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Happy 3rd Birthday To OpenOffice.org
Milo Fungus writes "OpenOffice.org is three years old today. The birthday page links to interviews and information about OpenOffice.org's push to schools, which is led by Ian Lynch of the Marketing Project. As a happy and satisfied user, I say 'Happy Birthday' with vigor and gusto." Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.
Now that they are getting coached, they will probably know why they shoud opt for it.
Or maybe not...
how long until
They should wish to lose some weight this year...
Get your boss to an OpenOffice.org pitch party -- "if they are innundated by advertisements, they will come!"
stuff |
It's nice to have a realistic alternative to MS Office. I've tried many OSS Office Alternatives, and this is by far the best of them all. Happy Birthday!
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
3 years old. Wow, how did they do all that in three years?
Microsoft Works: Oxymoron of the year. ~ ^.^
Time for you to start coding dude!
Happy Birthday OO! You rock!
My mom can use the Ximian OpenOffice Version, it's open office, just nicely polished, there is even a 1.1 version, now.
It was quite a change for our school to completely move to Open/StarOffice two years ago, but I'm glad we did it now.
Happy Birthday and best wishes!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
And I thought the C-64 article was a snoozer.
Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.
- Mr. Burns, I've got a a present for you, sir! It's just like Microsoft Office, but free and almost works.
- Smithers, help me to slap this guy! SSHLAP! Once more! SSHLAP! Now both of you! SSHLAP-SSHLAP!! Now give me a taste! SSHLAP! Now both of you again! SSHLAP! SSHLAP!
oo owns.
Get a bunch of your hippy MacOS mates together and pay someone to develop it. Oh, you wanted it for free.. silly me.
How we know is more important than what we know.
No... The Mac OS X Porting group specifically said that the only reason they haven't been able to port to Cocoa is that they need to change several of the Graphics APIs owned by different parts of the project.
Since some of these APIs are being revamped anyway(for all platforms), they feel it best to wait until they are finalized, or at least fleshed out enough to allow porting work to begin. This has the two fold advantage of:
A: They will have some say in the new APIs so MacOSX Concerns can be taken into account
and
B: They wont have to waste tons of time porting over obsolete code that will have to be changed anyway.
Ok... if *anyone* used the phrase "vigor and gusto", how long would it take to get marked as a troll?
To stay on topic, to get 90% of Microsoft Office features and usability in just three years *is* pretty amazing. Or maybe M$ just sucks and OO serves as proof positive that Microsoft Office has always been a scam first and a productivity package second.
Laws are for people with no friends.
As a happy and satisfied user, I say 'Happy Birthday' with vigor and gusto.
Has someone ported Vigor to OpenOffice now? I thought it was only available on vi ports.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
On a related note, StarOffice 7 comes out tomorrow. It's a free download for educational use.
OK, that was a bad troll. You're right on the copyright on the song, but where is there any indication--even a HINT--that he sang the song in public? There isn't.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
There's no native GTK or Qt port either. It hasn't been rewritten in Java yet, or ported to the Mozilla framework. I even have my doubts about how "native" the win32 version is. The point is, its a huge and ponderously monolithic piece of software. It was built using its own UI system and never designed to render widgets using anything else, and some of the controls it uses I doubt have equivalents in most other toolkits. Sun can't even make a version of StarOffice that looks consistent with their own "Java desktop" Linux distribution. Now apparently someone is working on an Aqua, but you can't seriously expect Sun, whatever you think of them, to fund the port themselves, and you should appreciate the technical obstacles the people who are porting it face when considering how long it is taking.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
Since students and academic folk are poor anyway, and nobody wants to steal from Microsoft, tell others at your school or university about OpenOffice.org.
I've convinced a couple professors to link to the projects from their web page. Hell, I learned about OpenOffice from school myself. It's a great place to spread awareness of this Office alternative.
so I'll follow the SUN?
Do I like SUN for sponsoring and helping develop OOo or do I hate them for supposedly backing SCO, keeping Java "proprietary," creating the Mad Hatter "Java Desktop" and having an overall lukewarm attitude towards Linux?
Either way, many thanks to the folks of OOo -- they're a heuuuuge factor in making my laptop functional and productuve...and MS-Free.
Three cheers to SUN for being one of the few companies to "get" Free Software licensing. I think it was the then CEO, at a gnome confernce:
"I have three letters to describe our licensing scheme: G - P - L!" [to much applause]
Here's the original announcment.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Martin Luther was a monk. Later in life he did marry. Shoot, there even was a Martin, Jr. I didn't think there would be!
Here I was going to go off on a rant and make fun of you're historical inaccuracy and how dumb you were, and you had the audacity to be right! Darn.
Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.
Yeah, I'll just burn the web site on a cdrom.
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Just wondering if Sun ever becomes disinterested in continuing its OpenOffice efforts, for instance, by striking a deal with M$ to use its Unix version of MS Office (assuming there is gonna be one).
Would they just kiss all their open source efforts good-buy, like AOL did to Mozilla?
You don't really understand the problem. You see, OpenOffice does not run as a GUI program on OS X like it does on Windows and Unix. Instead, the user first has to launch an X11 server (something most users don't have), then run OpenOffice as a command line program that connects to the X server. While it works, it has ZERO integration with the system and is only viable for geek users who know what they're doing. Normal OS X users cannot use OpenOffice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
So three years ago OpenOffice.org was founded from the released ashes of StarOffice5.2.
Now three years later, with OO1.1/SO7.0, we have the first broadly acceptable product fit for the general public. It feels like three years of hell, but really that's pretty impressive.
Congrats OO, and keep moving forward!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Just one more example of Suns idea of portable software, Java is another one: Works on any platform as long as it's Windows, Solaris or Red Hat.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Everybody that got a system redo by me got a copy of open office, doesn't matter if the OS was Windows or Linux...
No complaints after explaning that 99% of their friends doc's can be opened, which is better than MS office self...
At first all were amazed how this was posible, after convincing that they would have a office suite for no money that didn't fell of a truck and would not give any guilt feelings or hungry licencencing dogs... they fell for it and still use it up to date, all of them...
I run a small consultancy and design firm and noticed that GPL is great for end users, just as envisioned...
One way or the other we are all end user, like our great encesters with stone akses we need those tools to survive in the future...
Am I the only dyslexic fool who saw this and read "Happy Third Party to Buy OpenOffice.Org" ??
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Because of the fact that they were literally handed the source to StarOffice 5.0, they immediately had on office suite to distribute. Though they did do a great job with improvements and smoothing out the quirks of staroffice (the "integrated' scheme of 5.x annoyed me terribly), they did not create all of openoffice in just 3 years. (note that the binary is still called soffice)
I believe Panther ships with the X11 server by default, so it might be possible to put together a nic script for OS X users that would launch the X11 server and then Office. That's at least a little better as you can start with the assumption they have X11 and do not have to get it...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
People are so used to buying software and saying "yep, it sux, but there's nothing I can do about it" that they don't even seek out maintenance. Can you imagine buying a car and saying "yeah, the brakes squeek a bit, but I'll just wait until the next upgrade and hope that someone fixes it". It doesn't even make sense! Yet that's what people do with software -- whine to everyone who'll listen (except the proper channels of course) and hope that someone will fix the bug they need fixed or add the feature they want written.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, I wouldnt go so far as to say the older version sucked ass, but the new one is nice. I dont have any idea why people think Word is any better. I own my own business, and all I use is Open Office, and I even OWN MS Office, but I see no need to use it. I really think these people who say that MS is so much better actually dont do much more then simple formatting anyways.
additionally, apple is promising that x11 will be "fully" integrated with aqua, viz. you can copy and paste between the two window managers.
now that makes openoffice viable for dad.
2 1337 4 u!
Unfortunately, Microsoft has this thing called the MSDN Academic Alliance.
Students and staff of associated educational facilities get Microsoft software for the "price of media and shipping."
That means all programming students can get Visual Studio Pro for $5, and CIS students (and maybe others) can get WinXP for just as cheap.
The college where I'm a student worker has signed up for it. We're teaching C#, Visual C++, and VB.net, all through Visual Studio. All computers on campus run WinXP Pro. (Except for some machines in IT, which run Novell on Linux)
I'm make everyone I know aware of RHCT and RHCE, to try to get more UNIX around, but I'm afraid I'm not in any position to push. Write an email to them and tout further Linux curriculum and usage, will ya?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
(o)(o)
True but the latest release loads allot quicker, still makes me want to hit something though :( Apart from that its excellent, I dont even bother using pirate MS Office anymore!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What else is known about its private UI setup?
Well then why is the project getting millions of downloads?
Quite a lot of nobodys there..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the Apple freaks were there first. They took the hippy by the horns and rode him long before Stallman.
How we know is more important than what we know.
And it's roUnin, not 'ronin'.
It's really a part of the name. Somewhere in the depths of the PTO there's a company with OpenOffice trademark name. So, they keep the .org to stay out of trouble!
"99% of their friends doc's can be opened, which is better than MS office self...
Oh really
Are you seriously claiming that 1% of MS Office docs cannot be opened by MS Office?
I open between 1 and 10 Office documents every day sent to me by someone else. In the last year perhaps ONE of those failed to open, ie more like 0.1% failure rate.
Also, OO cannot handle Excel spreadsheets properly. I am not going to waste my time replotting every graph just because some programmer can't be bothered to write an import filter that works.
roUnin.
I've gathered that native porting will happen around 2006, with OpenOffice 2.0. Seems like a long time for it to happen, but I think it's the right thing to do, given their limited manpower.
I am aware that both OOo and Java work on more platforms than this, if that's what you mean. It's just not that Sun would really care, and it shows.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
from http://stats.openoffice.org/spreadsheet/index.html
There have been over 20 million downloads of OpenOffice... not bad!
Sorry, all these Word users may well be happy (I use Editpad, I'm an engineer not a secretary) but OO's spreadsheet is slow, unreliable and incompatible.
was asking for a crack for MS Office, because his trial version was about to run out (I didn't even know MS Office had trial versions), so I sent him a link to OpenOffice.org. Today he came in and was extremely happy. He said it installed with no problems, let him open all of his existing .doc files, and the look and feel was easy to get used to. I work for a Cable ISP, and my Supervisor is one of those guys who gets nervous when you say IP address, so he's not very technically inclined... He was very impressed with thee software, and could not believe he got a free program to run on windows that did not turn his computer into a adware box. He said that if there were any complaints, it was that it would take a bit to learn the features provided by openoffice that are missing from that other office suite. All in all, he is a very happy man, and I'm happy, because it always helps to make your boss happy for a while. Thanks OpenOffice!
Here's another happy OpenOffice user! R-
Hard loop..... huh?
Dynamic Designs
We switched our law practice to Linux (Suse) almost a year ago. Critical to that was OpenOffice. If you want a testimonial from a group of power users of OpenOffice try lawyers.
The computers now work all the time; they don't crash and our core business is being done without interruptions from computer problems.
MS doesn't seem to understand that this is the minimum standard that must be met before looking at extra "features". After 6 months it was not even the remotest thought from anyone in the office to go back to MS.
Both my girlfriend and I are poor, starving college students. I'm C.S. Major who switches between Windows and Red Hat on a pretty constant basis, so I use OpenOffice.org to avoid conflicts in file types (like using Office XP) for projects/papers/assignments. She, on the other hand, doesn't even have Office 97 and is very involved with clubs and groups, as well as taking 18 credits this semester. I gave her a copy of OpenOffice.org v.1.1 (I think it was rc3) about a month ago, and WHAM! She's hooked. She absolutely loves it, and it runs beautifly on her older machine (PII-233, 96MB Ram, Win98). She's given the CD I made for her with the install stuff to her friends with similar needs, and no complaints have made their way back to me (yet). OOo really is awesomeness! ^^
Abiword and Gnumeric are faster (MUCH faster) and better looking with native Gnome2 integration.
openoffice bloated? not quite, there's no animated paperclip to start with if they fix the load time, the suite rocks. as it is now, its great.
Really? well it says right here on page 185 of the Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese dictionary:
Ronin, n. (Kanji spelling) 1.Masterless samurai. 2.unemployed person. 3.High school person who has not yet passed a college entrance examination.
(Random House Japanese-English, English-Japanese dictionary / Compiled by Nakao Seigo. 1997 Random House, Inc. New York NY. ISBN# 0-679-78001-7)
Actually there is an accented 'o' in there, but I'm unable to render that character as well, so I guess that you're technically correct that I misspelled it.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Just curious... what does "SMT" mean in this context?
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Perhaps you haven't realized this, but of people who read Slashdot, significant percentage does use OpenOffice, or at least some other Open/Free Office suite. And that's why it is fairly newsworthy.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I really wish they would hurry up and fix the word count so you could count selections and count (or not count) footnotes. Unfortunately its pretty useless for many academics and postgrads until it lets you do this.
I just find it amazing that such an essential feature has still not been addressed despite many bug reports and feature requests.
I'm looking forward to 2.0 where apparently this is being addressed.
It's about FREE, not free. Show me a product as good as MS Office, for Mac OS X, and I'll buy it. I may hate MS's business strategy, but Office has the market because it's a real product...not a dream or an "also ran".
Give us a product we can use to do all the things we need to do as well as MS Office, and we'll buy it. Don't forget compatibility, since we have to communicate with the real world - which includes exchanging documents.
OO is telling Mac users that we should use Open Office, but we have to wait until 2005 or later..f'ckoff.
I'm not a programmer, or I _would_ help. I'm an engineer. I need to use the product, not talk about it or write it. Put up or shut up. While you're at it, fix that bloat problem - thin is in.
Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a critical component of spiritual devotion. Jon Krakauer
As recently as last weekend, I emerged abiword 2.0 (on my gentoo desktop), and tried to open my resume (in .doc format) that I've constantly been updating over the years.
Go to open it.. crash.
In addition, I was getting strange refresh issues with Abiword (had to scroll up and down the page to get it to properly display edited text - ie, deleted words werent getting deleted from the screen).
Yes Abiword is attractive-looking (way less visual clutter than alternative office suites), but because of the issues I described above, I won't be using it anytime soon.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1331169,00.as p
"Addressing several thousand attendees at the Worldwide Partner Conference, he took a swipe at Linux, open source and StarOffice, saying, "they simply accept the view that what they have is good enough. That view does not foster innovation. Being where we were with Office 1997 is not good enough for us," he said."
Microsoft admitting that OO is already equal to something they spent millions and millions on and also happens to be much more widely used than Office XP is the best thing they could have said.
I mean that. Office 97 is still very popular. One of the biggest challenges MS has is moving people off that since many businesses find that Office 97 is all they need. The fact they think OO has met the quality level that most of world thinks is "good enough" is excellent news.
Congrats to the OpenOffice.org team and thanks to Microsoft for the marketing material.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I'm not a programmer, or I _would_ help. I'm an engineer. I need to use the product, not talk about it or write it. Put up or shut up. While you're at it, fix that bloat problem - thin is in.
...
Well, then, good for you. So don't use OOo - nobody's forcing you to. No reason to start thinking it's all one big insult directed at you
Personally, I find OOo very useful and I'm extremely happy that it exists.
You know I love them, I'm on a dial up connection.
photosMy Photostream
I would really like OO to displace MS Office, but my experience is that there are too many glitches when sharing *.doc and *.ppt files for OO to be a realistic alternative to MS Office. Sometimes what I get is wildly off (e.g. a 6 page OO doc becomes a 9 page Word doc; tables disappear; deleted text reappears, etc.)
My reality is that many people send me MS office files, and the translation back and forth must be perfect for me to abandon MS Office. If I didn't work with MS files, and I could use OO exclusively, I would have switched a long time ago.
So, in the meantime I use MS Office with CrossOver Office, and I don't have any problems.
Simple, while open source code, garners stability from being examined and evolved by many programmers. GNU code has a nasty habit of picking up large numbers of undocumented and otherwise unecessary "features" that are conducive to its relative slowness. Also GNU is a broken Unix standard, things designed to the GNU specification are not necessarily compliant in Unix (which Linux does seek to replicate) Take a look at popular GNU applications such as EMacs, EMacs is quite possibly the largest simple text editor ever concieved, it is practically its own operating system and that's hardly necessary. EMacs is like using an atomic bomb to get rid of a tree stump. Like it or not, though Linux has a good deal of stability, it's quite sluggish in many aspects and will continue to be until some standardized Linux is created (IE Linus stepping forward and saying "this is Linux, all Linux has these" and sets forth a set of applications and features, the option to add more in various distros would still be there, but they would all be based off the standard)
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Once openoffice has latex exporting support or import, as they said they're going to have in future releases, it's game over. i'll completely wipe out my M$office warez on my comp...
my blog
Calc still can't stand up to hammering by engineers and data analysis folk (it's got some major problems), but the word processor is top notch. I look forward to its complete domination by OOo 1.2! Happy birthday OOo!
I'm not quite certain where you're getting your launch information from...ever since the initial Alpha release OOo OS X X11 has shipped with AppleScripts that allow a single double-click to launch both the X server and application, no command line needed. Each copy now ships with Terry Teague's Start OpenOffice.org applet that does this as well as provide Finder document associations for double clicking documents directly and also drag and drop font conversion. If you're a geek who wants to start it from the command line, you can, but steps have definitely been taken to make it accessible to people who have no clue what a Terminal is. ed
There is in fact a perfectly good word count macro that does everything people keep asking for. It's here, in a .sxw file that installs it, with a bunch of other stuff. If you don't trust self-installing macros (and you shouldn't), just read all the code and copy and paste over what you want.
What the project needs just as much as evangelism is people who will do bug triage join the qa project for that and python hackers. Since version 1.1, you can write extensions for OOo in Python.
OOo word count at http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.
- Format painter, a features SO useful that I can't live without it. The so called "fill format" is a entirely different thing, I need a format painter!
- Wordart! I need to add headings and stuff! I don't abuse it like certain people do, Its really useful when you use it right!
- Speed! The new openoffice is no faster, they just change everything around. It appears faster, by jumping from the splash screen to the window faster, but the real slowdown occurs when you open a document!
- Support for the selection column. The selection column is a thin hidden area that allows you to select text quickly. The mouse cursor faces the other way, and its one click to select a line, double click to select the paragraph, and tripple click to select the document! So useful, yet openoffice dosen't have it
- Keyboard shortcuts for entering special characters. For example press ctrl+',e to get a acute e as used in cafe (slashcode dosen't like them either, probably becasue of the lack of unicode support in perl).
- Make Impress remember the slide titles when saving in ppt formats, propeitery or not
- Don't crash when I drag and drop stuff from the file manager! If I drag and drop a txt, jpg, gcx file I expect it to decide what it is, and if it not designed to handle it, don't crash!
- Support for the "format zapper" shortcut. This removeds all formatting such as underline, strikethrough, bold etc in just "One" shortcut, ctrl+space!
- Decen't help system! Microsoft's non paper clip help system is very useful, the OpenOFfice ones are hard!
- Shrink to fit! This allows you to shrink your document so it takes less space on paper! Good for when you want to print of lot of stuff but don't want to waste ink
- Put the features people want on the toolbars, and make customising the toolbars A LOT easier! The current implementation sucks!
- Make it less fugly! How about being able to ajust to the actual theme of qt/gtk instead of just imitating the colours and fonts
That is just a small selection out of Hundreds that are missing. Just like Graphics profressinals shun the gimp, Office professials shun Openoffice! Its the fact that microsoft has took so much time and listening to feedback, to make a offce suite back in 1996, that still can't be matched in 2003! And Office 2000, XP and 2003 are in a completley different game than Openoffice!Q E D.
OOo 1.0 and 1.1 for Linux both work wonderfully on FreeBSD with linux_base-7 installed. I use the Linux binary on my FreeBSD box at home.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I'm happy with it so far, although obviously it would be great not only fully Aqua compliant but with a full OSX look, feel and human interface. Open source software always falls down at the human interface hurdle. One thing that can be said for office v.X is that the interface is not only very good but the first office since 5.1 to have a truly Mac OS Human interface. Open source projects need to have teams dreaming up pleasant, simple, clear interfaces that are compliant with the expectations of the users of the various platforms that the software will end up on.
I don't know how you you do that on your P3. On this 1 GHz Athlon, OpenOffice 1.1 takes just over 22 seconds (no preloads). Seems a lot of that time the disk drive is working quite hard, though, so that might be part of the problem. On my 2.3 GHz P4 OpenOffice, loads in just under 5 seconds. That is easily comparable to MS Orifice on the Dell P4s under XP at my university.
Considering the value he gets from that download (by comparison with MSOffice, for which he has to pay $BIGNUM), I would say that's a pretty good return on the investment of time (during which, of course, he can always go to bed).
I'd say these two operations cover maybe 80% of all my OpenOffice use (and I doubt that is an unusual usage pattern). It sucks that I have a crank up a big, ugly, desktop-dominating GUI app just to do that.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
As an academic economist that uses MS Excel and Maple on a regular basis for number crunching and data presentation, I'd say that Excel might be the only reason why I haven't either switched to [Free/Net/Open]BSD or to a Mac yet. Excel is an amazingly powerful tool for both business automation and statistical/econometric work. Have any among you switched from heavy Excel use to heavy OpenOffice work? How good is its set of readymade tools for statistic work (specifically, crunching up histograms from lists of data), numeric solving and graphs? Can it come up with candlestick charts, smoothened XY plotted charts, nonlinear regression on the charting GUI? Does it even have a correlation function? Excel goes as far as having a Beta function. I know most of those things can be easily written in a spreadsheet. Uh, I know some of these things can prolly be read on the documentation or just tried out, but I'm sure there are a lot of features I'm forgetting about. Unlike word processing (and I've given wysiwyg editors for LaTeX altogether), this is the kind of software where creeping feature-itis actually increases use value more than computer bloat. So, um, essentially, how have your switching experiences been with Excel and OO?
Looks like there's still a ways to go though.
[ReidNews]
Funny, I use WordPad a lot too. I bet a lot of 'doze users do.
.DOCs. I have yet to see Word fail to read WordPad-created content, but the reverse is quite common.
Since I can easily change the font, and change it on different bits of text, I find it's perfect for:
1. Anything I need to quickly write & print but still want pretty.
2. Printing Web content (since I have yet to find a browser that prints well). Select in news page, copy, paste into WordPad, select all, Ariel/9, print! Saves TONS of paper and eyewear.
3. Important documents that don't need fancy pagination but DO need to be easily converted to ASCII - such as a press release you want to both e-mail and fax.
4. Things that need to be highly-compatible
So here's a question about OpenOffice: does it include a WordPad equivalent?
This Like That - fun with words!
Of course you realize that this decision is a moot point, as depending on what romanization system you use it is spelled either way. The dictionary you are using uses the older format, the dictionary I am using uses the newer format. Both renderings, however, are indeed acceptable.
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
At work (a newspaper layout and prepress department) we use Layout 8000, a program that is written in MS-Dos and talks to a UNIX server, for arranging the ads on the page. It receives a file of ads called "the manifest" from the data entry department, on a PC-based network, and creates a file that can be read by a Quark Xpress extension on a Mac network by the art department. The PC's that Layout 8000 runs on are kind of old. Nothing wrong with that, since they work. The original version of Layout 8000 was called Layout 80. I forget whether this is because it was written in 1980 or because it ran on the 8080. The screen is a grid of ASCII characters forming boxes to approximate the look of ads on a column grid. (Upright spears, horizontal bars, etc.) It has crudely window-like menus done in the same way. It uses the mouse. You have to be careful because the mouse interface is quirky. In menu mode, where you choose what to lay out, print it out, etc., you navigate with the arrow keys, and you must not use the mouse at all because it reads the mouse movement as a sequence of arrow keys that will take you in out-of-control directions and at best log you out. In layout mode, if you click on a word on the screen it pretends you just typed that word, and this makes it easier to do some things because you don't have to retype serial numbers of ads. Don't push down "num lock" or else it will read the mouse as if it were a sequence of digits and make a mess. Idiosyncratic quirky commands you have to type, et cetera. It took me months to learn it, but I have a secure place at work partly because I've gotten good at it.