- Multiple possible solutions for the same problem.
I am in the midst of some legal work, and the lawyer e-mailed the parties a document
with a .wpd document. I first threw it at StarOffice 5.2, and it gagged. Nothing with a '.wpd'
suffix was in the menu, and I didn't remember offhand what it was, either. But the 'file'
command did (head slapping forehead), and I then was able to invoke AbiWord, which
smiled and brought up _most_ of the document. I was then able to roundly chew out the
attorney for using fractions instead of decimals, and was also able to create a copy in
Microsoft Word format so that the other parties could read it. (How did I know if the
.doc file was in Word format? Simple, I went back to StarOffice 5.2 and opened it there,
and it came up all funky just like the last Word document I got. Temporarily dropped the
font size by a couple of points, came up beautifully, and I shipped it out!).
So, I was able to use a couple of different tools, neither of which had been developed by
Corel or Microsoft, to solve an interoperability problem between proprietary formats.
- I can run [EMAIL PROTECTED] and do so with either their X11 display (which is cool, but only
permits one copy per X11 server invocation) or a Tk display (which allows multiple
copies to be run, one per [EMAIL PROTECTED] invocation). I have two systems, and each system
has two processors, hence I run two copies of [EMAIL PROTECTED] on each system.
- I can download, patch, and play with various amateur radio satellite tracking programs.
Key thing is that I can patch them to suit my needs, since the source code is generally
available. Ditto for various antenna design programs (NEC and its descendants).
- I like being in total control of MY system.
HTH,
Bayard
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