since that sadly is the case, one must think
of alternatives. Kent mentions needing to control
the details of appearance and layout precisely,
but hasn't found the solution in the Open Source
world.
I'd like to suggest giving 'groff' a try. UNIX
old-timers will know what I mean, since 'troff'
was what you use[d] in UNIX for formatting documents
to typesetting quality. Too many Linux users believe
that 'groff' is _only_ used for formatting man
pages. While it is used for that (so every time
you enter "man whatever" you will see groff output),
it has enormous capabilities. A surprising amount
of professional typesetting is done with groff
(or troff in UNIX houses). For instance, most of
the O'Reilly books have been typeset with 'groff'.
You may also come across it in unexpected places:
though it's not obvious, the HarperCollins "Robert"
French Dictionary was typeset with troff. Have a
look at that if you want to see what sort of control
this can give you over appearance and layout.
Basically, groff is a fully-functional document preparation
and typesetting package. As well as designing layout and
appearance, (including tables, equations, diagrams and
graphical content) you can also prepare tables of contents,
indexes and bibliographies.
I reckon it's well up with TeX, and better in some respects.
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 16-Jan-02 Time: 19:25:32
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