glen@proexam.UUCP (Glen Brydon) (09/21/90)
We have been entrenched in Troff, tbl, pic, and eqn for a long time here. I have been watching with great interest the development of many Wysiwyg systems for workstations, but we have many existing dumb terminals. While I hope someday to have access to workstations in the same price range as terminals, the fact is that they aren't there and anyway we have the damn things already. My boss (who uses a word processor package on a IBM-PC) wants us to buy into a package for our UNIX system. The major complaints are that the user gets no feed back about page breaks, margins or how tables will layout. I have looked into WordPerfect, but find that at the moment it is still at version 4.2 for UNIX. This version doesn't deal with much of that stuff that troff (or tex) deals with. Version 5.0 will be out soon, but how much can such a system do in the way of allowing the composer to envision the final layout anyway? We have been using a fairly nice version of troff from SoftQuad in Toronto. The major enhancement was to establish a context language that is made up exclusively of regular "human readable" lines. I have been showing people here how they can use this context output to check on such things as page breaks and total number of pages in documents, but still would like something like an integrated editor that shows you a ruler for margins and tab stops. Of course, any attempt with troff to see a table or equation is rediculous at best. Does anybody have a suggestion about what I do here? Should I ignore the boss, tell him to wait just a while longer, or push hard to convert to workstations or X-terminals. The most frustrating part about this is that I have an ongoing need to acquire new "dumb" terminals. I would just assume not buy anymore, but don't see how I can justify spending over a $1,000 (more likely $2,500-$5,000) instead of $300-$500 for the "glass-tty". My inclination is to at least "buy into" this newer technology (esp. since be already have an ethernet LAN), but this scares the big guy. All he sees is everyone doing wordprocessing with a real expensive workstation on the desk. P.S. Some of my own concerns have been the "loop" people get stuck in of throwing together a document. Formatting it to the laser printer. Seeing just what is wrong with it. Going back to revise the source document and starting over again. After many loops they just may have a finished document. Wasted paper, overuse charges on the laser, wasted time and frayed nerves are the main results of the above. How best to get to Wysiwyg NOW without the excessive cost??? Subject: Looking for Wysiwyg like editor for Troff pagelayout Newsgroups: comp.editor,comp.emacs,gnu.emacs,comp.text,comp.text.desktop Summary: as close to Frame, but on dumb terminal Expires: Sender: Reply-To: glen@proexam.UUCP (Glen Brydon) Followup-To: comp.editor Distribution: usa Organization: Professional Examination Service, NYC Keywords: We have been entrenched into Troff, tbl, pic, and eqn for a long time here. I have been watching with great interest the development of many Wysiwyg systems for workstations, but we have many existing dumb terminals. While I hope someday to have access to workstations in the same price range as terminals, the fact is that they aren't there and anyway we have the damn things already. My boss (who uses a word processor package on a IBM-PC) wants us to buy into a package for our UNIX system. The major complaints are that the user gets no feed back about page breaks, margins or how tables will layout. I have looked into WordPerfect, but find that at the moment it is still at version 4.2 for UNIX. This version doesn't deal with much of that stuff that troff (or tex) deals with. Version 5.0 will be out soon, but how much can such a system do in the way of allowing the composer to envision the final layout anyway? We have been using a fairly nice version of troff from SoftQuad in Toronto. The major enhancement was to establish a context language that is made up exclusively of regular "human readable" lines. I have been showing people here how they can use this context output to check on such things as page breaks and total number of pages in documents, but still would like something like an integrated editor that shows you a ruler for margins and tab stops. Of course, any attempt with troff to see a table or equation is rediculous at best. Does anybody have a suggestion about what I do here? Should I ignore the boss, tell him to wait just a while longer, or push hard to convert to workstations or X-terminals. The most frustrating part about this is that I have an ongoing need to acquire new "dumb" terminals. I would just assume not buy anymore, but don't see how I can justify spending over a $1,000 (more likely $2,500-$5,000) instead of $300-$500 for the "glass-tty". My inclination is to at least "buy into" this newer technology (esp. since be already have an ethernet LAN), but this scares the big guy. All he sees is everyone doing wordprocessing with a real expensive workstation on the desk. P.S. Some of my own concerns have been the "loop" people get stuck in of throwing together a document. Formatting it to the laser printer. Seeing just what is wrong with it. Going back to revise the source document and starting over again. After many loops they just may have a finished document. Wasted paper, overuse charges on the laser, wasted time and frayed nerves are the main results of the above. How best to get to Wysiwyg NOW without the excessive cost??? -------------------------------------- Glen Brydon Professional Examination Service, Inc. 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 740 New York, NY 10115 (212) 870-2262 ...!cucard!proexam!glen