Re: [PLUG] Open Source Equivalent of WordPerfect

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

On 11/17/18 10:33 AM, Casey Bralla wrote:
> Does anybody know if there is an open source equivalent to WordPerfect?
> All the word processing programs I have tried all seem to emulate MS
> Word, which I detest.   I used to be able to make WP sing, but MS Word
> is a burden since it tries to outsmart me and anticipate what it thinks
> I want to do, instead of letting me do what I really want to do!
>
> I've been using LibreOffice, and it's adequate, but I was hoping for more.
>
> Anybody have any suggestions?

I never liked WP, I used MultiMate, then WordStar, then various versions 
of MS Word.  I liked Word, and used correctly (which almost no one does) 
it used to be not that bad.  Unnecessary feature bloat and the "ribbon" 
interface have rendered Word unusable, at least for me.  As noted, 
LibreOffice can be adequate, be even it is far overcomplicated.  I 
switched to markup languages and never looked back.

Casey, what are your use cases?  Would a wiki work?  Mediawiki (powers 
wikipedia) is great for all kinds of docs & notes, but it's wiki markup 
is feeling very old and primitive to me these days.  There are a great 
many others, including some local/desktop lines like Zim.  (Zim is awesome.)

Writing in Markdown or Asciidoc then rendering into HTML or PDF using 
one of the tool chains might work.  The tool chains can be a PITA to get 
going, but once you have it working everything is effortless.  There are 
"static" wikis that work like that too, you have a Git commit hook that 
renders, so a commit or push to the right place just renders & publishes.

Other random musings:
We wrote the first edition of the _Bash Cookbook_ in OpenOffice, and I 
had to go to some contortions to handle code samples.  Then O'Reilly 
converted that into Word, then converted the Word into DocBook because 
that's how their workstream was a the time (circa 2007).  That was very 
painful and introduced a lot of errors.

We wrote the second edition in Asciidoc in Git (converted by O'Reilly 
from the 1st DocBook, circa 2017).  That was great.

Every so often I look at the current markup languages and think about 
Tex/LaTeX and WordStar "dot" commands and macros, and then think about 
the cyclical nature of tech and IT...

Later,
JP
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