Word Processor recommendation?

Message

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 7:02 pm

Alright, I'm just curious what word processor people would recommend, given the following criteria:

1.) MS Office compatibility would be nice, but isn't really that important
2.) Truetype font support is a MUST
3.) Anti-Aliasing support (whether built in or through a widget set) is a MUST
4.) Other office apps not needed, all I need is a solid word processor
5.) QT is fine, GTK2 is better if it uses either -- GTK1 is not acceptable =)
6.) I'd like it to be somewhat snappy -- OO Writer, for example, is not an option =P

I'm currently using KWord, and I'm pretty happy with it, but I was wondering if there was a standalone word processor that was better than it...I don't really use KDE all that much anymore, so I'm trying to see if I can get rid of as much KDE/QT related stuff as I can =)

Lovechild · Post by **Lovechild** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 7:05 pm

Abiword use the GTK2 versions these are marked ~x86 currently I think. there's also a CVS ebuild.

Abiword 2 is nearing release and it's very stable and pretty to look at.

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 7:17 pm

Thanks, Lovechild...I'll have to take a look at it ^_^

Verteron · Post by **Verteron** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 8:16 pm

Ximianized OpenOffice isn't quite GTK2 but integrates with Gnome quite well. It also looks great and has excellent MSOffice compatibility.

Lovechild · Post by **Lovechild** » Fri Aug 01, 2003 8:21 pm

Verteron wrote:Ximianized OpenOffice isn't quite GTK2 but integrates with Gnome quite well. It also looks great and has excellent MSOffice compatibility.

See points 4 and 6

Verteron · Post by **Verteron** » Sat Aug 02, 2003 9:09 am

Admittedly I didn't read your post properly, but XOOo is much "snappier" than non-X OOo. However Abiword is also good, so I'd give it a try

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Sat Aug 02, 2003 10:20 pm

Thanks for your suggestions...I emerged Abiword, and it seems to work quite well for what I want =)

Cossins · Post by **Cossins** » Sat Aug 02, 2003 11:44 pm

Does anyone know of a good beginner's guide to LaTeX?
It seems really great for doing things for school, and I like the geekness of it...

My problem is the same as the original poster, OOo Writer can do the job, but isn't nearly responsive enough (though it really helped with another 512 mb RAM...). KWord isn't really good at equations and that kind of stuff...

- Simon

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Sat Aug 02, 2003 11:49 pm

Cossins wrote:OOo Writer can do the job, but isn't nearly responsive enough (though it really helped with another 512 mb RAM...).

You so should not have to purchase half a gig of additional RAM to make a word processor usable o_O Well, unless your word processor is MS Word from Office XP, I suppose...hehe...

Cossins · Post by **Cossins** » Sat Aug 02, 2003 11:53 pm

Kesereti wrote:You so should not have to purchase half a gig of additional RAM to make a word processor usable o_O Well, unless your word processor is MS Word from Office XP, I suppose...hehe...

No, totally agree... I needed it for other stuff, though, so it isn't that bad... but still...

kesuari · Post by **kesuari** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 3:14 am

Cossins wrote:Does anyone know of a good beginner's guide to LaTeX?
It seems really great for doing things for school, and I like the geekness of it... :D

Take a look at the Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. Can be found in CTAN. Or by googling. I know many people (myself included) who have learnt LaTeX from it.

But as an incredibly short guide:
Make a textfile called example.tex that looks like this

Code: Select all

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}  % leave out [a4paper] if you're mercan. if you want a separate title page, try using {report} or {book} instead of {article}
\frenchspacing  % if you're Australian, French or British. if you're mercan, you're supposed to have two spaces after fullstops, but that just looks ugly.
\title{My title}
\author{Me}
\date{3.08.03}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
Lorem ipsum \emph{dolor \emph{sit} amet}, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Suspendisse dui. Cras augue. Phasellus consequat, odio nec fringilla luctus, neque felis malesuada felis, et congue ar\v cu quam id elit. `Nullam pretium, ``leo sit amet'' faucibus tincidunt', leo diam accumsan nunc, ut sodales ipsum tortor quis nibh. Donec dui velit, suscipit ac, imperdiet non, viverra vulputate, neque. Nulla \textbf{consectetuer consequat di"am}. Mauris elit enim, varius sit amet, con\'sequat at, pharetra at, urna. Suspendi\ss e velit pede, aliquam id, euismod non, varius porttitor, urna. Maecenas vitae odio. Vestibulum ut dui. \AE nean eros purus---congue id---iaculis eget, scelerisque \'\i n, urna. Quisque mi. Nullam varius wisi id sapien blandit volutpat. Pellentesque j\'usto er\`at, porttitor ut, pretium non, mattis eget, neque. Donec sit amet \aa gue. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litor\`a torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymen\ae os. Quisque iaculis. Nulla ipsum\dots

A second pargraph (the first one was generated by the Lorem Ipsum generator (and is not Latin and the accents are mostly random though sometimes logical (historically, grave accents went on low vowels and acute on high vowels and a diaerisis indicates that two vowels are pronounced separately), and then I went in and added stuff to make it more interesting. Take a look at what it generates by firing up a console and running \texttt{pdflatex example} and opening up the pdf). I won't get into maths or anything here; take a look at the guide.
\end{document}

Zephaniah · Post by **Zephaniah** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 8:09 am

I found Lyx to be great for doing all my write-ups for uni. It's a frontend to LaTeX. Check it out http://www.lyx.org/
It uses QT, but if you want to get some work done, that shouldn't make too much difference I don't think.

helmers · Post by **helmers** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 11:12 am

I would just like to toss in another cheer for Abiword, it is fast, easy to use, and spellchecks in norwegian. It exports to word-readable formats just fine, and also imports okay, but the imported goods isn't always a perfect copy.

So if you want something fast and usable, I'd say ABIWORD any day.

PS: And use the latest version, the older versions doesn't do GTK2.

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 8:41 pm

AbiWord 1.99.3 is da bizness.

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 9:26 pm

Can't wait for 2.0 final to be released ^_^

jbstew32 · Post by **jbstew32** » Sun Aug 03, 2003 11:37 pm

which is the best for MS office compatability? Abiword, openoffice, koffice (i know i know), or what?

helmers · Post by **helmers** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 5:35 am

OpenOffice.

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 6:31 am

But man, last time I looked, Openoffice was slow. At least on my poor Athlon 1Ghz. You shouldn't need more than that to run an office suite, IMO

I havn't tried the Ximian-ized version, but even still....it would be nice if someone took the Office filters from Openoffice and put them into Abiword ^_^ I don't know if there are licensing issues with that, but I don't think I'm hardcore enough of a coder to do such a thing myself...

helmers · Post by **helmers** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 8:21 am

Yeah I agree with that OpenOffice is too big. I just keep it around, because suddenly someone mails me a Word document with lots of freaky gadgets that Abiword doesn't understand.

Gnumeric is doing Excel docs pretty well though.

For writing documents I recommend AbiWord, but it is unfortunatuly not always enough. Part of the problem is that AbiWord doesn't support all of the Word features, but I am sure they can improve the import filter some more. AFAIK that is high on the AbiWord folks priority list.

M_Kelder · Post by **M_Kelder** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 11:22 am

helmers wrote:Yeah I agree with that OpenOffice is too big. I just keep it around, because suddenly someone mails me a Word document with lots of freaky gadgets that Abiword doesn't understand.

You can find at http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html suggestions to write the sender back. It is not a problem if they don't know you can actually read some non-standard documents.

mtangolics · Post by **mtangolics** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 2:04 pm

OpenOffice, granted it's slow, but once it opens it works fine. =D

scriptkiddie · Post by **scriptkiddie** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 2:52 pm

I have Open Office 1.1 and it opens within 2-3 seconds after clicking on it on my P4 1.5 ghz.

Its run really really smooth once it is open and running to.
I have not tried OO 1.1 on kernel 2.4.x... Only on 2.6

mtangolics · Post by **mtangolics** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 3:15 pm

Yea, well for us powerful CPU ppl... =)

/me has a 2.4@2.88 P4

Seriously tho, OO is good if you have a fairly decent system.

Kesereti · Post by **Kesereti** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 5:14 pm

That's a big if =) I'd love to have a halfway decent system, but...I'm a network administrator living in the U.S. city with the highest unemployment rate of all major metro areas in the country (over 9% now), which when combined with the fact that the tech economy sucks in general, boils down to -- I pray daily that nothing goes wrong with my computer 'cuz I can't afford to fix anything, much less upgrade =P Hehehe...

theEleven · Post by **theEleven** » Mon Aug 04, 2003 5:19 pm

Another abiword fan here, definately recommend it suiting your criteria.