New Commercial Word Processor For FreeBSD

martin-k writes "There is commercial software built for FreeBSD after all... SoftMaker, a German vendor of office apps, just ported the TextMaker word processor to FreeBSD, making this the fifth platform it runs on (after Windows, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, and Linux). Blazingly fast, reads and writes Microsoft Word files seamlessly, and offers everything you expect from a modern word processor. Also coming to your desktop: the PlanMaker spreadsheet and DataMaker database package."

Comments

More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

TextMaker started out under Windows, got ported to Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs, Linux and now to FreeBSD.

Just for kicks, we did an x86 Solaris port in an afternoon. I guess we'll do a few more Unices -- except for Unixware, of course.

Re:More platforms to come...

[Sevn]

Do you guys have anything Visio compatible? That would be a "killer app" for *NIX right now. Right now for Visio, the options are vmware with MS and Visio, CxOffice with Visio, or some serious winex breakdancing to get Visio working.

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

Do you guys have anything Visio compatible?

Not yet. We have the building blocks (we just completed a complete AutoShapes drawing layer for TextMaker and PlanMaker), but we need to build a user interface and a significant symbol library around it.

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

Sure...

- Wordperfect isn't being developed anymore, and the WINE port they did was not really well-received, to put it mildly.

- Abiword and Kword don't have enough features to make them viable for the office, and they don't provide good Word file compatibility.

- LaTex is great for those that know how to use it, but your typical non-tech person won't grok it.

- OpenOffice is too bloated for my taste.

- What's the point in running Linux when you use MS Office through WINE? It will be slow, resource-hungry and is cost-prohibitive.

The main points that TextMaker has going are:

- Fast (should launch in one or two seconds on most machines) and compact (if your WM is fast enough on your machine, so will be TextMaker).

- TextMaker provides solid MS Word compatibility, in quite a few cases better than OpenOffice or StarOffice.

- TextMaker is multi-platform: Runs on FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs and soon Palm OS 5.

- Usability, usability, usability: Everything is where you expect it to be. Clean user interface, clean dialog box design. Text frames, picture frames etc. are shockingly easy to use. Mail-merge is a snap.

Get the trial version of TextMaker if you think this is just marktin' speak...

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

BTW, here is a good comparison of TextMaker and a bunch of other word processors.

Re:More platforms to come...

[nitehorse]

It looks like you guys are using a statically-linked set of Qt and KDE libraries from the KDE2 days. Is this true?

Re:More platforms to come...

[jjgm]

Uh-huh. Currently, Textmaker's asking me to spew a tarball into /opt or wherever.

How about integrating with the OS packaging system? It's the first concern in my mind when I think about supporting this across multiple desktops along with all the other apps we support.

J

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

No. It "looks" like a Qt app, but everything is homegrown.

Re:More platforms to come...

[Brandybuck]

What's so difficult about it? Everything is in one directory. Untar it to wherever you want. It just works. If you don't like /opt, untar it to your home directory. Wherever. Geez.

Re:More platforms to come...

[outZider]

With such an interesting assortment of platforms, do you have any intention of porting to Mac OS X or BeOS?

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

Mac OS X is on my personal wishlist, but if we decide to do it, we'd probably start out with an X11 version running under Mac OS X.

For BeOS, amount of work vs. userbase is not really attractive (FreeBSD was one changed line in the source code).

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

No, I simply try to avoid doing business with litigious people.

Re:More platforms to come...

[jjgm]

*bzzt*. The keyword was "packaging system".

You obviously don't maintain 250 systems. I do.

Re:More platforms to come...

[Wolfrider]

--So install it on ONE, and export with NFS... Unless your 250 aren't networked together.

Re:More platforms to come...

[outZider]

True -- but there is an X11 server for Be. Compiling on a BeOS target with X11 and BONE installed would theoretically be trivial.

Re:More platforms to come...

[chenwah]

Just out of curiosity, can you show us the line 8-)

- flip

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

It's the beep function which had to be #ifdef'd. If you count the matching #endif, that would be two lines...

#if !defined(DWFREEBSD) && !defined(DWSOLARIS)
fd = open("/dev/tty10", O_RDONLY);
if (fd == -1) return(FALSE);
ioctl(fd, KDMKTONE, (DUR << 16) + (1193180 / frq));
#endif

Re:More platforms to come...

[jjgm]

Perhaps you would care to make some more sweeping assumptions about my computing environment.

We don't run NFS; it's too old, creaking and trusting. We have 20 sites over five continents, and we have laptops. There are many other packages routinely installed and maintained. Special cases make my job, and my team's job, much harder.

Re:More platforms to come...

[Wolfrider]

(sympathy) Ah. Well, then. (/me shuts up)

HAND.

Re:More platforms to come...

[ozuma]

I tried to display a Japanese document with using Japanese fonts, but I can't.(Mojibake occurred.)

OpenOffice.org has a project of l10n and i18n. Does TextMaker have a framework of i18n?

Re:More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

TextMaker doesn't do Unicode yet. This is planned for a future release. Currently, we only do one-byte character sets with left-to-right writing.

Re: More platforms to come...

[skidmarx]

Since you mentioned porting, would you give any consideration to doing a port for OS/2 using the Odin libraries ?

Odin is the OS/2 analog to WINE for Linux.

There's a company out of Germany, InnoTek, using the Odin technology to port applications to OS/2. So far they have done:

~ VPC for OS/2
~ Adobe Reader 4
~ Java 1.4.2

And they are working on OpenOffice 1.1 for OS/2.

Gregory L. Marx

Re: More platforms to come...

[martin-k]

We had a nearly-finished OS/2 version of TextMaker in 1996, but since then, interest in OS/2 software has declined so much that we never completed it, let alone release it.

If and when we do ports, we'll never again use emulation libraries. We used Micrografx Mirrors to port DataMaker to OS/2 in 1995/1996, and I never want to experience such a nightmare again.

How far along is OpenOffice for OS/2?

Nice surprise

[__past__]

It's nice to hear that, however, I'm mildly surprised. There was a poll at bsdforums IIRC that asked whether people would be willing to pay for it - the vast majority (including me) seemed to see no real need for it. There are already various free office suites that work quite well, and if anybody would need TextMaker, they could simply run the linux version - works fine for lots of other apps, from acrobat reader to a complete Lisp IDE including native-code compiler (generating Linux binaries, of course), debugger and profiler I happen to use with FreeBSDs Linux compatibility.

In other words, while I'm always happy to see my platform of choice supported, I wouldn't expect any significant commercial gain for SoftMaker. Most people won't be interested in a proprietary office suite - just as with Linux people, but the FreeBSD desktop market is obviously a lot smaller than even the Linux one - and others would have bought it anyway, even without a native port.

(Of course, if they would be hiring, I would be much more enthusiastic ;-)
(As I would if this story wouldn't be about TextMaker, but VMWare, which is the only proprietary program that I really, really miss.)

Re:Nice surprise

[martin-k]

I wouldn't expect any significant commercial gain for SoftMaker.

It got us posted on Slashdot...

Re:Nice surprise

[Brandybuck]

According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

I've used the demo TextMaker, and frankly it's awesome. Blazingly fast, does everything I need a WP for, and even handles some Word docs that OO can't format correctly. I'm certainly considering a purchase.

Re:Nice surprise

[__past__]

According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

As far as I understand, their main problem wasn't about porting, but about supporting another OS. I have little idea about what kind of framework they use, so I don't know how platform-independent their code really is, but it certainly has at least some potential to make support more complicated.

It would be really great if SoftMaker - or other company that made the same step, like Opera - would follow up with some data, like how many units they sold, how it affected their support expenses, etc. I can see why they wouldn't, but I would certainly be most interested in it.

I've used the demo TextMaker, and frankly it's awesome. [...] I'm certainly considering a purchase.

Well, more power to you, and SoftMaker for that matter. I don't want to be misunderstood: I think this is great - as a FreeBSD user and supporter I love these kinds of thing, and SoftMaker certainly gained some Geek credit points with it. I'm just surprised given the mostly negative feedback before. (And while I do not consider a purchase at all, simply because I can't even remember using an Office suite the last time, let alone for something OOo (which sucks more on FreeBSD than elsewhere, probably due to Sun's idea of portability - "any platform, as long as it's Windows, Solaris or Red Hat") or Gnome-Office wasn't sufficient, I realize that I'm simply not their target audience)

If this works, great. If it doesn't, we'll have a disgruntled commercial vendor and potentially (if they withdraw the offer) disgruntled end users. I'd hate this to happen because of unjustified expectations on either side.

Re:Nice surprise

[pknoll]

I run the Linux version of VMWare on FreeBSD. Works fine. Networking is a little trickier, but you can do both host-only and bridged.

Granted, I'm using version 2.0.4, and don't know whether or not Workstation 4 would run or not.

Re:Nice surprise

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

To be honest, this statements bugs me. Even if all they did do is recompile, and if it worked (a recompile is not sufficient in all cases, they're pretty lucky) that just solves the coding aspect of the app.

Other major aspects:
Packaging.
Documentation.
Testing.

Of those 3, packaging is sure to be done, since they can't really ship without it being installable. Documentation, well, for the most part they can use the warmed over Linux docs (with maybe some errata on installation and printing) and users should be fine. What I'd be worried about is if they did a full QA run on it. Becaue it works on Linux doesn't mean it's just going to work on FreeBSD, and I hope I'm correct in assuming they did do a QA run, just didn't mention it.

Re:Nice surprise

[Brandybuck]

There's some evidence that they did do some significant QA on the FreeBSD build. The product first came to my attention because someone was beta testing it. It wasn't just built and thrown out there.

Packaging is simple. At least with the demo, you just untar it somewhere and it's ready to run. Since everything is statically linked but xlib and libc, so there are no installation issues.

The documentation covers Linux *AND* FreeBSD, since there are no functional disimilarities in the products. Printing is identical (lp or gv or add your own command).

Re:Nice surprise

[Felis Rex]

Hey, this software is genuinely a pleasant surprise. I am so impressed that I'm going to buy it. And in the last three years, I have only bought three programs, all of them games. Sure, I have OOo installed under FreeBSD. It works very well for my needs so far. But TextMaker is not only very impressive software, it's a great price, and I want to encourage this behavior. How can I lose by purchasing it? I get a surprisingly good word processor, and I show other companies that, yes, FreeBSD is a platform worth supporting. I win both ways. And at the same price as my last game purchase! Just waiting on the next paycheck.

Infringement?

[agent dero]

Maybe I am unclear on the copyright infringement thing and everything, but doesn't this conflict with MS in some way?!

I mean, Open Office is freeware (also works on FreeBSD) but they're selling something like this with Word capabilities? I smell trouble...or maybe it's just me ;-)

BTW, I am not a fan of commercial apps for OSS platforms, seems contradicting somehow

Re:Infringement?

[evilviper]

I am not a fan of commercial apps for OSS platforms, seems contradicting somehow

You've listened to RMS' ranting too much.

Re:Infringement?

[thanjee]

In what way is it infringing?

the .doc format is now an open xml format (with optional digital signing if you want the security), so any wordprocessor can have the ability to import a .doc file (the xml kind).

Microsofts reasoning behind this move: If .doc becomes the standard format for all documents (on all wordprocessors, despite their OS), then Microsoft Word by default becomes the defacto standard for all documents.

The question then becomes, who will be able to outdo Microsoft in working with the .doc format given they have a 10 year head start?

Re:Productivity Problems

[judmarc]

I've recompiled and reinstalled the *entire OS* in 20 minutes. (1.5MHz machine.)

Sure there isn't something you're doing wrong?

Regarding Textmaker

[thanjee]

Has anyone here actually tried Textmaker? If it delivers what the web site states, then it is probably worth paying for. They have a free 30 day trial version which I am currently downloading. If I like it and think it will do a better job than the other software I am currently using then I will pay for it. If not, well hey, it is just fun trying new stuff out.

Re:Regarding Textmaker

[martin-k]

If you have a .doc file that gets imported incorrectly, you might want to send it to support@softmaker.de for inspection. We are always improving the filters, and many of the improvements are based on user feedback.

Re:Productivity Problems

[Brandybuck]

Hmmm, takes me 18 minutes on a 2.8GHz machine. You using a ramdisk or something?

Re:Productivity Problems

[evilviper]

takes me 18 minutes on a 2.8GHz machine.

There's a huge difference between the MHz rating for an AMD processor, and a Pentium 4 processor. If he's talking about an XP chip, that would put his 1.5GHz a lot closer to your 2.8GHz than you might think.

Then there's the issue of how much memory you have, how fast your disks are, etc.

Re:the price is weird though

[martin-k]

The symbol that looks like a C= is the Euro sign, not the pound sign... :-)

TextMaker costs either EUR 49.95 or US$49.95.

Portability: What commercial unix software needs

[harikiri]

The better the codebase is, and if indeed it is so portable a simple ./configure ; make install will suffice, the more platforms software "X" will run on. For commercial software, this means that they don't have to bend over backwards for a slight increase in marketshare by offering a commercial (if unsupported) piece of software for the more esoteric UNIX platforms out there.

Ie, if you were a company that created a word processor built on C/C++, and you had made an effort to use appropriate configure scripts on Unix to assist in creating builds, by putting a small amount of time in to enable the code to build on esoteric-platform-1, and it worked, you suddenly have an entirely new (if small) market to sell your product to.

However, if your application sucks, nobody is going to buy it. But if you sold each application with a license that enabled *any* platform (ie, pay $49 and download program for windows/linux/bsd), and not having to pay for a copy of the linux vs bsd version, woo.. happy endusers.

I dunno what I'm saying at this point, just rambling. :-)

Re:Productivity Problems

[TheLink]

Hmm, What O/S and version is that?

I got a CPU 1000 times faster than 1.5MHz and recompiling and reinstalling FreeBSD takes longer than 20 minutes. While one could think the HDDs are a bottleneck the disk I/O stats don't seem to indicate so.

Re:Productivity Problems (OT)

[cperciva]

I assume you're talking about a buildworld/installworld here.

Can you give me details of how you did this? I'm looking to get a buildbox soon, so I'm interested in any tips (at least, those backed up by benchmarks) people have on the issue.

Re:Productivity Problems (OT)

[judmarc]

As some of you have pointed out, yep, that's 1.5GHz. *blush*

This was with FreeBSD-STABLE; I'm now using -CURRENT, for which buildworld/installworld takes considerably longer.

Also, (some may consider this cheating), I usually skipped the kernel config unless something important had changed. The kernel config might add 5-10 minutes (again, longer now with -CURRENT).

Setup details (hardware): The 1.5GHz chip is an Athlon XP1800+. The FreeBSD slice is on a RAID0 array consisting of two IBM 40GB ATA100 drives (shared with Win2K; Gentoo and Win98 share a 20GB IBM ATA66 HD). 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM. Nice stuff for when I built it, but solidly middle-class today, I think.

Setup details (software): Softupdates enabled on root. Tagged queueing at that time on the IBM drives, no longer an option now. No ramdisk; I tried it, and build times were within seconds of what they were without it, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. And definitely no -jx; as others have reported, that slowed things down for me. Make.conf set (with gcc 2.95 at the time) for i686, no games and no profiled libraries. I mounted the non-root non-swap partitions (for me, /var and /usr) -noatime. Because of the 512MB RAM, I could also leave swap turned off if I chose. I dropped to single user most times, but occasionally didn't bother - I don't remember this making a significant difference to build times. That's pretty much it.

Tested out

[rraton]

Tested it on NetBSD with Linux emulation. Works just fine, was quite fast and sweet. Only problem was that when I tried adding lists, I could not get out of the list mode... Anyway, I wouldn't pay 50eur from it, because there are similar choises for no charge.

Re:Tested out

[aelfwyne]

For the casual word-processor user, geek, and perhaps undergrad student, KWord or OpenOffice is sufficient, and to pay US$69 for it doesn't seem an viable option.

However, if it truly delivers fast, reliable, feature filled, word processing to linux/freebsd, then *SERIOUS* word processors should be interested. Some of us have to do more than just a letter to grandma.

For instance (and I don't know if it supports these) as a student in upper level History, and soon to be in grad school (next Fall), I know I need a word processor that handles the following all correctly:
* Headers & Footers.
* Supressing first page on Headers & Footers
* .RTF format in/out
* .DOC format in/out (mostly in, maybe out)
* Footnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Endnoting (Keeping numbering straight)
* Indexing

And that's off the top of my head. You'd be surprised how rare some of those features are. And when they do exist, they don't always work correctly.

Beyond that, you want good spell check, grammar check (neither do you depend on though), and versioning capability. That's just off the top of my head.

A word processor that handles all of that and:
* Doesn't crash frequently
* Can load up in a matter of seconds (single-digits here folks)
* Doesn't output strangely formatted text (1)
is probably worth US $69 to me.

(1) Strangely formatted text: I recently printed out a coverpage that had some large lettering on the front in Open Office. It looked fine on the screen, but when printed, the letters were bunched up too closely - the spacing didn't match the size of the font. UNFORGIVABLE. A real word processing user cares about the appearance of printed output.

Re:No, Thanks

[martin-k]

"Appears" is the correct term. It's a straight X app without any external library references except for Xlib and glibc. Definitely no Qt in there.

It's a troll people

[Burb]

Unfortunately, the trolls are taking over the BSD postings (or more correctly everyone else is abandonding slashdot bsd forums and leaving them to pleasure themselves in peace)

Re:Productivity Problems

[judmarc]

Yes, 1.5GHz was what I meant to say.

The 20 minute times were for -STABLE. -CURRENT takes a lot longer.