From: ellis@nova.gmi.edu (R. Stewart Ellis) Subject: Re: WordProcessor (~=TEX) for Linux Date: 29 Sep 1993 01:27:23 GMT
mark@taylor.uucp (Mark A. Davis) writes:
>snail@lsl.co.uk writes:
>>In article <1993Sep24.111523@cs.utwente.nl>, debruijn@cs.utwente.nl (Steef S.G. de Bruijn) writes:
>>> |> a la WordPerfect for Linux.
>>I think he means Framemaker for Linux, or 'Word for Linux' :-)
>>> Wordperfert sucks (it's no misspell!)
>>Don't u mean worddefect, as its know here. We have it one the Vomit Making
>>System.
>Kindly keep your personal and unproductive comments to your self. We find
>the software to be extremely productive, flexible, cost effective, and
>open. Perhaps you two should tell us which wordprocessors you use and like
>so others can say yours suck.
>Also, perhaps you should enlighten us as
>to a better wordprocessing system under Unix? Framemaker isn't bad, but
>TERRIBLY expensive.
Starting with the recognition that WP is available on the widest range of
systems, which gives it a tremendous headstart, it has a number of serious
problems. I have seen signed postings from a guy who used truss on SVR4 to
observe wp opening a config file 500 times while it was starting up. This
is consistent with the startup speed under X. Also WP fails totally to
understand how X and UNIX printspooling are supposed to work. If you bring
up a dialog box on the X version and then dismiss the box, it repaints the
entire screen a couple of times rather than restoring the save-under
region. This is a dismal failure and really gets in the way of trying to
use it. Three of us here with a total of over 20 years of UNIX experience
still cannot get WP to print to all of our lpd printers after dozens of
hours of effort. That has been real productive. I now have the port on all
my printers set to disk. At least I can print from the shell after I save
them.
The one thing that makes me support WP is that I can use it over a terminal
and trade docs with the Windoze or DOS or VMeSs users.
-- R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765 ___________________ Humanities & Social Science, GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst. / _____ ______ Flint, MI 48504 ellis@nova.gmi.edu / / / / / / Gopher,News and sendmail maintainer, all around hack /________/ / / / /