Slashdot Mirror
Text-Console Based Word Processing?
chipperdog asks: "I am looking for an activly maintained console based word processor, similar to what one could find with Appleworks, from the Apple // era (Prodos 8 version, pre-//gs), or even one comparable to DOS versions of WP and Microsoft Word. An open-source one that compiles and runs in Linux would be best, although it would be nice to find one that could run on a 486DX2 50MHz with 8MB. A Google and Freshmeat search only turned up editors that seem to lack some of the necessary word processing features I am seeking.
Although I mostly use VI (and *TEX when necessary), some no-so-geeky end users need the quasi-WSIWYG interface."
Although I mostly use VI
Try Emacs.
Yet Another Web Site
pico + gpm is a simple, powerful combination.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
RPM here.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Looks like you can go buy Wordperfect 10 for Windows in a family pack for $49 - $20 holiday discount from corel, then go Here to buy a legal $40 copy of the Wordperfect 5.1 floppies that you are then entitled to use.
;)
Many Wordperfect DOS tips here.
This Ask Slashdot answer provided to you by Google, like most of them.
o/~ Join us now and share the software
How well will emacs work on a 486DX2 50MHz with 8MB?
Yet Another Web Site
As I recall, the Linux version of WordPerfect that was available as a free download a few years ago, had a console mode as well as a GUI mode. I can't say for sure, since I never could get it to install :)
What are you talking, it's a light weight OS. :)
I didn't start it!
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
has what you need.
It has a legacy stretching back further than TeX and is used for man page formatting on tty devices.
You can format the output to higher resolution devices if you wish. There's even some work afoot to make it output html, which I think has a lot of potential for helping me to stop worrying about my MANPATH
"Provided by the management for your protection."
And when did pico become a WYSIWYG word-processor? Read the question!
I think it's a dead end. Either run DOS and find old copies of MS Word 2 (which was a great product...), or get slightly more powerful machines and run something like lyx. Or teach people how to use nroff/groff -- probably easier for non-geeks than TeX.
Rats drown in Wordstar.
(An old palindrome)
I was remembering back in the day of Wordstar, lo and behold it is a add-on for Word 97/2000! We are talking functionality of those classic keystrokes!
Another interesting page.
Using linux, I prefer joe over vi. Any idiot (that would be me) can use joe.
I've found that it is not realistic to teach the average user to use Vi or Vim or Emacs. I've had some success in configuring Vim to work with the WordStar/Borland control-key editing commands, but I'm not finished. I'm interested in finding others who want to do this too.
Maybe the old 5.1 or 6.x versions of WordPerfect for SCO Unix will work even on modern Linuxes. There's an old HOWTO. Check Google. Some DOS word processors like WordPerfect, XyWrite and the like might work under emulation, but getting a SCO one wotking wouldn't feel like emulation when it comes to things like navigating the filesystems, running multiuser, and using colors to signify formatting over terminal emulation.
I'm not sure "non-geeky users" are going to be keen on any console-mode word processor, no matter how capable it is, though. I guess you know your users best.
VDE by Eric Meyer is an amazingly fast and powerful, RAM resident editor written in Assembler. Take a look and see if it meets your needs. VDE would perform well on a 8086 class PC with minimal RAM
The main limitation of VDE is file size. Because it loads the entire file into a page of memory, VDE can only work with a file of up to 64MB in size. To get around this limitation VDE is designed to easily work with files split into smaller chunks.
You could run it over FreeDOSor UNIX.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
There was an MS-DOS shareware product -- in fact, it was the product for which the word "shareware" was coined, and by a guy who'd been Microsoft employee number 9, no less -- called PC-Write. It was a lightweight (fit on a floppy), blindingly fast (even on an original 4.77 MHz 8088) quasi-WYSIWYG word processor. I tried it, I paid for it, I used it a lot. With a little care, you could do fairly close to WYSIWYG editing of plain ASCII files.
The author (Bob Wallace) passed away September 29, 2002. His company is long gone, as is the company his product was sold to.
It looks as if you can download version 3.04 here. Halfway down this page you'll find version 4.15. The Pascal source code was available at one point; it's probably disappeared.
A similar product, "Breeze Word Processor," appears to be available here. This is a four year old (to the day!) Netnews discussion of lightweight MS-DOS word processor packages. Your very best bet might be an MS-DOS or Windows 3.x version of WordPerfect or Microsoft Word.
None of these are actively supported.-(
In this day when people lightly port Sim City and Civilization to PDAs and phones and web browsers, it shouldn't be that hard to recreate one of these.
P.S.: What OS is your 8 MB system running?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Emacs is a light weight OS?
Ya. Now if only someone would write a decent text editor that ran on it.
lyx definitely a sound suggestion.
:)
I was going to suggest framemaker, which can output latex format files(done my thesis with it, I knew I should have use vi, I cheated). However, Adobe decided not to continue its beta testing on Linux version I think lyx is the only choice for your serious, professional editing needs.(whoever says MS Word can meet professional editing needs obviously hasn't been in publishing field before
In summary: see LaTeX
- "That's no OS. It's a text editor!"
- "It's too big to be a text editor!"
- "I have a very bad feeling about this..."
- "Yeah, I think you're right. Full uninstall! Lock in the auxliary swap disk!"
The poster mentioned tex. The poster doesn't seem to be looking for tex, but something WYSIWYGish. Like WP for DOS. It's very possible that someone could write a front-end or analog of LyX that worked in the terminal rather than in X, generating LaTeX and then PS or PDF.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Why not just use LaTeX? It is great! It is better than OpenOffice (flame-bait??). Sorry. It is all I need. Why should I use some MS-Word wannabe?? ;-)
Nothing beats TeX quality formating. I use it to do my hair as well.
Everyone keeps suggesting text editors. Text editors are great, but they are NOT word processors!
Word processors give you functionality that text editors don't. With a word processor, you can define the paper size, the margins on the paper, as well as things like fonts (Arial, anyone?), kerning, justification, etc. ad nauseum. Even more, word processors generally have printer support, so you can submit a print job from the program instead of the command line, select the printer you want to use, even manage print jobs.
A word processor lets you put multiple columns on a page. A word processor lets you embed images in a document.
Show me a text editor that has all these features and I'll show you a word processor. Yes, there *were* console (read: non-graphical) word processors that could do this. As the parent says, like WordPerfect and Word for DOS.
So why doesn't the parent use WordPerfect or Word for DOS? For one thing, they are hard to find. For another thing, they cost money. For a third thing, it would be awfully nice to have an open source one.
Next time read the parent! If they say "word processor" don't suggest "text editor!"
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Hrmph. I think joto got the short stick from moderators...
I think he's right -- it used to be that console based WP's were popular because it required less resources and ran much faster than GUI WYSIWYG WP's. But that was back in the days when console-mode VGA ops were still magnitudes faster than rendering the same text on the graphics-mode VGA.
Times have changed -- with HW acceleration, gobs of memory, and 2,000 MHz PC's (with much faster execution clock counts), there's just no market (community) need for new WP's to be text-based.
What's wrong with WordPerfect? There has been Linux, DOS and SCO versions that could certainly run fine on a 486.
With new Linux PC's selling for $200 at Walmart, it's hard to believe someone would take poverty so seriously as to try to make do on a 486 *and* try to run the latest linux.
Of course, maybe I'm missing the original poster's intention. Maybe he's homebrewing an uber-Tandy-Model-100 using recycled 486 parts and a FLASH drive... And he intends to have a 40x12 LCD as his console... But I somehow doubt that...
Groff's main weakness compared to the current troff is a complete lack of Unicode support. What happened is that the groff author went to a lot of effort to give Groff iso-8859-1 support. Unfortunatly, he lost interest in Groff (which I don't mind; I do not feel that writing free software should make you a slave to that software for life) and the FSF had a heck of a time finding a maintainer for Groff.
Now that Unicode is slowly catching on, there is a need to give Groff Unicode support. I do not think that Groff's current maintainer is interested in doing this; it is a lot of work and the need for it is not perceived as being that important. In fact, this is a free software project in the works: Give groff real Unicode support.
Perhaps it is possible to port the current Troff (with unicode support) to Unix.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
And since when could you do WYSIWYG on a text console?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Word 2 could do bold, italic, underlines, and did a pretty good job of getting the line/page breaks right on a standard DOS console (basically a lame vt100) back in 1985. Given the references in the original question, that seemed to be level of "WYSIWYG" the original poster was interested in.
Regardless, PICO is NOT a word processor in any way, shape, or form. It's a text editor.
just because you're using a non graphical terminal doesn't mean you need to be back so far in the web browsing world.... you should use w3m instead of lynx, it supports tables and frames which makes some web sites a whole lot easier to read
Need a Catering Connection
Could you use Tex or SGML and have layouts to convert to whatever format you need.
A text editor is good enough for SGML or TEX and the formats support everything you could do in a word processor (and probably more).
EMacs may have addons for Tex and SGML
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Joe offers basic line/word wrapping functionality, and the JSTAR option offers basic Wordstar key-commands.
Protext---the text-based word processor that was originally released for the AtariST, Acorn, and Amtrad PC---is still available for sale. See http://home.btconnect.com/tigerteam/protext/ for more info. There isn't a Linux native version, but it is a light-weight MS-DOS program that should run under the appropriate Linux-hosted emulator.
when did pico become a WYSIWYG word-processor?
Well, pretty much anything that runs in a text console isn't going to be WYSIWYG - last time I checked, a text console won't display different size characters.
WYSIWYG means "What You See Is What You Get" - which pretty much excludes text consoles all together.