Re: [PLUG] Open Source Equivalent of WordPerfect

On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 9:48 AM Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com> wrote:

Bhaskar,

Always nice to trip across another old VAX RUNOFF and Unix
roff/nroff/troff guy!

Did you ever use IBM's Script tool? I used it at a summer internship
at IBM in 1982. You'd write text, marked up with SGML markup tags
to identify elements like chapters, sections, paragraphs, lists, tables,
etc. Then you'd run the Script tool to render the formatted doc.
It pulled rules on how to format each element from the cascading
standard project-wide, department-wide and corporate-wide sets
of Script macros and DTDs.

So, we flunkies created content and our overlords decided how it
would be formatted. Technically, I think we could have written our
own personal Script macros and DTDs to override some/all of the
formatting, but few of us knew how.

A couple years later, I was using VAX RUNOFF and sorely missing
the ability to specify the formatting. It was like using SGML with a
single hardcoded set of Script formatting macros.

Then roff/nroff/troff. Then WYSIWYG Interleaf that stored itself as
markup. Then Word that was WYSIWYG-only, stored in a
proprietary binary format. It just kept getting worse and worse!

About 10 years later, in 1996, I started using HTML and it was like
coming home. Finally, I could write docs in markup again! And
could even specify the formatting separately in CSS and DTDs.
Better yet, it was "deja vu all over again"! The HTML looked just like
the old familiar SGML, complete with angle brackets and all. Nice!

See:
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language#Concrete_and_abstract_syntaxes

Happy Thanksgiving!
--Fred
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fred Stluka -- Bristle Software, Inc. -- http://bristle.com
#DontBeATrump -- Make America Honorable Again!
------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 11/19/18 3:17 AM, K.S. Bhaskar wrote:
> As one who has used markup languages including the original markup
> language (runoff / nroff / troff, pre-processed by eqn / neqn, tbl,
> and m4) all the way through HTML and DocBook XML to reStructured Text
> (e.g.,
> https://gitlab.com/YottaDB/DB/YDBDoc/blob/master/MultiLangProgGuide/MultiLangProgGuide.rst),
> as well as WYSIWYG tools (going back to Word-11 on RSTS to LibreOffice
> including Interleaf and various editions of Microsoft Word), my
> opinion is that everything has its place.
>
> WYSIWYG tools are unbeatable for quick, short documents like resumes
> and business letters. Just get it done.
>
> Markup languages are great for large documents (whose size means that
> they are often maintained by multiple people over long periods of
> time) and where you want to separate the content from the
> presentation. We maintain all our user documentation using git (on
> GitLab, mirrored to GItHub). For example, the reStructured
> Multi-Language Programmers Guide above is published as a web page at
> https://docs.yottadb.com/MultiLangProgGuide/ and we can also generate
> PDFs and ePub should we want to.
>
> Regards
> – Bhaskar
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 5:04 PM Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com
> <mailto:fred@bristle.com>> wrote:
>
> Casey,
>
> JP has the right idea when he says:
>
> > I switched to markup languages and never looked back.
> My votes are:
> +1 for markup languages.
> +1 for tools that generate markup languages.
>
> The dominant markup language these days is HTML. And as JP
> says, there are other less wordy markup languages that generate
> it: Markdown, Asciidoc, etc.
>
> Working directly in a markup language is pretty easy. You
> simply mix the formatting commands in among the words of
> the document. Commands to start a new paragraph, change
> text font or color, center a line, insert an image, create a list
> or a list item, etc.
>
> I find it better than a WYSIWYG tool like Word, LibreOffice,
> WordPerfect, WordStar, Interleaf, etc. Those tools respond to
> keystrokes, menu clicks, etc. by doing things they think I want.
> But I sometimes find those actions and effects to be totally
> unexpected. And all too often I can't figure out how to prevent
> an effect that is now persisting for all or a portion of my doc.
>
> My favorite such tool was Interleaf (1990 or so, on Apollo Unix
> workstations) because it was a WYSIWYG tool that stored each
> doc as an ASCII file of markup, not in a binary format. I
> sometimes got frustrated with things like "Why is this line of
> text insisting on remaining centered, when I wanted it left-
> aligned?!??!". But, I could just open the markup file in any
> ASCII text editor (vi, emacs, etc.), scan or search for the
> relevant text, and notice that it was annotated with markup
> that used the word "center".
>
> Then, I could go back to the WYSIWYG tool, search the help files
> for that exact markup command, and learn how to undo it. Or
> could make a change in the WYSIWYG tool, then diff or view the
> markup file to see what changed, and figure it out myself. Or
> could simply delete that part of the markup to fix the problem,
> bypassing the WYSIWYG tool entirely.
>
> Furthermore, I could write shell scripts and small programs to
> process the text of the markup files, making consistent changes
> to all sections of a file, or to multiple files, rather than having to
> use the WYSIWYG tool to manually edit each occurrence.
>
> These days, if you're not comfortable directly editing HTML or
> even Markup or Asciidoc, there are lots of WYSIWYG tools out
> there to provide a simple point/click UI like you see in Word,
> WordPerfect and the others. See:
> - http://google.com/search?q=WYSIWYG+HTML+editor
>
> Also, many of the tools where you'll want to enter formatted text
> now accept some form of markup. Examples: Wikis, GitHub,
> BitBucket, Jira, etc.
>
> These days, I do ALL of my documents in HTML: my resume,
> my consulting contracts, invoices, design docs, etc. Such docs
> can be stored in a single file, backed up, printed, copied to a
> USB drive, etc. They can also easily be attached to an email, and
> pretty much all email clients can render them without the
> recipient even having to fire up a browser to view the attachment.
>
> Here are some samples of docs created in HTML:
> - My resume:
> http://bristle.com/~fred/resume.htm
> <http://bristle.com/%7Efred/resume.htm>
> - A typical invoice to a client on my company's HTML letterhead:
> http://bristle.com/Temp/2016_07_HHL.htm
>
> Note that you didn't have to install Word, LibreOffice, or even a
> PDF viewer to view those 2 docs. Any web browser or phone can
> open them. I only use LibreOffice to view/edit any non-HTML
> docs that other people send me, never for my own docs.
>
> I'm a HUGE fan of FOSS. But, I did a search for a WYSIWYG HTML
> editors a few years back. I specifically wanted one that would do
> these 3 things:
>
> 1. Allow me to create and edit docs without ever looking at HTML
>      when my goal was to just pretend I was in Word or LibreOffice
>      and whip up or edit a doc using entirely a WYSIWYG interface.
>
> 2. Offer a dual mode where I could see and edit the HTML directly
>      watching the instantaneous effects it had on the rendered doc,
>      and could also edit the rendered doc directly via the WYSIWYG
>      interface, watching the instantaneous effects it had on the
>      HTML markup.
>
> 3. Allow me to open a file of hand-crafted HTML from someone
>      else, make a minor change via the WYSIWYG interface or by
>      directly editing the HTML markup, and save the file WITHOUT
>      having the entire file re-indented, word-wrapped, or in any
>      other way reformatted. When I sent the edited file back to the
>      author and he ran a diff tool, I wanted hm to see only the
>      changes that I intended to make, no other noise.
>
> Unfortunately, the only tool I could find to meet all 3 criteria was
> Dreamweaver, which is proprietary, not FOSS. So, I bought it and
> have used it happily ever since. Are there better FOSS options by
> now?
>
> --Fred
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred Stluka -- Bristle Software, Inc. -- http://bristle.com
> #DontBeATrump -- Make America Honorable Again!
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 11/17/18 11:37 AM, JP Vossen wrote:
> > 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
> > --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> > JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ |
> http://bashcookbook.com/
> >
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