[P1] Reading word documents

Larry Kollar kollar at alltel.net
Tue Jan 27 17:41:15 PST 2004


Angus Wallace wrote:

> .... I don't use, or like Word myself, but
> occasionally need to open a word doc...
> I'm actually quite a fan of LaTeX, which is all of the things you're
> talking about. An excellent implementation of it can be found in Lyx
> (which is free). See www.lyx.org if you are interested.

I learned *roff long ago, and prefer it myself. LaTeX does a slightly 
better job of typesetting, but groff can format a 500+ page book (see 
my .sig) to PostScript, 2 passes in 10 seconds on a 900MHz iBook. :-D 
In these days of wicked-fast computers and tolerance of sloppy 
typesetting, pick whichever one you're comfortable with....

Panther (and Jag, with one of the security updates) provide groff 
1.18.1 standard; earlier versions of Jag offer 1.17. The latest release 
is 1.19, and I created a .pkg file that replaces the shipped version 
with 1.19. It's a surprisingly complete package; there aren't 
replacements for every single utility in the AT&T Documenter's 
Workbench (DWB) but it comes pretty close and surpasses DWB in some 
respects.

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://home.alltel.net/kollar/utp/



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