🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <RSW.91May7182512@delay.cs.brown.EDU> rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) writes:
>So why doesn't someone tell us about the system and how good/bad they think it
>is, what it can do, who it can help, etc.  This group carries very little
>information, though I'm sure there are many people who could provide some.
>Bob Weiner				   rsw@cs.brown.edu

BBN/Slate provides sound, images, text, spreadsheet and graphics
objects for multimedia mail.

Good point:

1) Low cost (for educational sites). It's cheap enough to have on
several different platforms. I don't know what it costs for
commercial users.

2) Good text editor. Rodent support for the interaction-impaired,
Emacs bindings for the rest of us, remappable keys. 

3) Good fonts. (minor gripe: I wish they'd ship BDF files for
their fonts in the X distributions. I occasionally use
workstations that Slate doesn't work on, but that have OK X
installations. Slate insists on it's custom fonts to work.)

4) The object oriented graphics tool is nice. Has a minimum of
restrictions on what can be done, and handles display of color
images on B/W or less nifty color screens pretty well.

5) Bitmap editor is included. Combined with the PBM/PPM/Utah RLE
tools, you can get pretty nice scanned images into documents.

6) Multi-lingual text support: Hangul, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew
properly written (Hebrew is right to left!)

Gripes:

1) Custom fonts. It don't work without them. Even for English
text.

2) You can't ever completely exit from it w/o killing off the
initial window via your window manager.

3) Formatting is very style-sheet oriented. It's possible to
override on a local basis, but it's not straightforward.

4) The conferencing features are a little confusing on X
terminals.  

On the whole, it's a nice setup. It works pretty well on X
terminals. 

-- 
David Boyes       |The three most dangerous things in the world:
dboyes@rice.edu   |  1) a programmer with a soldering iron,
                  |  2) a hardware type with a program patch, and
"Delays, delays!" |  3) a user with an idea.