[rescue] Re: nuking from orbit

[BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> > Golly, I must be the odd greybeard critter, in the hurd.  I still consider
> > vi (coupled with troff and maybe TeX) as some of the best word
> ``processors''
> 
> Nod.
> 
> I also prefer to use VI for running off short memos - but I usually don't
> bother with fancy formatting.  If plain text dont get teh word across-
> nothing will!

For longer than I can recall I have kept boilerplate memos in n/troff
that I can pull up in vi, add in what I need in a memo, and pipe it to
a ps printer with our letterhead.  I still do that on my dos laptop
terminal box, with a full troff 3, where I can output on the net or
to any handy printer.  It saves time, is portable across anything from
CP/M to Unix (not many CP/M machines around anymore), and never has any
silly graphical output stream... just text.  CP/M boxes can barely run
an nroff, but dos boxes can usually handle a full troff and TeX. There
never was a vi for CP/M, that I can recall, although I rewrote some
freebie editor smallc stuff to approximate a vi (CP/M did not have enuf
memory capability to do much).  There is a great little vi called Calvin,
for dos, that is hard to beat.  Elan puts out the troff3 suite, although
if you have a good C compiler and access to the antique unix code, it
can be coerced to compile on dos.  TeX is fair to good on dos.
That way, everything is portable across all levels/types of machine.
That makes it very useful.

> For fancy formatting - I prefer HTML (and *gml variants).  I can make a
> document look all kinds of professionally done usng HTML - and folks with
> Word are still stuck trying to figure out two columns!

(:+}}... Good ol' troff/TeX/etc to the rescue.....(:+}}...

The beauty of it, I have found, is that regardless of what box I am
sitting down to, if the stuff is in my toolkit on that box, I can
do the ``word processing'' anywhere.  That has been a lifesaver to
me, since there is no telling what particular machine I may or may
not have up at any given time.

Bob