🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <tlm.718249912@scl1.al.iastate.edu> tlm@iastate.edu (Dr. T.L.  
Marchioro II) writes:
> At the risk of seeming ignorant (or, even worse, proving what 
> everyone already suspects :-) I thought I might offer a "modest
> proposal" about a subject which has been banging around  this group
> for a couple of weeks now.  Specifically, starting with Louis Mamakos'
> post about "gee, they unbundled WriteNow and then dropped the read-only
> version. What should I make my documentation in?" we now have arguments
> running about bundled versus unbundled software, the value of said
> things versus those things added to 3.0, etc.  
> 
> Personally, I find the unbundling of a read-only right now rather 
> strange, but would guess it has something to do with (1) keeping the
> 3.0 distribution smaller and (2) (from my cynical side) giving Appsoft
> a boost.  
> 
> Sadly, there's little to do about it now (except complain, which we're all
> quite good at :-) but perhaps I can offer a better solution to Louis' original
> question --- i.e. a solution with pagenumbering, headers, etc. which runs on 
> any NeXT --- which at least "calms the waters" on one aspect of this 
> question.  Why not have everyone put their documentation in troff??
> [rest deleted]

A standard that is available to everyone is absolutely necessary.  In fact, when NeXTMailing documents, we've taken to telling the print panel to save the postscript from whatever word processor we wrote the doc in (we use, roughly equally, Edit, WriteNow, and WordPerfect) and sending that in NeXTMail.  Everybody has Previewer, right? :-)

I'm sure I'm worse at troff than Dr. Marchioro is, although I'm not completely unfamailiar with that style of word processing.  But this is the 90's (though it seems that they're almost over already, since to me they started in about 1987 :-), and lots of us demand WYSIWYG.  Why doesn't someone bite the bullet and make Edit a full-function RTF word processor, with page numbering, styles (still waiting for the new Stylist beta...), and all the other goodies?  Or, better yet, take that functionality out of E


dit and write a separate RTF word processor?  Even NeXT converts their on-line docs from Frame (I think that's right) to RTF.  On the assumption that eventually no one will want paper copies of the docs (that's flame bait if I ever saw it), even page numbering doesn't matter.  As for compatibility with other systems, RTF is something of a standard, and anyway we're talking about the One True OS here, so sooner or later everyone will junk what they have now for NeXTSTEP, right? ;-)

I vote for RTF, if we can get a real RTF word processor.  I'm not a word processor guy, and I don't have the time to become one, or I'd do it myself.

Michael

--
Michael_Pizolato@afs.com
~18 kyu
Q16
NeXTMail appreciated