I installed AbiWord earlier this week. I uninstalled it today. It'll be a while before I try it again.
I don't actually want a word processor. I prefer using something like DocBook or LaTeX for making presentation-quality printable documents. I wanted something that could read and display RTF with reasonable fidelity. Yesterday, I found that AbiWord does render RTF documents reasonably well, but not that well, and not at all quickly.
Today, I found that AbiWord installs some butt-ugly fonts early in the fontpath (i.e. before the adobe-*-*..-* fonts). Included in this is the AbiWord version of Arial and Times, which Mozilla picks up to render lots of common web pages as hideous, unreadable monstrosities.
First, I didn't realize the cause. When I started poking around, AbiWord left the building post haste. About fifteen minutes later (after I found the brain cells that remembered to do a xset fp rehash) everything started looking normal again.
I prefer using something like DocBook or LaTeX for making presentation-quality printable documents.
From what I can tell, TeX is exactly what I want for just about everything I could ever possibly deal with. The problem is that it seems to have a rather tough learning curve -- especially since what I want to do with it isn't the typical case of writing up scientific papers. I mainly want to do multilingual stuff, mostly Latin-script with unusual accents. But when last I said "Alright, I'm learning TeX this week!", I started by downloading a big TeX distribution for MSWin -- and couldn't get it working; it choked on its own test file. I tried another dist, and it inexplicably died (with unintelligible error messages) on some documents, and for others (even simple ones) it even more inexplicably rendered them magnified at about 130%.
With Jade, for DocBook, I had comparable experience: installed everything by the book, started it up on test documents, and got either broken/oddly garbled output.
A friend of mine offered this assessment of both Jade and (La)TeX: "There's no reason for them to start working better -- all the people that 'need' to use them, already understand their current quirks". It has the ring of truth, and it's quite unfortunate.
So for the moment, I'm stuck with producing simple RTF. It's limited, but it forces me to be sort of minimalist in what I try, and that can be good in ways.
Re:LaTeX/DocBook things
paulg on 2002-05-23T09:19:09
I had some success using MikTeX, which is just a port of the command-line tools (i.e. no GUIs). I used DVIWin for previewing & printing on my non-PS printer. That was all quite a while ago, though, so things may well have changed since then.
I think it's worth persevering with (La)TeX: once you've got to grips with it, it's quite easy to use and very flexible, especially if you can reuse someone else's document class files.
Unfortunately, I'm now in the corporate world of MS Word:-( Re:LaTeX/DocBook things
robin on 2002-05-24T17:27:08
It's not remotely helpful to you unless you're planning to buy a new computer, but I've had absolutely no problems with TeXShop (Mac OS X only) in combination with its associated TeXLive-teTeX.LaTeX is definitely one of those things which seems blindingly obvious only once you understand it.
Re:LaTeX/DocBook things
TorgoX on 2002-05-25T02:09:57
LaTeX is definitely one of those things which seems blindingly obvious only once you understand it.Yes, I've been warned away from LaTeX for this reason and others -- notably that it's based on preprocessing and therefore is prone to reporting an error on line 123 of the TeX which corresponds to god-knows-what line of your real LaTeX input.
The other complaint I heard is that le grand esprit behind LaTeX (Lamport?) is a "design fascist", and that the templates are inflexible, so that you end up having to learn TeX anyway to coax them into working the way you want. And I've had enough with the crazy arbitrary limitations in RTF -- for example, in RTF, there's about three interlocking reasons why I can't have dictionary-style runners (headers that report the first and/or last entries on the page) in RTF, and of course it so happens that I want do have dictionary-style runner for, yes, a dictionary! Grr. GRR, I SAY!
Re:LaTeX/DocBook things
robin on 2002-05-25T12:49:04
That sounds a little unkind to me. I've only ever used LaTeX for moderately simple documents, but I've never had serious difficulty locating an error.Of course you have to learn TeX (and probably Metafont) if you want fine control over every aspect of your document's appearance. That's more or less the point of LaTeX: you describe the logical structure of your document, rather than describing exactly how to set it. Personally I find the results very appealing, but presumably not everybody agrees.
The really wonderful thing is that you almost never have to do anything yourself, because somebody has almost certainly done it before. CTAN was the original Comprehensive Archive Network, after all! It took me only a matter of minutes to find a solution to your problem about dictionary-style running heads.
Re:LaTeX/DocBook things
ziggy on 2002-05-27T16:32:18
If that's the intent of using LaTeX, then why not just use XML for the authoring, and map to a suitable back-end: (La)TeX, XSL-FO, SVG(?), (X)HTML or even RTF?you describe the logical structure of your document, rather than describing exactly how to set it.LaTeX is a huge improvement over TeX, in that it helps focus on substance over style. But it's not 1993 anymore, and there are other ways to focus on substance.
Re: LaTeX/DocBook things
robin on 2002-05-28T09:03:28
why not just use XML for the authoring, and map to a suitable back-end
Are you referring to DocBook, or are there other systems which also work as you describe?Re: LaTeX/DocBook things
ziggy on 2002-05-28T12:53:04
DocBook is a reasonable XML format for writing documentation; it's been in use for over a decade and has benefitted from lots of thinking about logical document descriptions. There is also reasonable support for converting DocBook into common output formats (HTML, RTF, PDF, etc.), but that suffers from the same problem as (La)TeX -- the tools only begin to make sense once you warp your mind to their expectation how you should be thinking.Are you referring to DocBook, or are there other systems which also work as you describe?:-) DocBook is only one choice, though. I've seen very effective XML vocabularies that defined 7-10 tags to describe a kind of document (an article, for example) that map very well to other systems for formatting -- HTML, PDF, RTF, XML, and even some variant of TeX. I've found that the tools to process (and translate) random XML vocabularies have been getting easier to use over the years, while TeX systems remain fundementally TeX-like (and rightfully so, to the consternation of many TeX-newbies).
