wetterau
Group: Members
Posts: 38
Joined: July 2004 |
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Posted: Jan. 24 2005,23:45 |
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Warning: long winded.
DSL is excellent--a basic system usable on a wide range of hardware and easily enhanced to satisfy individual preferences. Word processors have two tasks: text entry/editing and document preparation. Text editing (writing, programming) is verbal and symbolic; document preparation is visual. It is hard to make a single interface that works optimally for both tasks. A GUI that allows quick access to margin adjustments, font changes, bulleted lists, image inclusion, headers and footers, etc. is going to be cluttered with choices irrelevant to a writer or programmer working on a project. A keyboard interface that is fast, powerful, and visually clean will be much harder to use for visual work.
For light text editing, Beaver works well. For professional text editing, Vim (or the full GVim with documentation (thanks, mikShaw)) is the best there is, in my view. For medium duty document preparation, Abiword works and is improving. For heavy duty document work, ooWriter is excellent. The .cli packaging of ooWriter is terrific. Most people who have a lot of document preparation to do and who must interact continuously with Microsoft Word/Office users will put up with oo's long opening time. Both Abiword and ooWriter have the usual mouse oriented entry/editing routines, not as good as Vim/GVim, but good enough for those who are not primarily writing or programming.
The choice for a light duty word processor is hard. Pathetic Writer is useless in its present state. Ted is fast and has the advantage of writing .rtf files that can be read as is by Windows/Word users. The other direction doesn't work as well because Word users must save their document as .rtf in order for Ted to be able to read it. Ted needs antiword or another .doc to .rtf converter to be really useful in these situations. Ted is almost too good for a light word processor. When you start needing all of its capabilities, you might just as well use ooWriter which has just about everything you could want.
I haven't used flwriter, but the interface is appealing. If it isn't crash prone and if it works for international users who have their own fonts, right to left entry, etc., I'd vote for it. Most likely, anyone who has to interact with Microsoft document formats is going to use ooWriter anyway. If I could have only one small word processor, I'd probably choose Ted. Given Abiword and ooWriter in reserve, I'd choose flwriter (if it's stable).
All that said, I use GVim for writing and ooWriter for document preparation. When I need top of the line presentation, I use a Windows box and the Adobe tools, PageMaker, Indesign, and Photoshop.
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