:: Re: [DNG] Office pack
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Author: Isaac Dunham
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] Office pack
On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 01:47:37PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Mon, 2 Nov 2015 15:50:27 +0000 (UTC)
> Mitt Green <mitt_green@???> wrote:
> > I
> > can't be sure about word processor, speaking of numerous AbiWord
> > issues.
>
> Honestly, if you can run MSWord under Wine, you'll have a better word
> processor than anything Linux has to offer. They all suck.
>

If you're talking about a Word version that's not 12 years old, I would
respectfully disagree.

As far as what I would use, there are a couple things lighter than LO
and more reliable than Abiword:

* Ted <http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/>, an RTF editor (on a level with wordpad).
Not in the repositories, but you only need X, the right gui toolkit, and
a few common libraries to build it. GTK+ 2.x or Motif are the currently
available toolkits, as far as I know.
A little minimalist compared to Abiword, also less dependencies.
Edits RTF/text, exports html, epub, ps, pdf.
Last I knew, tended to crash when confronted with large images, but
otherwise quite stable.

* Textmaker, from Softmaker Office (note: commercial product).
Fairly compatible with MS Word.
In my own experience, generally stable and almost always renders right,
though I have seen it crash.
Needs X libs and C++ support, which means it shouldn't be a problem.
Available for Linux and Windows; the Linux port is usually released a
few months to a year behind.
There are older versions available gratis online (IIRC, 2006 was the last
no-key version, while "FreeOffice" 2008 requires you to sign up to get
a key emailed to you; ~weekly email offers follow).
(And when I say "available", I mean "...with the approval of Softmaker".)

> > LibreOffice has too many dependencies, as well as AbiWord, while I'd
> > like to remain minimalistic.
> >
> > What do you use daily and would advise?


I don't do that daily anymore, but I used to write/do basic formatting
in Ted, then the fancy stuff in one of OO/LO Write, MS Word, or TextMaker.

Sometimes I used VDE or MS Word for DOS 5.5 from FreeDOS or dosemu for
preliminary writing; of the two, I'd only recommend vde.

HTH,
Isaac