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How Is GNOME Office Coming?
Clyde has written a nice article over at LinuxOrbit about the state of the GNOME office suite. With all the hubbub surrounding the recent freeing of Sun's StarOffice, this is gonna get more interesting. I'll tell ya the one thing that I miss in AbiWord is anti-aliased text. Staring at that horridly pixelated text is hard on the eyes. Between the Gimp, Gnucash, Eazel, Evolution, AbiWord, Gnucash and the like (no, I'm not forgetting KDE, I just haven't used it recently), the application support under Linux is rapidly making it feasible for a desktop user, but we're just not there yet. And it's the little things that get ya.
I realize the importance to the community of being able to import/export from/to MSOffice file formats but on a personal level, I haven't used or seen them for years. Does anyone have any idea of the ability or either KOffice or GNOME Office to deal with file formats from Applixware?
.as and .aw to .xls and .doc just to be able to import them into the KOffice or GNOME Office formats. Whew! Sounds like work!
As an Applixware user for the past 3-4 years, and a happy one at that, I'd not look forward to exporting serveral years worth of files from
Anyone have any knowledge of this?
Thanks.
src
Aftereffects and Premiere have a much better chance of happening, IMHO, mainly because of the technical difficulties you point out for the other suites. I agree that the Gimp is not all that, and certainly not nearly so easy to use as Photoshop from what I understand. Your idea of controlling fonts inside the app sounds like the best way to go. Adobe certainly has the coding manpower to do that. They have worked to conquer OS deficiencies before; for instance: they use their own paging system in PS.
These kind of questions amuse me. A lot.
:):
Very simply, you need a word processor for two reasons (aside from the obvious one of reading word processed files
1. To write documentation (any coder worth his/her salt should know how to write at least moderately good docs to any program he/she writes).
2. To read documentation and notes that others in a team have written.
Rami James
Guy in a Box.
--
rJames.org - illustration
You complain about how complicated TeX is, but I don't think you really know what you are talking about. In fact, if all you want to do is type a letter or paper, just type the text in your favorite editor. Leave an empty line between each paragraph. Then, at the end type "\tex". Then, save your file as foo.tex and run "pdftex foo.tex". Now you have foo.pdf, which looks beautiful (as all TeX does).
For more complicated things, LaTeX isn't difficult to learn. Need a footnote? Try \footnote. Need something italics? Try \emph. Need an ordered list? Try \begin{enumerate}. Need a title page? Try \maketitlepage. I think you get the idea.
And if you're typing ANY equations or math, you absolutely must you TeX. Any other tool is a joke compared to TeX's ability to crank out formulas. Once you learn how it works (5 minutes, tops, for the math part), it is much faster and easier then Word or any graphical device (short of some kind of hand-writing recognition) could ever be.
I think that sometimes people are just afraid to learn something new or can't see what they can do. For an idea, head on over to http://html2latex.sourceforge.net. I wrote a little program (shamless plug; also in the sig!) that will convert HTML to LaTeX. So, if you know how something works in HTML, and want to see it in LaTeX, I figure this is a pretty good way.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
Mandrake 7.1 (at least) has an utility called DrakFont that copies the fonts from your (eventual) Windows partition and installs them to be used in Linux. I have personally used Times New Roman for some purposes (it's much prettier than most of the default Linux fonts).
However, I think that there should be better fixed-width fonts (like Windows' fixedsys) to be used with Gnu Emacs on lousy monitors.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Hmm.. at least Microsoft is considering saving documents in XML. I don't see LaTeX doing that yet. For that matter I can probably count on one hand the number of products which store non-text information who are even in the process of converting storage formats to XML. So who has their thumbs up their asses?
Mmmm.. Donuts
Now to dreamweaver: I don't find a lack of such program to be a handicap at all. When I was doing full-time web design on windows, I still used vim. The problem with GUI html editors is that you can't automate them like you can a good text editor. With vim you get immensely useful things like abbreviations, copy/pasting multiple times, so on. If I need to create 10 links, I create one, copy it, do 10p (paste 10 times) and change the URLs. I realize that for many people it's a matter of taste to prefer GUI tools, but again, lack of such programs shows that it's not a big deal for most. But if you really want it, start coding.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Why not have an html page called 'sorting order' and linked to every page in your project that needs this info?
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
The shift in thinking I am talking about has little to do with input/output devices and more to do with the underlying design concept of an idea-based system. Right now everything is built around the notion of fixed documents, which as I stated before are simply proxies for the more basic unit of an idea. What I would love to see is an interface system designed not around documents but around hyperlinks.
Now initially it might work like so: I go to a meeting with a client who suggests a new feature for my product. When I get back to my desk I go and create a new "idea" object. My IdeaOS allows me to keep many such objects around, and at any time I can make one of them the "Active Idea." This might appear as an icon on my desktop.
When you create an idea you can give it all sorts of characteristics. These might be unique things like "Color = Purple" or links such as "Color = Idea #7's Color." Entire idea objects might be simple characteristics of other idea objects.
With an idea object you might have associated "output methods," which could include text, pictures, or other things. Depending on the nature of these things they might be automatically generated and updated, or they may not. But the point, in the short term, is that you at least see the web which ties the whole mess together. Even though you may not be able to say, "if we change the color of the panel our profits will go down," at least the marketing department will know that they need to re-shoot all the pictures for the ad campaign.
From a management perspective this is an ideal way of structuring things. At any point in time the CEO can look at the six (or N) high-level ideas, and perhaps change one slightly. This change will percolate down the chain of ideas, either altering automatically or at least informing everything down the line of the changes that need to be made. Likewise if a person wants to change an idea somewhere down the line, he or she can see the effects this will have on ideas above and lateral to them.
Blah blah. You get the idea...
-cwk.
Well I have a little suggestion to make, which is that letting your government rot in hell is not the best way to go about improving it. As with software, so with government: its better when its Open. But it takes effort and action, not dismissal and empty phrases.
And Quicken is so dependent on Windows.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
ooh, pray tell us where to download the latest ISOs for M$ Office for Linux?
These apps are woefully inadequate compared to what is available on NT and the Mac - the last thing I would recommend people do is waste their time porting to useless toolkits.
As it stands, your argument of "choice uber alles" is ridiculous anyway - linux makes you use X, so why not cram something else down your throat?
I learned to use lyx pretty quickly. I know no Latex and it's pretty easy to use once you get used to it. My girlfriend who knows nothing about computers learned to use it in a day and says she's not going back to anyother word processor.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
wrong kind of freedom.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft is the master of Embrace, extend and extinguish. You KNOW they'll find some way to make their XML impossible to read/format, at the same time claiming that they're making a great innovation and also claiming to embrace open standards.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I haven't used a wrod processor in 3 years, PICO and VI can handle anybody's text needs.
"the devil finds work for idle circuits"
What stops them taking Linux/Staroffice - to date - has mostly been the relative difficulty of installing & supporting Linux, in comparison with Windows.
Except that Windows is actually in several ways Harder to install than Linux. With Windows things often have to be installed in exactly the right order also if you want several identical workstations you need hacks like disk imaging. The only reason people think Windows is easy to install is that its possible (through Microsoft's dodgy dealing) to buy machines with it already on. N.B. The first thing likely to happen to preloaded Windows machines in many corporate environments is that the OEM setup gets overwritten buy a "corporate setup", thus the OEM install was a waste of time anyway.
As for support, doing things requires someone who knows what they are doing to be sat at the machine. This is an OS who's error messages consist of a list of the contents of CPU registers. Not user friendly at all.
The moment you look any deeper than the GUI Windows appears a lot "geekier" than any unix like system. Even something like the sendmail config file allows comments and dosn't expect numbers in hex.
That'd be a moral equivalent of an assembly language I believe :)
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They simply don't understand that mainstream desktop users have a serious font fetich, and that setting them up must be automatic. Further, importing a user's favorite fonts, particularly TT fonts from a Windows installation has to be either 100% automatic or nothing more complicated than clicking an option on a dialog. I've used every major and most of the minor distros, and none of them come even close to handling TT fonts this well.
Assuming we are talking about a corporate setup then there is a very elegant solution. That of the font server. Maybe this is another example of the people involved trying to chase Windows rather than improving something unix already did more simply than Windows.
Regardless of how trivial it is after install time, these things need to be done at install time. Any desktop is going to be measured against windows and the Mac, which will both have usable truetype fonts and word processing at install time. When you install more software that uses fonts, it installs more fonts in a central location and is able to find all the fonts you have.
Except that the default place for Windows to store it's fonts isn't very "central" (except in the case of a stand alone machine.)
I don't understand how the Apple market (which can't possibly be more than 8-10% of the PC market can get Adobe products (and they get them FIRST!) and linux/unix can't even get releases that are one lousy version behind.
Recently I read that SoftImage (the whole shebang, not just the renderer) is being ported to Linux. Now, what about textures for those models?
Don't tell me that the GIMP is ready for that! I know that I have bben using PhotoShop since I was a wee lad, and I know what I like. I am telling you that the GIMP is not ready for that kind of prime time. The UI is too clunky and unintuitive.
(No flames please, this is my opinion and I'll stand by it. I've used both the GIMP and PS extensively, and I just cannot become as comfortable in the GIMP as I am in PS.)
Dammit, ADOBE, why are you not listening to us fans!
Rami James
Frustrated Pixel Pusher.
--
rJames.org - illustration
"X is a network transparent bitmap protocol blah blah blah" ... i.e. it has nothing to do with fonts. Until it does and until sysadmins can drag and drop fonts into /usr/lib/X/fonts/ somewhere and have them instantly appear in all X apps (or users do the same thing in $HOME/lib/fonts linux font support will seriously suck compared to other OSes. Oh yeah with enough wizardry and by stopping/restarting X itself xfs and the application (you might as well since if you do this wrong you might get all your apps to use the fonts
Well there are two obvious ways of doing this. How do you set Windows up so you can add a font to every workstation with out needing to reboot them or wear out your shoes going round to each one?
The situation now is that every single serious X application implements its OWN font server - StarOffice has the WORST and most complex font installation support imaginable. It's *hilarious* to suggest that normal non-X savvy users could possible install a font and get document to print using that font under StarOffice.
This is probably mostly a problem of application developers following the Windows model of big monolithic apps (Indeed Star Office is frequently criticised for this.)
Anyway should end users be expected to perform the task if installing fonts which is more properly that of the sysadmin.
Windows definitly blurrs the distinction such that people actually see unix stopping end users from carrying out system administration tasks as a problem.
What about Docbook with MathML? I don't really know a whole lot about them, but wouldn't those be "a modern replacement for *TeX"? From a cursory glance MathML appears a bit harder to use than LaTeX's equation-writing, but I've never really used MathML.
It won't *ever* be possible to have fonts "instantly appear to legacy X apps with out restarting the applications but it might be possible to have xfs "poll" it's font directory regularly or to write applications in a way that treats fonts differently.
Unless these "legacy X apps" are available as source code...
If everyone in the team uses the same programs (kind of a basic idea, I think) then everyone can read the docs.
The only reason I need a word processor is to read MS Word docs produced by people who would be happy with the output from a crayon if it had the word "Microsoft" on the side. I've actually seen business letters sent out in Comic Sans!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I keep seeing people do odd things with their 'office suite' programs.*
I wonder whether there are more business centered ways of doing this stuff.
Take wordprocessing. WP springs from the need to type letters accurately.**
But letters also
But despite all this context and workflow, the wordprocessor only direcly enables word entry and typographical formatting. Now add to this workflow the needs of B2B interaction, and you suddenly see that a company has a heck of a lot of data tied up inside a multitude of proprietary Word files.
I think feature bloat is a symptom of the painful fact that most software doesn't do what is necessary for business. Consider a small business. Consider the data they use. Forget the office formats used to store the data. Is there really any need for 200MB software packages to manage this small data?
Come on guys, you're information experts. What is the key information that a business runs on? How does this information flow around, in and out of an organisation? What are the tools to manipulate the flow, and what are the structures best suited for arranging this data?
Will the business desktop simply become a departmental transaction processing server...??
*Like keep their list of address mailing labels in a spreadsheet, or keep lists of amendments to cad drawings in a separate wp document.
** I don't know it's real history. Perhaps someone can fill us in?
Installing fonts on Red Hat 6.1 is ALMOST simple. I put a bunch of TrueType fonts in a directory near the rest of the fonts, executed 2 simple commands, restarted the xfs font server, and there they were (well, I did have to do it as "root" but that's expected). Of course it did take me months to track down the instructions, and to weed out what I needed from 47 variations for 47 different distros ... However, I'm not sure if this helped Star Office, which I seldom use. My main purpose was to improve text additions to graphics in The Gimp.
I am under the impression that C++ was actually written on top of C originaly. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. It all seems so long ago now...
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
What's wrong with HTML docs? Everybody knows HTML (at least a little), and everybody can view HTML. Plus it's pretty easy to automatically generate shell pages from code. HTML will be around far longer than any version of Word's .doc format.
The fact that they have different formats is more proof of clashing bravado.
:)
From whose side? Just from GNOME's? Just because they are bad by definition?
The two projects, especially Helix
I see one here. Who's the second?
I'd like to see Gnome (the project I have more hope for) truly innovate.
Like what? Design new UI paradigm? Sorry, puny volonteer project is not where you expect it from. Neither KDE nor GNOME won't bring you truly innovative UI. There wasn't innovation in this field for decades, and GNOME or KDE folks aren't the Batman either. They just build working thing, not save the world. Maybe Xerox PARC labs will do
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
LaTeX is junk, though.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
DocBook SGML (or the XML version) is what you need. It was specifically designed to document code, and you can use it to generate either very nice looking print (ps or pdf), or HTML.
Not to mention the fact that Emacs/PSGML mode eats it for breakfast.
HTML is not such a bad option either if you don't need printed documents. Microsoft will undoubtedly do their darnedest to extend HTML severely, but there is no reason to take advantage of those extensions for simple documentation. After all, with documentation you probably aren't too worried about page layout. You simply need links, headers, bold and italics, and perhaps some basic tables and figures. Most of the documentation I write would probably look acceptable in lynx (you would need an image viewer for the pictures).
Sadly, I echo the original poster's viewpoint - they may have digitized an entire encyclopedia into the Brain of the Paperclip, such as it is, but it sure is tough to get anything out of the little critter. And that's all that matters in the end, isn't it?
I always find the arguments between the LATex folks and the regular word processor people interesting. I'm sort of in between - I write everything in xemacs, put it in HTML, put it into a web page, and - if I have to - print it out.
But I know that's not for everyone, since the learning curve is almost vertical for stuff like that. You pretty much need to be an old computer hand to appreciate the advantages. I can edit text with a speed that awes everyone who sees me, simply because I took the time to learn emacs. I encourage anyone who's up to a technical challenge that improves their abilities enormously in the long run to follow me on that path; but I realize it's simply not something mainstream people care to do.
So we need word processors, and sure as shooting we need something other than those god-awful fonts.
I can't help but wonder if many Linux fans won't cross over to the Macintosh side when MacOS X comes out. I mean, here we have a platform that has the guts of Unix that we love, combined with the brilliance of a designer interface created with panache anyone in open source will have a tough time with.
Yes, I know MacOS X isn't open source, but the underpinnings are, and all the applications mainstream people love are there. I think it's worth a look, simply because it could solve a lot of problems.
I plan to buy a dual-processor Mac as soon as I'm reasonably assured MacOS X is out and functioning well.
D
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I see all these people bitching about "horribly pixelated fonts" and how anti-aliasing is going to solve all the problems in the world.
Ok, I'll bite. Abiword and all other linux software looks just fine to me. Perhaps I've somehow managed to fall asleep at the keyboard and accidentally managed to add anti-aliased font support to X by rolling my forhead on the keys. Come to think of it, I did have a big headache a few weeks ago...
So, you "horribly pixelated font" people, show me these horribly pixelated fonts. Seriously, I've never seen them. I want to see some screen shots. Please follow up to this message with a link to some screenshots of this horrible non-anti-aliased blight on human eyesight.
I somehow expect what's actually going is that:I can say this because I'm quite familiar with the way most displays look under anti-aliased fonts, and the way they look can best be described as "almost the same." Thus, I somehow don't think that such a minor effect would generate this amount of bellyaching, except through a combination of the above, especially the last one.
So please, put up some screen shots of these horribly pixelated fonts you're seeing, and let us determine for ourselves why they're so bad looking.
Thank you.
Go to www.microsoft.com/truetype and find your way to the truetype fonts download area.
.sit.hqx) and with their original file name. You must not supply the font outlines in any form that adds value to commercial products, such as CD-ROM or disk based multimedia programs, application software or utilities. See Microsoft's permissions site for more details."
"TrueType core fonts for the Web FAQ
Q What can I do with these fonts?
A For all the rules that govern the use of these fonts please read the end user license agreement.
Anyone can download and install these fonts for their own use. Designers can specify the fonts within their Web pages. Our guide to specifying fonts in Web pages explains how to do this. You can distribute the files from your Web site as long as you complete our Web font registration form. You can only redistribute the fonts in their original form (.exe or
They are available for anyone to download and use, but if you redistribute them you can't repackage them or change the name.
"Microsoft develops some fonts in-house and licenses others from independent font vendors. If you are looking to license a particular font, you should contact the vendor, not Microsoft, regarding licensing issues."
_You_ can "install" the fonts, the distributions just can't bundle them with thier X11 packages.
Lars -
Yeah, I totally agree. The KOffice suite is supposed to be totally emeddable (a la OLE), so you can put a Spreadsheet inside your text document, etc. To me, KOffice looks far superior to Gnome Office, at least in this respect.
My last bit of a rant here has to do with HTML editors. Why don't we have any decent ones for Linux yet. No, EMACS ain't what I'm talking about either. Most notably over on NT in my mind is Dreamweaver, which aside from being an outstanding GUI for HTML it's also one hell of a site manager. As someone who not only codes the back end of web sites, but also has to do layout and design not having a tool like Dreamweaver around is a serious handicap.
Agreed. 100%. I would love to have DreamWeaver for Linux. Love it to death. It doesn't fux with my code, it understands and can clean up Word (gak!) HTML, it doesn't touch PHP, does all the layers and best of all, it spits out clean HTML. How do we get Macromedia to release this beauty under Linux? I haven't tried it under WINE yet, perhaps I'll give it a shot this afternoon.
There are only a handful of apps I use under Win95/98/NT:
MPLAB/Rice17 are probably the reason I don't give up Win32 totally. I can work around the rest, but my work depends on being able to use the ICE software.
I agree with you totally on the anti-aliased fonts: Something must be done. If it breaks X compatibility, it's gotta happen. I think it could probably be done without breaking X though. Perhaps an alternate font server which, if given 1-bit fonts, fakes an anti-alias, but if presented with truetype-style fonts performes proper antialiasing. Maybe even with subpixel antialising for my laptop. :-)
Is there a wharf app which gives me 9 places where KDE/Gnome "systray" icons get captured? I can't stand the bar along the bottom but a single 64x64 square with 9 possible systray icons (KICQ, etc.) can go would be the cat's meow. I've searched at different times but haven't found anything useful. Tons of launchers but nothing which can replace a systray. WindowMaker has panel/KDM simulation so the apps think they have a systray, I just need to find/make an app that uses it for a wharf icon. :-) Too bad I can't code apps to save my skin. Embedded, sure, but apps? ugh.
Oh yeah, and something needs to be done or a howto written about Motif-style file selection boxes. If I use NS or Moz and want to save a file, I have to remember the filename because if I change directories, it forgets the filename. How stupid is that? And the fact that I can't highlight something (select), move to where I want to replace text (by highlighting the text to remove) and the pasting... is there a way around this without having to select what I want gone, erasing it, then slecting what I want, going to where I want it and pasting?
X is wonderful because it's network transparent and when tunnelled through SSH, secure and pretty snappy. But as you'd mentioned there are a few shortcomings (which are really simplistic compared to some of the things people want) which make it totally unusable.
Maybe if Microsoft would stop screwing around with Clippy and started working toward that level of output quality, I'd have less gripes about their software.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They realized that they were not competing with the computer but with PAPER!
The document analogy may take quite a while to replace. It has, after all, been with us since the time of clay tablets...
/joeyo
2^5
Point taken, but this subthread got soooooo offtopic I propose putting it to rest.
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Unfortunately, though gnumeric looks pretty good, it cannot handle large files well. I recently tried to do a simple import of a comma delimited file and it took over 40 minutes just to import the data. Excel pulled it in quickly (~1 minute). I am really pushing for at least a few Linux desktops in my company, but unless I can provide a good word processor, spread sheet, and email client, I won't make much headway. This is one area where the code from StarOffice may help.
This is really a criticism of Linux distributions, not Star. (I was using RedHat 5.2 at the time). Decent looking fonts, (and the necessary servers), should be included with the distribution, at least as an install-time option. By the way, this also allows for a much better selection of fonts for Netscape. (Has RH 6.2 or other installation done this?)
HTML is too open, the Microsoft camp would never support vanilla html documents. The obfuscation of HTML into MS-HTML is already occuring, and soon, it will be as fucked up as the proprietary .doc format, both of which you can only read with a proprietary MS program
. Thanks Bill.
Lars -
Unix was designed for programmers, scientists, and engineers. It works for them rather well. It was not designed for PHBs and their secretaries.
So, the question. Is adapting Unix for this last category of people is the right thing to do?
Well, maybe because what engineers do is produce documentation?
Where the Hell do you think that all of those standards published by outfits like IEEE, JEDEC, EIA, EIAJ, ISO, and other alphabet outfits come from? The stork? Or do you think that the PHBs do all of that stuff and then leave the implemetation details up to grunts like me?
Are you under the charming impression that teams of tens of engineers work out projects like 5 million gate ICs based on whiteboard sketches? Office automation is one of the indispensible tools of engineering, and it's getting harder and harder to get by with the Solaris box at work and the Linux network at home without adding a W2K notebook or some other Redmondian puspocket. At which point the IT crowd and PHBs suggest that we don't need the workstation any more since we can use an X terminal package to connect to The Server from the LoseDoze box.
Damn straight we need office tools, and yesterday wouldn't be too soon.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Cannot load Corel Office or StarOffice files". When we're a "open source community", shouldn't we atleast help eachother by understanding the file formats instead of going the M$ way with properitary formats?. Anyhow, GNOME Office. Wouldn't this be the same if Microsoft delievered MS Office with every Windows copy sold?. Food for thought
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
This one I haven't tried, thought I was aware of it's existance. There were a couple of things that turned me off to TopPage. Not the least of these is IBM. I have a LOT of respect for the bulk of the stuff that IBM does and all. It's just that when it comes to PC software it's kinda like having a seriously shaggy dog in your house. Oh sure, he seems friendly enough, until you find his hair has gotten into everything.
I really do need to try this out though. I sure don't feel comfortable talking ill about an app I haven't even tried out. Still, just the marketing spin I find a little spooky here...
It allows you to create dazzling Web pages without any HTML knowledge or programming skills.
You can get everything you need to design, personalize and share your site in an easy-to-use all-in-one package.
Okay, everyone who is having FrontPage flashbacks please raise your hand!
Now to get really nit picky... my favorite tag in the whole wide world from a TopPage generated web page on IBM's site.
<META name="GENERATOR" content="IBM NetObjects TopPage V4.0.3 for Windows">
One of the things that keeps me loyal to Dreamweaver is that Macromedia doesn't try and be a one stop shop for all possible web development needs. It's number one selling point is in the fact that it doesn't muck up the HTML at the code level, enabling you to use other apps. No mention of code treatment can be found on IBM's site.
It may sound silly to worry about how the HTML code gets formatted so long as the page looks pretty in the browser. Of course if the GUI layout work is only just the starting point in developing a dynamic site, the code formatting becomes critical. From what I saw of the HTML code on that site, I don't think this is what I'm looking for.
I do intend to give this a fair try though. I'm just going in a LOT less hopeful than when I downloaded Quanta.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Unix was designed for programmers, scientists, and engineers. It works for them rather well. It was not designed for PHBs and their secretaries.
So, the question. Is adapting Unix for this last category of people is the right thing to do?
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Actually, it's a good question.
Unix was designed for programmers, scientists and engineers back when PHBs and secretaries didn't use computers. So should non-scientists remain in the grip of Bill, or should they have alternatives? That's really the question.
Unix ain't great for everybody. I've long complained that the design of the shells, not to mention a lot of other details, imply a "boy's club" mentality, wherein shared secrets (non-obvious commands, for instance) are the requisites of membership. The Linux programmers are, of course, upper-level members of the society. Geek pride and all that. So I don't think that Unix in anything resembling its raw form is what the Rest Of Us need.
But give Apple credit (and btw I'm not a Mac fan) where due: In MacOS X, they're merging a Unix kernel with a Mac API and GUI and it looks like they'll pull it off. The robustness of the Unix kernel keeps it running, the Unix API helps programmers add capabilities, and the Mac layers make it palatable to mere muggles.
I think KDE and to a lesser extent GNOME are doing something similar, but they're far from ready for prime time. Frankly the font rendering on KDE sucks (well, it's based on antiquated X11 technology, after all). Until such core display issues are fixed, Linux will simply be too ugly for widespread use.
Give Bill credit where due: Win98 does a fantastic job of displaying text. The open source community needs to learn from them.
BTW I'd be very open to a non-Unix non-Bill OS too. As Miguel pointed out in his recent essay, Unix sucks. It was a great experiment but we're stuck with some obsolete ideas. I wish somebody would really rethink things and build an OS that takes advantage of what we've learned since Ritchie et al started their important work 30+ years ago.
MathML's only a replacement for *TeX's formula-writing capabilities. I don't think one can write a book with index, TOC, cross-references and the like using only MathML.
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Surely that was what the IMAP protocol was for??
Then M$ had to decide that they "knew best" in a lame attempt to force things like unix out of the server environment...
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Why sould you need an antivirus in Linux?
Probably for doing antivirus checks on incoming email, so those who still use Windows have that protection.
the real at&t mix
They also have a legacy of MS desktops, which they will not switch away from, for some time yet. I guess it might sound curious to someone coming from a hard-core linux background, but the single offering I cannot find is anti-virus .. presumably because of this belief in the Open community that it is unnecessary. At the risk of repeating myself, to me, its the one last thing I need to be able to get my clients to buy into open.
I'm going to have to agree with this. Although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, KDE to me look like a "I-wanna-be-M$" desktop. I really don't know much about the development, but K just looks like it's trying to match Windoze feature-for-feature. I just find the interface to be much clumsier than that of GNOME. Having started using K, and then switching to GNOME, I can't understand why anyone is using KDE. People talk about GNOME being slow and/or unstable, but I have never had any problems with it. Especially with the Helix-Code releases, GNOME seems to be making progress faster than KDE. Not to mention the licensing issues that everyone loves to bitch about all day. To me, GNOME is just a better way to get around the GUI.
--Stupid Sig Here--
But an application can anti-alias the fonts in it's own display... Look at the gimp.
A good, fast, dynamic anti-aliasing canvas library that existing apps could easily link against is a possible solution.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
I see one here. Who's the second?
1. Gnome, 2. KDE, thus there are two..
Like what? Design new UI paradigm? Sorry, puny volonteer project is not where you expect it from. Neither KDE nor GNOME won't bring you truly innovative UI. There wasn't innovation in this field fordecades, and GNOME or KDE folks aren't the Batman either. They just build working thing, not save the world. Maybe Xerox PARC labs will do :)
From what I've heard gnome was funded quite heavily by RedHat, thus I assume they're not all volunteers. I expect creativity. There is so much cool technology out there, it seems a waste for such talented people to work on such a project.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
Besides LyX, in the non-free world there is also Scientific Word for Windows which has been around for a decade. Very mature and very feature rich. In additional it includes enhancements to let it cooperate with Maple. I just use pure LaTex but 8 years ago Sci. Word allowed me to do all the stuff that was just a little to hard on AmiPro.
People have already pointed you to lyx/klyx.
You can annotate latex documents. Just put a comment in the source code, using % .
That works for me when I'm writing a paper with others. I just insert something like
% JOE: Fill in the above numbers once you rerun the simulation.
It's easily identifiable, can be searched for, and directed to who I want. What more could you want?
Some people I know also use footnotes for this purpose.
On an off-topic note, I just discovered the 'lbxproxy' program that comes with XFree86... Low Bandwidth X Proxy. Lets you run an X server proxy from another machine which relays X events and info to yours via a highly-compressed and optimized X protocol... has anyone used this on a wide-scale basis? Could anyone comment on their success with it?
the real at&t mix
If I understand you correctly, much of what you're saying here was incorporated in the Apple/IBM OpenDoc specification. It also screams 'Object Oriented User Interface!' to me, something that the OS/2 WPS was a fairly good implementation of.
Most unfortunately, they killed off OpenDoc around '97 IIRC.
Not quite. Certain LaTeX features don't function properly if you pass down to the TeX level. In other words, yes you have access to TeX but use it and you LaTeX gets messed up. For a simple example set margins strangly using LaTeX macros and then use $$ to typeset a centered equation rather than \[ and you'll see what I mean.
I belive that you are free to run KWord under AfterStep as long as you have kdelibs & kdesupport packages installed.And of course you are free not to run it at all. Is it free enoght ?
And regarding mem requirements. I am not so worry about them as i worry about netscape, that sucked up 170Mb during one day last week(in fact in this moment i belive that kde+dozen of kde apps that i run take less memory then netscape). Hopefully Konqueror will come soon
As for existing ports, KLyX (an aging but functional KDE port) was already mentioned. There is also a more recent Windows port.
LaTeX? Junk?
LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX. Anything you can do in TeX, you can do in LaTeX as easily, but there are macros that reduce your workload substantially.
The step up from PHB to power user isn't that big, as I think I've pointed out.
So, you believe a PHB can become a PHPU (Pointed-Hair Power User)?
That's what the Docbook is for. Docbook doesn't have formula-writing capabilities on its own, so you use MathML to write the formulas. I was asking about DocBook+MathML. DocBook can do an index, TOC, and cross-references. I'm not sure how easy it is compared to *TeX, though, since I've never used DocBook, just read about it.
However, GnomeOffice has a better edge in the future if you include GIMP in it. StarOffice doesn't come with a photo editing tools, something like Photoshop. And that's a good news for GnomeOffice. Especially, GIMP is a very good software to use.
If they really want to make those software (AbiWord, Gnumeric, GIMP, ...) as a office suite, they should work on a central file type or file format that can let these "GnomeOffice" document types compatible and interactive with each other.
Unlikely that GnomeOffice will be use by most *NIX users. Not yet. But one may never know if once Gnome will take over the CDE world.
Good luck!
============
Mathematics will always come back to hunt you down, in so many ways
As soon as Microsoft get their thumbs out of their arses and start saving word/excel/etc documents in XML, with open schemas that everybody has access to, the world will be a better place.
.NET strategy will do?
Maybe that's what their
You never know - They may make it nice and easy for the open source community to at last easily provide MS-compatible apps.
If I understand you correctly you need to expose the same bits of information in a number of different ways. Is it possible that XML might be able to solve these problems? You just write your information once and use differents XSL style sheets to expose the data in different ways (I know it's never that simple but..). If your data changes then any changes will automatically be reflected in your documents by re-generating them with XSL. That kind of changes the problem from being "how do I manage this information" to "what is an easy, flexible and quick way of writing XSL". I know XML is still a bit too close to the bleeding edge for commercial development, but I believe it holds a lot of promise.
The problem with GNOME, as I, a mac user/programmer who's gone over the linux side, see it, is that GNOME is duplicating M$'s interface design mistakes in the name of duplicating the company's successes. And frankly, it bothers the hell out of me to see the same exact broken interface in AbiWord, Gnumeric. These applications running on Linux, an OS that's supposed to the pinnacle of meritocracy, where good ideas are kept and bad ideas are thrown out. I am sick and tired of suffering through the last 10 years of Microsoft's bad decisions. I don't want another 10 years of doing the same thing courtesy of GNOME and Helixcode's adoption of them. I do not buy the argument that any crappy interface has to be kept just because people were already familiar with that interface under windows. Going from windows to linux is such a jump for most end users that doing things right way and dumping M$'s UI conventions won't matter that much. Now here's the kicker. I don't have to be whining and bitching about this. I don't feel I need to present this argument so things will change. I can actually do something about this problem. The open source nature of linux allows me to crack open the source for GNOME's office stuff and give it standard mac UI conventions, conventions that were far more well thought out that M$'s. I can change the Menu selection to quit the program from 'Exit' to 'Quit', with alt+q being the keyboard shortcut. The alt keys, which are in the center of the keyboard and provide the greatest equidistant coverage of keys, are best used in keyboard shortcuts, not for access that try to replace the mouse (courtesy of the Redmond idiots). Hitting alt+f to find stuff in a word processor (the way it's done on the mac) requires a lot less effort for the user to hit than ctrl+f. I can change all GNOME applications so that they use alt+f for find (which works really nice when paired with alt+g, for "find again"). Hell, I can even put out all these modified applications in a customized linux distribution if I really want to. Of course people will cry "fragmentation" if I do all these things, but if doing things the way they should be done means fragmentation, so damned be it.
>It was clearer to me that the Revolution has a >long way to go. Even if freedom is practical, >there can't be any little missing feature
I couldn't agree more.
>to convince people to leave MSFT, even the bugs >and bad UI must be the same.
I couldn't disagree more. Me and the penguincow will disprove this.
Can you please tell me what's exectly is the big difference in look between KDE and GNOME (besides GTK themes, but don't forget that KDE2 comes with themes in 6 weeks)?
KDE has start menu with a K, GNOME has start menu with a foot. Same minimize/close/maximize buttons, same menues in the programs. Same WIMP paradigm like in every damn GUI on every computer in this world(besides those who has only CLI). What's the big difference ?
You say that KDE looks "I-wanna-be-M$"(what is this btw? never could figure it out) desktop. Don't forget who says that he admires MS and copies they features(hint..hint.. he things that unix sucks). What KDE wants to provide it's stability and usebility in the first place. And they do provide this !
Progress... let's speak about progress. KDE's development for the last 10 month i belive focused on KDE2 & KOffice (and not on bringing KDE1 to stable level). So unless you are compiling once in while cvs snapshots you don't really know about progress. The progress shourtly: Themes(i guess that the "ugly" part isn't relevent then); rewritten files manager and browser that support HTML4, CSS1, Java, Ecmascript; KOffce suite that is nicely integrated together(unlike like it was written somewhere downstears "collection of unrelated GTK & GNOME programs); KOM/KParts system that is working as proved by Koqueror & KOffice. Well... does it counts as progress ???
PS. , GNOME is just better way to get around the GUI. For me(and lot's of other people) best way to get around GUI it's by keyboard. And it's something that never could do in GNOME.
PPS. StartOffice that is going to be rebuild in GTK with Bonobo and already called by some GnomeOffice imho going to be another mozilla(major rewrite, a couple of years and nothing on the horizont)
Netscape has another standard, called CAP. It's much more recent (March 10, 2000) and hopefully has a better chance at success.
ICAP draft: http://www.ox.org/o x/projects/calendar/draft-oleary-icap-01.txt (There exists a version 4 of this draft, but I've been unable to find it)
CAP Draft: http://www.imc.org/draft-ietf-calsch-cap
Steve Ferris has a Java implementation of ICAP (both client and server) here: http://maelstrom.org.uk/
Yeah, but does it have Clippy the Paperclip that we all know and love? :)
While I agree that LyX is a great tool, writing good LaTeX requires that you approach your writing from a very different angle. Moving from Word to WordPerfect, for example, could probably be accomplished with very little retraining for a majority of users. Moving from a wordprocessor (read, glorified typewriter clone) to a document processing system like LaTeX is a bit more difficult. Teaching users that they shouldn't worry about formatting but only about tagging the content appropriately can be a hurdle. One has to create several documents using TeX before they really understand what the software can do for you.
Personally I am a recent LaTeX convert, and am very happy how my productivity has increased. Time spent fiddling with section numbering, cross references, margins, pagebreaks, tables (God help anyone who creates tables in Word), verbatim examples, fonts, page numbering, etc. is now spent actually working because the software does all those things for you (effectively and efficiently) and you get things like beautiful output with Table of Contents, Index pages and nice headers/footers (with included section/chapter name etc.) for free.
You also get excellent printed output, PostScript (which can be easily converted into PDF), ASCII Text and HTML that doesn't suck. I can spend minutes creating something, or hours of frustration trying to get things to look right--I know what choice I will be making.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
...you use the slowest theme.
<O
( \
X Adopt a bird today!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Well, speaking just for the antialiased font problem, I think Linux is going to see some really good news over the next few months. I've been hacking on high performance aa font rendering using Freetype2, and I've got some working code in the Nautilus CVS, as part of librsvg. All of the font integration code is going to get released as LGPL (librsvg is GPL) and I hope and expect lots of other projects to pick up on it.
Not only that, but the XFree86 render project has all of a sudden picked up some momentum. I have confidence that the designs floating by on that mailing list will lead to nice, clean hardware accelerated aa text soon. While we're at it, we'll fix the XLFD mess and problems like client and server fonts not always matching.
This is a hell of an exciting time for advanced 2D graphics under Linux. Gambai!
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Are you familiar with aspect-oriented programming?
http://www.parc.xerox.com/csl/projects/aop/
They claim that, whereas OBJECTS symbolize encapsulation and "locality" of ideas, ASPECTS symbolize concepts which are non-local, and cut across many OBJECTS.
nick
...right click your image, then click the dotted line at the top of the main menu. This gives you a somewhat traditional (if rotated) menu bar.
<O
( \
X Adopt a bird today!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Remember that a lot of TeX's macros and primitives are over-written by LaTeX ones, so not everything in TeX is easily reached from LaTeX.
LaTeX handles text flow around objects better than TeX and it handles fonts in a different way. Font handling in TeX is hard and in LaTeX it's sloppy. I admit there are days I'd rather have sloppy.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
For a lot of things, I use SCREEM (http://screem.org). I haven't used HomeSite extensively, but all the features I did use were cloned pretty well in SCREEM. It has site management via the sitecopy tool (HTTP, FTP, and WebDav), syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, and I think Perl in the latest releases. Previewing can be done in an external browser or via the lightweight GtkHTML widget.
My only real complaint is that it's still a little buggy and sometimes crashes unexpectedly. That, and (like most any HTML editor), it becomes somewhat useless when dealing with lots of SHTML.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
I'm sure there is already a free Minsesweeper game clone for Linux :=)
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Oh boy, I can feel the flames licking at this post. Even still, there's a couple of things I've got to say here.
First off, I've tried several times to use both AbiWord and StarOffice to write a simple document. I never could get past a single paragraph. The fonts are just so horribly unreadable as to make using the end product painful. I know it's neither one of those app's fault. Something simply has to be done about how X deal with fonts before Linux is viable for the desktop.
Oh, and I do enjoy reading the "All I want is a text editor", "EMACS is all you ever need", and "TeX rules". I'll give those folks this much credit, the fonts are at least readable there. When it comes right down to it, I fully darn well expect to have tool bars, formatting functions, and all the wiz bangs without having to read some 300 page O'Reily* book. Ack!
(* no offence meant to O'Reily. I've got me a library of them books here)
Moving along here, I've been wondering a little something about the graphical environment in Linux ever since I first got to playing with it. Why are all the icons and window borders so big? Granted, this isn't really a usability thing, but it sure makes those apps look and feel kinda hokey. A good example of this is Gnumeric. Here we've got this pretty darn nice little spreadsheet program that looks like it was put together with children's blocks. Mind you, I only mean to point out Gnumeric as an example. Almost every app running on Gnome, and to a lesser extent KDE, seem to make horrible use of the screen space. It just has a feel of being very blocky. Folks I've shown my Linux setup to have made similar comments as well.
My last bit of a rant here has to do with HTML editors. Why don't we have any decent ones for Linux yet. No, EMACS ain't what I'm talking about either. Most notably over on NT in my mind is Dreamweaver, which aside from being an outstanding GUI for HTML it's also one hell of a site manager. As someone who not only codes the back end of web sites, but also has to do layout and design not having a tool like Dreamweaver around is a serious handicap.
I also have yet to run across anything that approaches the functionality of HomeSite for getting in at the text level. Again, just being a cool text editor doesn't even begin to replace all the stuff that HomeSite has built into it geared specifically for web technologies. Heck, nothing I've seen on Linux even comes close to HS's PHP hi-liting which in and of itself isn't perfect.
I could probably get by for a long while with a less than stellar office suite. What I can't live without is a less than stellar HTML editing suite. There appear to be some interesting prospects on the horizon in development. Maybe some day someone will get enough of this right to actually get me to go closer to full time to Linux. I am watching for it!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
But you wouldn't put a mail server in a workstation that is meant to be used for "Office applications", would you?
This is not a problem of kernels, or CPU cycles, or the lack of effective 3D displays. It is really so much more basic, and yet, more challenging.
Even though I have not used a typewriter in a year, and the filing cabinet in my office lays there unused, those two objects are the basis of my computer's design.
We may talk about the paperless office oday, but it is meaningless. We are still document-driven rather than knowledge-driven.
Businesses are fighting this, but it is an expensive war. My company uses a system called Onyx for Customer Relations Management. It is a very complicated and clunky client/server system that cost over $500,000 to acquire, and probably that much again per year to train people and keep it running. Look at ERP systems like SAP or BAAN, these are equally moribund, and yet companies still throw billions at them annually, because they are still the best (only?) option.
People do not think in documents, they think in ideas, but you cannot capture the pulses of neurons and transmit them directly. A document is merely a way to capture this stuff so that it can be stored, retrieved, and transmitted to others.
I work as a product manager, and do everything from talk with clients and users to writing specs and drawing mockups for our developers. Most of what I do revolves around collections of ideas of how a feature should work- "The sort button should be on the right side, and all items should sort in ascneding order..." I spend probably 1/3 of my time just maintaining concurrency between specs for development, marketing docs, training manuals, and management summaries.
Let's say I decide the sort button should be on the left instead- that could mean that dozens of documents need to be altered, even though only one concept has changed. Now think- what if I could simply create a "Sort Order" object, and instantiate it in multiple places: word documents, development specs, and page mockups. If I change it, I change it in just one place, and it either updates automatically or at least tells me what needs to be updated by hand. This would not only save me time, it would prevent bugs and many misunderstandings.
I swear I am learning to code now just so that I can take a stab at this problem. I support Linux because it provides a sized canvas on which many ideas can be painted. Gnome is doing a lot of yeoman work, and I am sure it will be useful, but I would love to see more truly speculative design being done. This is where Linux (or some other free OS) could really revolutionize things, because you do not necessarily have to consider the short-term business imperatives that MS and Apple do. Even if either one of them could deliver a system like the one I have described, I believe it would be a failure, because people are not generally ready for such a thing. A small subset would be, and they will adopt it, and in a short time businesses will realize how much more productive those people can be.
-cwk.
I think that detecting viruses at the mail server is an interesting idea. But on the other hand it doesn't stop other machines from getting viruses by other ways. You can't control what others execute and that's why you would be better puting an antivirus rigth where the virus can infect.
In fact, e-mail clients are the ones that should take care of viruses that are embedded in e-mails, not the mail server. If a virus infects a client it's because the e-mail client is broken, not because e-mail by itself or the server are inherently insecure.
Why do I always hit "Submit" and then try to hit "Preview"?
Whether it is at the firewall or on the client, the need remains an Open anti-viral package, if only because the IT managers perceive the need for it.
I mean, like: Gnumeric (ugh)? GIMP (that one oughta go over big with the Sensitivity Training types in HR)? Eye of Gnome (Sounds like a D&D Module)? It would probably be worth a fraction of a market share percentage point or two if the names of the Apps in this Suite were changed to something people can say without cringing...
If you want to know that you are writing standards-compliant html and you want to know exactly how it is supposed to look, then Amaya is a pretty good choice.
Unfortunately it stresses compliance over everything else. (Heck, by definition how it looks actually *IS* the standard...)
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
You're running Nautilus? Is there a place to download that, in binary form? The website only mentions CVS which is rediculous - cause then I have to download and compile a hundred million libraries (gnome, gnome-libs, gtk...).
Joseph Elwell.
Seems to me that in a lot of ways, Microsoft just out paced the rest of the Office field. I recall how Quattro Pro introduced the world to multiple sheets within a single file, and seperating them with tabs at the bottom. The very next version of Excel had that, a ton of other goodies, and ever increasing integration with it's good buddy Word. I seem to recall a similar fate falling on AmiPro as well.
Looking back on it now I remember the day the war of the Office suites was over. It was Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0, just a little while prior to Windows 95 coming out. For the first time these two apps shared more than data, they now looked very similar to each other. Similar tool bars, menus that were obviously put in sync to eachother. Prior to that point the Office market was very much up for grabs, but afterwards nobody was even talking about any of the other players. MS hit those two outta the park.
As to the rest of your post, it seems that KDE is focusing on the kinds of issues that you're talking about when it comes to interoperability. Just 6 weeks away (as sela has already posted) from seeing how they got their implementation to all play out.
Personally, I think this Gnome office suite is going to go another production cycle before we start seeing any real integration there. At this point it seems we've got seperate applications being bundled together and referred to as a suite. Not a bad thing by any means, but not anything that's going to keep the folks in Redmond up late at night for the moment.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Well, certainly they don't do it "to compete with kde's koffice"
I wouldn't be so sure. Gnome was started to compete with KDE because of he difficulties with the QPL.
That would be pretty silly thing to do.
No more silly then releasing software with a 1.0 version number that is not nealy stable to match KDE's version number. No more silly then upping parts of Gnome to version 2.0 to match the upcomming KDE 2.0
If they read each other's formats (and why won't they?) this is twice as good.
The fact that they have different formats is more proof of clashing bravado. They should and easily could share a format between them. I do not see this happening, but perhaps in a perfect world.
Well, I almost certainly don't like their "welcome windows user, you won't see the difference" UI attitude
Agreed. I don't use kde or gnome for that matter beyong the gimp, but KDE seems to be making waves and Gnome are the followers. The two projects, especially Helix, are just too similiar to really make a difference. I'd like to see Gnome (the project I have more hope for) truly innovate.
The only thing I don't like about Lyx is their use of the XForms widgets. Before people jump all over me for trying to fix something that already works, let me say that this is a real problem for those trying to i18nize Lyx - the XForms library has no real way of allowing things such as two-byte languages, etc., to be used, so everything has to be a nasty hack.
WOuld the Lyx team consider doing a port of Lyx to GTK+ (or even KDE)?
- usability tests against "the potential truth" and against "the competition" (makes sense to create an open source process for this, no?)
- marketing literature
If I've missed something please post a few links to more info... 2 cents....Scott Fitchet
scott @ nospam_figital.com
No. But you would hope that the mail arriving at the client had already been checked by the mailserver.
I took a brief look at DocBook. Looks very nice, but it's by no means a TeX replacement (closer to a LaTeX replacement but without the ability to go really low-level).
--
I think a lot of people would write better documents with greater ease than they could do with M$ Word.
Pardon my lack of knowledge, I'm not a programmer but a business owner who moved his entire network to Linux over 3 years ago (yay!) but as the Applixware document formats are Ascii, that would mean that they'd be, more or less, importable into either GNOME Office or KOffice, possibly minus a bit of formatting, is that right?
If so, I believe I'll take a closer look at both of them!
Thanks!
src
I have just used StarOffice and Gimp to write a 40 minute presentation with heaps of graphics. If you push StarOffice hard enough then it does fall over, but the recovery files are always up to date so I haven't lost anything yet.
The only flaws I found with the presentation package is that
1) This is minor but you can't change the colour of equations (if you could its beyond me!)
2) Under Linux you can't embed any video formats - you can under the Windows version (I'm using 5.2) - so I have to play the avi file I wanted through another package before starting the presentation.
As for all the comments (other threads mainly) about anti aliased fonts, I use SuSE 6.3 with XFree86 3.3.5, StarOffice 5.2 on a 1024x768 screen and I don't have any problems with blocky fonts. I don't state this to get flamed for my allegence to SuSE, but I don't have any problems there must be a way around it. Everything looks fine though a video projector too.
Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.
There's a very interesting read about the possible division of StarOffice's word processing module, StarOffice Writer, up here at linuxtoday.com.au. It poses an opinion about the possible future of StarOffice now that Sun has GPL'ed the StarOffice source code.
People interested in GNOME Office might also find this interesting.
Digital Philosopher. Looking for work.
The article fails to mention Powerpoint, which I guess can only be described as an "infamous" part of Office. Its GNOME counterpart is Achtung. Also, there's Guppi, which will eventually provide graphs for everything, though at the moment it's just used as a standalone application (embedding is taking off though)
As much as I like the idea of having a free Gnome-based word processor, I must say that Abiword is still in its infancy. I mean, I'd like to have a slim word processor but Abiword doesn't even support tables!
The Abiword developers seem to be pretty proud of their import filters but how hard can writing such a thing be for a word processor that doesn't support tables?
Don't get me wrong, this post is not meant as a flame but it seems to soon to name Abiword when it comes to Office tools.
Monkey sense
Integrate Sun's StarOffice into the GNOME suite when it's released under the GPL. I realize it would take a fair deal of rewriting, but the core components would no doubt help them.
Once this portion was completed, they could integrate it into their existing Office codebase, all running off a Gtk+/Gdk base. It'll be interesting to see, if that happens, the ease of porting it to Win32 and other non-Unix platforms. I noticed that someone I knew was running Gimp under Win32. Wow, did that look strange. Gtk menubars etc etc running under Windows. But if Gimp was ported, why not the whole of GNOME ?That, more than anything, would make it feasible for non-technical users to switch over to Linux/Unix.
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
It would be nice to see one joint effort to produce a decent productivity suite for Linux. I hope that StarOffice can be used as the base, and features which aren't currently in the product can be taken from products which aren't as mature. I use GnuCash to see how it stacks up against Quicken (which I use also). It has almost all the features I require, but it is so dependent on GNOME.
KDE 2.0 is already in feature freeze, and in 6 weeks they plan the official release of 2.0, including Koffice.
Some time ago I downloaded the 1.91 release, and was quite impressed.
On the negative side it still had several annoying bugs (which are quite expected at this phaze of the development), is not as feature reach as Star Office, and what hurts the most is the lack of filters.
On the positive side, it has most features users would probably need, is nicely integrated (I was quite impressed with the KOshell), and has original design that does not try to be MS-office clone.
Sela
I searched high and low for a decent HTML editor - something similar to Homesite.
I found a KDE-based editor called Quanta+ at http://quanta.sourceforge.net/
It's very feature-filled, and definitely competitive with Homesite. The 1.0.0 version I'm using right now has a couple small bugs and an occasional memory leak, but hopefully that will be fixed when I upgrade to one of the 1.0.x releases.
I highly recommend checking this package out.
--
Is is only me, or are there other out there who find anti-aliased text to be rather fuzzy and hard on the eyes? Give me anti-aliased any day...
Well, certainly they don't do it "to compete with kde's koffice". That would be pretty silly thing to do. They do it to get things done and have a good office app. If K gets another one - OK, so we'd have two good office apps. If they read each other's formats (and why won't they?) this is twice as good.
As for KOffice being winner - not sure. Well, I almost certainly don't like their "welcome windows user, you won't see the difference" UI attitude, but I think I can theme this away. Let's see them when they deliver KOffice release.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The author seemed to be lauding the features, such as scheduling, of Outlook + Exchange. Sure, those features are nice, but they reduce choice. To synchronize many people across a project using MS Lookout, it is necessary to be running Exchange server with it. Similarly, all users must be using Outlook as their mail client to schedule projects together. So what happens to those people that wish to use a different e-mail client? They get left out of the loop. And what happens to those offices that wish not to use Exchange, either due to its broken imap implementations, to its inability to function with non-outlook clients, or to its reliance on NT servers? These businesses cannot use Outlook's scheduling features. This is yet another example of how bundling unlike components (mail, schedule) together inherently leads to lack of choice.
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
One word: Enlightenment
It rocks
Where it is heading is very exciting.
Check it out
Simon
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
Integration is planned through the use of Bonobo, which incidentally is the component architecture that Sun has chosen to use with Star Office. So you'll be able in a Gnome version of AbiWord, some time in the future, to embed a spreadsheet (gnumeric, excel, star office) in an AbiWord document and even edit from that shell, using the familiar gnumeric controls.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
I know it sounds like a really small thing, but it's one of those showstoppers for the desktop crowd.
Clyde has written a nice article over at LinuxOrbit about the state of the GNOME office suite. With all the hubbub
surrounding the recent freeing of Sun's StarOffice, this is gonna get more interesting. I'll tell ya the one thing that I miss in
AbiWord is anti-aliased text. Staring at that horridly pixelated text is hard on the eyes. Between the Gimp, Gnucash,
Eazel, Evolution, AbiWord, Gnucash and the like (no, I'm not forgetting KDE, I just haven't used it recently), the
application support under Linux is rapidly making it feasible for a desktop user, but we're just not there yet. And it's the
little things that get ya.
Does Gnome Office just sound like a collection of unrelated gtk/gnome software they're trying to group together to compete with kde's koffice?
It just seems to me that koffice is attempting to be a consistent group of interacting programs; Similiar look, feel, interaction, etc and the gnome people are playing the catch up game all over again. I just hope this isn't the 1.0 fiasco all over again.
From what I read on the 'net, American and British governments are extremely useful, efficient, and friendly organizations, compared to what we're forced to live with. Ours indeed does several hundred useful things, along with several thousand useless and dangerous ones. Let me repeat: may it rot in hell.
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I take it you know of LyX. It's nice to be able to output your document to just about any format possible. As for the annotation, I suppose one could write a seamless front end for RCS.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
This may be from the Out-on-a-limb department, but I believe the atrocious browser and/or fonts situation must be solved for Linux to move forward. Grizzled old hackers from the Unix tradition see all of this a just superfluous eye-candy, but that huge block to the left of us on the chart don't warm up to computers with bad/mismatched/funky/tiny/ugly fonts. It's just a fact. And unfortunately, Linux has to compete on the desktop to really challenge MS.
--- WWSD? What Would Strider Do?
In seeking to run a workstation that is 100% free of MS I find that I can live quite well within the confines of StarOffice (I'm sure they can fix the "annoyances" that currently exist) but really miss my Adobe products. (Anyone from that organization reading this?)
+-+-+-+-+-+-+ "I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm quite sure it's hard to pronounce."
Yes, both have their strong points. Gnome is the GPL foundation onto which the FSF may work its way into the desktop market. It certainly has Miguel, who has an astute eye on the overall development process. This is a very good thing.
The KDE team has numerous solid developers who saw a need to create an enivronment which would not shock a windows into never-ever using Linux again. They build a solid environment for some people. This is also a good thing.
In fact BOTH are good things. Both run as GUI into Linux, which, please repeat after me, is a kernel, not a distribution or a window manager.
Now granted as far a coding goes, the Linux community needs to decide on a standard for a Graphical front end. No doubt, no question. However, the people who are doing the real work , the programmers from both projects are working on it. And, I might add, working hard for no money.
The day will come, in my opion that a standard will be agreed upon. Then these groups will adhere to that standard. I have no doubt that they will.
So, everyone involved with development in KDE and Gnome, congrats, you have made great progres in very little time. To the complainers, shut up, input is good when it is contructive , otherwise, it just contributes the insane drivel that oozes into these pointless arguments.
Night all =)
Everyone in my department uses LaTeX. If you have lots of equations, it's really a great thing. And besides, many of the journals accept electronic submissions in LaTeX, but nothing else. Once you get used to it, it's no big deal. Kind of like ls, rm, cd, mkdir, etc..
;)
So I guess we can expect to see a progress report artice on KDE/Koffice here then? Seriously, even though this article produced some interesting threads, I found it a bit lacking for front-page /. "news". It would have been much nicer as a side article only visible in Ask Slashdot or some other category.
It's only software!
The way I see it, everyone is trying to solve this 'lack of office applications' problems using either KDE or GNOME. However, you call it 'lack of office applications for LINUX'. Both GNOME and KDE are independant of the GNU/Linux system. BSD users use them, people who use other Unicies use them (i remember a shot of GNOME running on an SGI Indy under IRIX a while back on the GNOME web site), and if somone really wanted to they could port an X server and junk to FreeDOS (but only a really sick person would) or somthing.
Anyway, the point i'm trying to make is that maybe taking a GNOME- or KDE-based approach is wrong. Gtk+ and Qt are NOT the only toolkits for X that could work. What about Fltk, Motif, etc? Trying to solve this problem by tying the solution to a specific desktop system is wrong, because it doesn't solve the problem for the people who don't use that desktop, or either of them (like me).
In the past there has been talk of the KDE and GNOME people getting to gether and sharing work to make the systems more compatible. if it's happend, i've not been paying attention. If it hasn't, it probably wont.
Sure the new users of an open-source UNIX clone/version/what ever is policialy correct to day are going to be less likly to learn troff and vi or EMACS or whatever and want to use somthing windows-esc, but forcing them to use either GNOME or KDE to get everything they want because whatever won't work well the the other is wrong. it takes away the freedom of choice that free software, and UNIX in general is all about.
Any sort of solution to this problem needs to be able to work well with everything. Since StarOffice is now GPLd, just use it. does it matter? I don't think so. It's independant of both GNOME and KDE, so it's just what is needed. Sure it may lack some features people might want, but they can just add them. Scavanging code to forking off to make some sort of KDE- or GNOME-based version doesn't make a whole lot of sence to me, but what do I know anyway? i'm just a weird BSD-using highschooler who gets no respect from anyone anyway. whatever.
Between the Gimp, Gnucash, Eazel, Evolution, AbiWord, Gnucash and the like
Damn. I didn't know he made so much money from Slashdot!
X with an alpha channel and antialiased fonts, with full compatibility with existing clients would be yummy...
Listen carefully. I'm talking about my government, not yours. I'm talking about what my government is, not what I'd like it to be. And you have absolutely no idea whatsoever about the system I live in, or how well I comprehend it.
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I used to think the Gimp was very hard to use as well. Now that I've used it for a while, Photoshop seems clunky and non-intuituve (and I've used PS vince version 1). I expecially like the tear-off menus the Gimp has; commonly used ones I can place next to the canvas.
It's all a matter of what you're used to, I suppose. Having said that, Photoshop is noticeably faster and has more features. Gimp's getting there, though. I look forward to the 16-bits per color channel!
I thought that was done by all the companies who adopted Office over other solutions, companies desparate for thousands of interoperable work stations that Got Work Done at minimal total cost. As far as I can tell (from living through it), Microsoft just listened really well to what those companies who actually use general office applications actually wanted.
I'd include these attributes in "what they actually wanted":
- one release and deployment cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
- one training and familiarization cycle for the desktop instead of one per application,
- one partner company for the desktop instead of one per application,
- you get the drift.
WordPerfect and Lotus had viable office software right up to the day Microsoft got this right - and even though Microsoft had to invest in building the Windows platform layer to get that integration, it turned out to be a worthwhile investment for them. (Heck, they even passed Windows off as an operating system, even though it manifestly was not at the time...)A Linux-based successor to MS Office won't have to build an integrated platform - few would argue that Windows 3.x had anything on either Gnome or KDE. And there are obvious cost advantages available to whoever can use either platform to solve the real issues of office software.
Could someone focus on these issues of simplifying things for large organizations with a Linux-based office suite? Yep. Certainly all the wounded corporate support types out there have some ideas about what sucks about supporting Office - if someone found those things and fixed them, that would be a start.
Would a product that did this capture the relevant mind-share? Quite possibly, though one would have to withstand the full competitive force of Microsoft. We know that Microsoft will trade off anything up to and including the laws of the United States of America to keep large organizations on their customer list - I'm sure they'd try to compete on "not sucking" if someone made them do it.
Is anyone focusing on this yet? Not that I've heard - and I'd be surprised if any open source development project looked up from scratching its own itch enough to try to scratch the generic large organization's itch. To my mind, that's what will be absolutely required to change the office desktop world.
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
I am a PHB, I admit it. I can do the basics of UNIX, but GNOME makes my computing experience a lot easier while working in the enviroment I've chosen to use. I'm currently using FreeBSD 3.4. I made the descision to use it based on what I read on the Internet about the stability and speed of the system, as well as the philosophy behind it. I am currently running Mozilla M15, GNOME, StarOffice for Linux 5.2, Sun JDK 1.2 for Linux, and Mutt mail client. I was a user that didn't know anything about computers at all 3 months ago, I started learning on Windosw 98, but realized that it wasn't for me. Now I am coming to grips with the FreeBSD ports collection and the GNU C Compiler, as well as the /etc/rc.x startup scripts, and many other fascinating things. As a PHB, all I can say is that you shouldn't underestimate any computer user, be they PHBs, power users, or technicians. The step up from PHB to power user isn't that big, as I think I've pointed out.
I'd love to see a modern replacement for *TeX which, though works well and is supposedly bug-free, is awfully antiquated. I prefer to write my documents as source code, just not in a moral equivalent of Turing machine (raw TeX) or PL/1 (LaTeX).
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