stephenf@suite.sw.oz.au (Stephen Frede) (04/09/91)
We are looking for a text formatting system to supplement our extensive use of troff. It needs to be WYSIWIG but have as much of the flexibility of troff as possible, so that naive users can create documents easily and quickly, but complex macros (or whatever the product calls them) are possible. We've looked at FrameMaker, but the demo version we have doesn't seem to have all the functionality we would like. I went to a demo of a product called Asterix, which has a very powerful (they claim) macro language called ELF (unfortunate name, given SVr4), which may do most of the things that we want. Has anybody used this product? Could you summarise the advantages, disadvantages you have found with it, or just mail me so I can ask some specific questions. Regards, - Stephen Frede Softway Pty Ltd, P.O. Box 305, Strawberry Hills, NSW 2012, AUSTRALIA Phone: +61 2 698 2322; Fax: +61 2 699 9174; Telex: AA27987 domain: stephenf@softway.sw.oz.au UUCP: ...!uunet!softway.sw.oz!stephenf
wjh+@andrew.cmu.edu (Fred Hansen) (04/10/91)
Excerpts from netnews.comp.text: 9-Apr-91 Asterix - product info wanted Stephen Frede@suite.sw.o (1001) > We are looking for a text formatting system to supplement > our extensive use of troff. It needs to be WYSIWIG but have > as much of the flexibility of troff as possible, so that > naive users can create documents easily and quickly, but > complex macros (or whatever the product calls them) are > possible. Another system to consider is the Andrew Toolkit (ATK), its ez editor, and its suite of applications which share the same data formats and user interfaces. ATK generates troff code and documents may be augmented with embedded troff code if you want. It handles and displays various fonts, type sizes and face variants, justification, centered and right flush, sub- and superscript, indentation, explicit page breaks, footnotes.... The major feature is the capability of embedding objects in text--rasters, tables, equations, drawings, ...; this is an open system so users can create their own objects and embed them. For printing, ATK generates troff (with embedded postscript for rasters) which is run through troff (and psdit) to print the document. ATK is WYSIWYG only to the extent of showing all typography and embedded objects; line breaks on the display are adjusted to the display width. Lineand page breaks for printing are deferred to troff with its extensive knowledge of the exact fonts that will be used for printing, but the printed form can be viewed before printing via the 'preview' program. (Looking at a preview image shows one reason why WYSIWYG is not always a great idea; characters positioned on screen according to their print widths look awful.) NESS "Ness" is the extension language for ATK. It is a general purpose language with an emphasis on extending the behavior of embedded objects. String processing is especially well supported: fromrtf.n, a translator from RTF to ATK, is fully-functioned, and yet only 2600 lines long. String values in Ness can contain all the typographic formatting and embedded objects supported by ATK. The cost of ATK has an upside and a downside. It is free, so the price is reasonable. But it is not a "product" so some features are not fully implemented. I find it satisfactory for my work and have written half a dozen papers and thousands of lines of code using it over the past four years. (Among the ATK applications is the multi-media mail interface with which I am writing this note.) ATK is available on the X tape and from the various ftp sites that provide X--under directory contrib/andrew. Our own ftp site is emsworth.andrew.cmu.edu (128.2.30.62). For more information you can contact Susan Straub: susan+@andrew.cmu.edu Fred Hansen
jim@applix.com (Jim Morton [ext 237]) (04/11/91)
stephenf@suite.sw.oz.au (Stephen Frede) writes: > I went to a demo of a product called Asterix, which has a very powerful > (they claim) macro language called ELF (unfortunate name, given SVr4), > which may do most of the things that we want. argggghh! Yes, it is unfortunate that the acronym ELF is used both for SVR4 object code and our macro language. When we came up with the name ELF, the System V object code was still called COFF! > Has anybody used this product? Could you summarise the advantages, > disadvantages you have found with it, or just mail me so I can ask some > specific questions. I won't get into commercial marketing talk here, but feel free to email us directly at: asterixinfo@applix.com and/or download the demo at uunet.uu.net:/applix/asterixdemo.tar.Z -- Jim Morton, Applix Inc., Westboro, MA ...uunet!applix!jim jim@applix.com
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (04/12/91)
>For printing, ATK generates troff (with embedded postscript for rasters) >which is run through troff (and psdit) to print the document. Run through device-independent "troff", that is; you can, with some amount of effort, get it to work with "old troff", but it can't print everything that it can if you have device-indepedent "troff". Allegedly, some people have gotten it to work with "groff".... >ATK is available on the X tape and from the various ftp sites that >provide X--under directory contrib/andrew. Our own ftp site is >emsworth.andrew.cmu.edu (128.2.30.62). And you probably want to FTP patches 1 through 9 from "emsworth.andrew.cmu.edu" and apply them, if you use the version of ATK from the X11R4 tape.