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Office suites...
>>>>> Foz == Foz <99969628 [at] mmu.ac.uk> writes:
Foz> Does anyone know of a console based word processor?
I doubt Lyx works on the console (LyX produces TeX files with a
WYSIWYG interface). XEmacs is a hog (well, it's GNU Emacs), but you
can compile without X support and use the AUC-TeX package with
tex-tools (or something like that, I prefer native LaTeX with
fontification) to get WYSI sorta WYG (ie, the math and foreign symbols
show up, but probably only on X, bold and italic fonts are used where
available, if not colorized). This would probably require a lot of
customization of the package to work well on the console, though.
Why do you want a word processor? Are you sure that's what you
want?
If it's just pretty output, and you are willing to basically write
very stylized programs that are 95% text data, then TeX with X?Emacs +
AUC-TeX (AUC-TeX does most of the drudge work for you) as the editor
is a fast way to produce excellent output. xdvi is a previewer that
is smart enough to reread the marked-up output automatically so you
can get near WYSIWYG performance (as long as you don't do Asian
languages): when you've edited the text in Emacs, you type ^X^S (to
save the document) ^C^C RET (to invoke LaTeX on it) and use the mouse
to focus on the xdvi window. It knows which page you last looked at,
so you don't have to page through it to review local changes.
Your template files are more useful since you can read and
understand them. The basic macro language is easy to use (nice for
defining things you use a lot), more advanced features are extremely
arcane but equally powerful.
There are also a number of SGML packages. These have the advantage
that they will handle XML (coming to a box near you soon), and are
very easily retargetable (so that the same markup can produce Web
pages, man pages, and hard copy simply by changing a command-line
option). However, they generally have much more clumsy interfaces so
far.
Markup languages have the advantage that you tend to produce better
structured documents, and you can use grep (and glimpse) on them!
Although AbiWord (and maybe MS Word) will be producing XML as output,
so this advantage will probably go away.
Honestly, small and useful probably isn't in the cards, whether with
a markup language like TeX or SGML or XML, or with a word processor.
32MB of RAM is a little tight for XFree86 + XEmacs + TeX, but I
functioned in that environment for years with only 16MB. You wouldn't
want to use Netscape at the same time, say. But exiting and
restarting Netscape has to be faster than rebooting to NT....
You might also consider fasting (or giving up beer) for a week. By
the end of the week you'll have saved enough money to double your RAM
:-) That would probably make Windows NT happier too. (There is no
truth to the rumor that there is a line of code
if (random() > win32_get_installed_memory()) burn_baby_burn();
in the NT scheduler inner loop but sometimes you'd think so....)
Foz> Or if not a WP that is small and useful.
Really, the questions are: How small? What functionality?
--
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Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________
What are those straight lines for? XEmacs rules.
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