[rescue] FrameMaker

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Sat, 20 Mar 2004 @ 23:05 -0600, Bill Bradford said:

> I think ORA is all DocBook now, or at least they are for the actual book
> *content*.

Not entirely, as a few authors still submit their books in nroff.  I was
reading a question from one of them recently.

Not just ORA either.  

I watched a show on TV years ago about a book publisher, and their whole
operation ran on a UNIX system running TeX.  Every source they got was
converted into TeX for printing.  Pretty cool stuff.

Another shop on the same show was all PostScript.  

> > Once I learned FrameMaker, it was trivial to learn word processing
> > software (MS Word, for example) - FrameMaker is really page layout
> > software...
> 
> I learned HTML by going "oh!  Its just like reveal-codes mode in WordPerfect
> 5.1!".  I still wish someone would do an open-source implementation of WP5.1,
> or that Corel would release it to the world.  I spent years (literally) using
> it in high school and college.

Interesting.

And yeah, I'd like to see WP 5.1 for Linux.

I have version 8, but it isn't quite the same.  It doesn't do all of the
keybindings quite right.

The X version is OK, but it is *horribly* slow if you put a single
graphics image in your document.  Known bug they never would fix.

If I have to use a word processor, there are only a few I like:

* Word Perfect
* WordStar
* XYWrite (wierd, but interesting capabilities)
* TextPro (Atari 8-bit)

I'd like to see a new WP for Linux and for MacOS.  Not that I like
bloated suites like that, but it would be better than MS Office.  I
suppose it will never happen.

I just can't make myself like Open Office:

* buggy
* horrible UI design
* makes M$ Office look lean and efficient
* bug/flaw compatible with M$ Office

Setups like that get in the way of writing too much.

Oh well... nroff is your friend...

On that note, years ago I saw a newspaper edit room.  One guy had a
workstation with two page-oriented displays.  In one he was editing
markup tags, almost like .nroff and TeX.  The other was updated in
realtime, or close to it.  It was kinda neat.

I think something close to that would be doable with nroff or even TeX
using some simple vi macros.

A few years ago I had a script that kinda-sorta did that, but it wasn't
real good yet.

What would be nice would be an incremental engine for TeX or nroff, that
could update only the changes to your output format.  That would make a
trick like this a lot faster.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [4649 5920 4320 204e 4452 5420 5348 5920 4820
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