bryan@uunet.UU.NET (Bryan J. Cardoza) (06/22/88)
Our company is an manufacturer of minicomputer systems with our own ports of System V and BSD4.2/4.3, and PICK. As you would well expect, we produce and maintain a lot of documentation. Our documentation group are looking for a long range solution for our text processing needs. Currently, most of our UNIX and PICK documentation is ditroff-based, while our hardware reference manuals and marketing literature are Macintosh-based. We need an integrated solution. Because this is a new problem for our documentation staff, I hope that those of you who may have experienced this will have information that you are willing to share with them. One option is to go to completely Unix-based document preparation platform (such as one to several Sun workstations). Considering that method: 1. What is the "best" WYSIWYG page make-up program for Sun (or similar) workstations? 2. What type of software packages are available that could be used to generate high quality line drawings on the workstation? 2a. Could drawings generated by the package be imported into the page make-up program mentioned in #1? (Ala CricketDraw files imported into an MS-Word document on a Macintosh.) 3. What types of high-quality printing devices would be supported in the environment as outlined above? Laser Printers (HP, Imagen, etc.)? Typesetters (Linotronic, AutoLogic, etc.)? It would be advantageous to integrate our existing Macintosh II's, SE's and Plus's with our Unix/ditroff-based environment. The goal would be to allow the Unix machines to share resources (printers and data) with the Macintosh systems. I've seen ads for TOPS, but I rarely find marketing hype informative. 4. Is there a realistic way for our existing Sun workstation (and via Ethernet our other Unix workstations) to share data and printing resources with the Macintosh systems in a PostScript environment? Finally, I would like your candid opinion. 5. If you could create your "dream" document preparation system CONSIDERING THAT YOU HAVE TO WORK WITH A LOT OF EXISTING DITROFF-BASED DOCUMENTS, what would you specify? Thanks for you help. -- Bryan bryan@iconsys.UUCP {uunet,caeco,nrc-ut,rumiko}!iconsys!bryan ---------------------------------------- Submissions to: desktop@plaid.sun.com Administrivia to: desktop-request@plaid.sun.com UUCP: {amdahl,decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4}!sun!plaid!desktop{-request} Archives can be gotten from the archive-server. To get information on the archive-server, send mail to: archive-server@plaid.sun.com -or- sun!plaid!archive-server with a subject line of help