From: Tim Miller (tjm@hrt213.brooks.af.mil)
Date: 11/01/92


From: tjm@hrt213.brooks.af.mil (Tim Miller)
Subject: Re: Linux - the future?
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1992 17:11:08 GMT

On Sun, 1 Nov 1992 05:47:44 GMT, twpierce@unix.amherst.edu (Tim Pierce) said:

 T> In article <1cv4nbINNn7v@frigate.doc.ic.ac.uk> ajt@rri.sari.ac.uk
 T> writes:

>Keith Smith (keith@ksmith.uucp) wrote:
>
>: I haven't even seen a decent "Word Processing" program freebie for Unix.
>
>Depends what you mean by 'decent' - TeX is probably the best text
>processing software I have ever seen and it has been freely available
>on most Unix platforms for a long time.

 T> Powerful? Yes. Flexible? Yes. Extensible? Yes. Learning curve?
 T> What learning curve? That's a learning *cliff*.

>Troff/nroff is not bad either and PD versions like mroff have been
>available for some time.

 T> Where can I get such a thing? Getting groff going has been one of
 T> my worst nightmares.

        The roblem, really, is that these are all typesetting languages
of one sort or another. What I've been unsuccessfully looking for is a
WYSIWYG X11 freeware word processor. Apparantly one doesn't exist;
anyone capable of writing such an application is capable of learning TeX
or roff faster.

        At my site I have users clamoring for WP software under X. At
this point, I'm just going to give in and purchase FrameMaker.

-- Cerebus <tjm@hrt213.brooks.af.mil>
"But it's a huge beastie, and expensive. Ah well."