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Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> __/ [ 7 ] on Saturday 23 September 2006 11:30 \__
>
>> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>>
>>> __/ [ Mark Kent ] on Saturday 23 September 2006 08:48 \__
>>>
>>>> begin oe_protect.scr
>>>> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>>>>> OpenOffice bundles Mozilla
>>>>>
>>>>> ,----[ Quote ]
>>>>>| Future versions of OpenOffice.org will come bundled with
>>>>>| Mozilla's Thunderbird email client and Lightning calendar
>>>>>| application.
>>>>> `----
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=6944
>>>>
>>>> Interesting... I wonder if there'll be some kind of linkup with
>>>> open-exchange, say, to make it easier for businesses to do their own
>>>> integration?
>>>
>>> It sounds like an Evolution turf, but Lightning is bound to have full
>>> support for these protocols, as well as for Palm device synchronisation,
>>> which I suspect is among the selling point of Open-Xchange. Surely,
>>> there's a move towards a fully-blown front- and back-end collaboration
>>> frmaeworkthat is application-depedent and Open Source. Competition returns
>>> to the IT marketplace.
>
>
> Oops. I meant to say "application-_in_dependent". Also disregard the
> typos please. *smile*
>
>
>> This mixing and evolution is the power of open source for you doing
>> wonders. Personally, I would be happy if konqueror (with fish, smb, ftp
>> etc) was integrated into open office because next to writing your document,
>> the biggest issue is accessing other machines scattered around
>> the office that contain your data.
>> So if Open Office had tabs and you could open several documents and work
>> on them at the same time, and each of those could also be a konqueror
>> window acessing files, then regardless of platform you have access
>> to your data.
>
> I am not too fond of (*)Office. Never have been. KOffice, OpenOffice, AbiWork
> and some other bloated package whose names I can't recall tackle the problem
> of composition in the wrong way (reverse engineering from layout to
> description, rather than describing information and layour). Children should
> be taught a simple application such as LyX, which produces far more
> professional-looking document, with structural semantics, styles set apart.
> It easier to use and less complex. Files are smaller and there can be reuse
> through linkage.
>
> Now, driving on to my main point, I love PDF's. LyX (or TeX if you descend
> lower) gives you PDF's, DVI's, PostScript, or even well-divided HTML. From
> each of these you can generate thumbnails quite quickly, 'on the fly',
> unless of course you use 'dinosaur platforms'. This means that rather than
> filenames in Konqueror (or Nautilus), you would be looking at, e.g. the
> front page of each document. Size is not an issue as it's customisable.
> Moreover, there's metadata which can be used. /Structure/ can be used for
> extraction of pertinent information for indexing (there's also the
> possibility of collaboration, e.g. Wiki with TeX). As regards tabs,
> Konqueror (among other file managers) opens PDF in a locally-embedded pane.
> There's tab support as well, even for file browsing. This is better
> demonstrated than explained verbally.
>
I understand what you're driving at well enough. I used to use Lotus
Manuscript, which was the closest thing to Lyx I recall from the DRDOS
days. The structure of a document was created through a very simple
dewey-decimal style numbering system with linked paras, the style from
pre-packaged but fully customisable styles. The two had no direct
linkage, and as such, any para could be moved or taken anywhere else
without affecting the overall structure, /and/ whilst maintaining proper
numbering. What was even smarter was the cross-references could be
embedded into paras (by words, in fact), and they would automatically
update if the para were moved. The whole thing looked like it had been
constructed around double or multiply linked lists, very simple, highly
extensible. I wrote a 20,000 manual for a software package I'd written
in less than one week using it, on a 386 in DOS with 2 Meg expanded
memory; no slowdowns, no problems, graphical preview of output (no
wysiwyg mess here). The file format was texttual not binary, so even if
all went wrong, you could still recover the ascii text parts.
For some reason, Lotus abandoned the whole approach and bought ami-pro
instead, for windows, which had all of the disadvantages of wysiwyg,
with none of the advantages of manuscript. Manuscript still supported
simple macros, imports from spreadsheets, charts, and so on, and
drawings. To be frank, there is little or nothing you can do now which
couldn't be done then on a 386 machine running DRDOS.
What computers have brought to the office has been TCP/IP networking,
really, with a few apps which help with that. Shared diary and syncing
phones to calendars is useful, but presently, for anyone unlucky enough
to be stuck with outlook/exchange, you're so stuck to individual
platforms that the potential benefits are not close to being realised.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
Schshschshchsch.
-- The Gorn, "Arena", stardate 3046.2
|
|
