As seen in Byte... R.I.P.

Eric Eisenhart eric at eisenhart.com
Tue Oct 30 17:35:19 PST 2001


On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 06:12:57AM -0800, Christopher Wagner wrote:
> A lot of people in my office are asking to be switched to StarOffice from 
> Microsoft Office.  I've been playing with it for awhile, it seems to be 
> kind of nice, if a bit kludgy.  At least it doesn't crash nearly as much.

OpenOffice is probably less kludgy and more prone to crash.  (It's the open
source version of StarOffice)

Or you could switch to something like LaTeX; I understand there are some
nice WYSIWYM editors for LaTeX that run on Windows.  There's also LyX, KLyX
(KDE version), AucTeX for emacs, joe, vi, edit.exe, et cetera.

I plan to do a presentation on why WYSIWYG is bad for your health showing
people how to switch to LaTeX for at least some basic stuff.  Not that I
know *when* I'll be doing that; sheesh.

http://www.tug.org/                    -- TeX Users Group
http://www.ctan.org/                   -- Comprehensive TeX Archive Network
http://mirror.nblug.org/CTAN/          -- local mirror
rsync://mirror.nblug.org/mirror/CTAN/  -- "          "
ftp://mirror.nblug.org/pub/mirror/CTAN -- "          "

(TeX is a professional quality typesetting system originally designed with
mathematical papers as the primary focus; Actually, with a specific set of
math and computer science heavy books as the primary focus: Donald Knuth's
Art of Computer Programming series.  It also works for things like letters,
resumes, articles, papers, etc.  LaTeX is a markup language built on top of
TeX that uses a similar syntax with a different set of commands.  In LaTeX
you declare what kind of document it is and declare what particular bits
are, and the actual layout and typesetting is handled for you.  There are
"competitors" for LaTeX, probably most notably ConTeXt, and some people just
use a set of custom TeX macros and just do straight TeX; LaTeX is probably
the most popular one like that, though.  And there's all sorts of LaTeX
"styles" that you can download from CTAN.  I use "res.cls" (or is it
res.sty?) for my resume and have been *very* happy with the results; it was
never this easy to make customized resumes with a WYSIWYG word processor.)
-- 
    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
/e\ Perl&SQL Coder   War is peace.            IRC Nicks: Falsch Freiheit
---                        -- George Orwell



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