On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:16, Anne Wilson wrote: > In that case, it's scream-worthy. I run win4lin for just three purposes - > the most important one is to exchange documents with my daughter, who has > her thesis in wordpro format. > > Apart from that, the other two are big conveniences that I can't find in > any linux package. One is PagePlus's ability to print an A5 booklet on A4 > paper, properly sorted, with pages 1 and 24 on one side and 2 and 23 on the > other. If scribus had that I could dispense with this one. I find it hard > to believe that no-one needs that facility. > > The other one is a photo-printing app that quickly allows me to print 4 to > a page, guaranteeing that the pics come out the same size. I can do it > with KWord, but hand-drawing boxes is not reliable, and also it is > sometimes necessary to slightly crop to make the format of the pic fit. > This may be replaceable in linux, but I haven't found it yet. > > Sorry to be OT, but I think it helps from time to time for us to air our > needs. Sometimes others have a solution. Sometimes the idea gets picked > up by a developer. > > Meanwhile, I hope Simon gets what he needs, and I'll help all I can. I > never saw the need for that other behemoth of an office suite, and loved > SmartSuite myself. > > Anne
I run Win4Lin for 1 reason only, and that's the Genealogy program I use, none of the Linux programs come close to the features I need. I occasionally mess around with designing a KDE replacement for it, I have a database schema and some screen mock-ups, but time is too limited at the moment to build the actual working bits in-between :-( I know there was a lot of politics inside Lotus against either releasing the Wine version (support issues, "diminished" user experience, etc), or properly porting to Linux (Windows bigots). But then Lotus didn't really seem to know what they were doing with anything, like releasing a Linux Notes server but not a client. Shame really, waste of a good product, they could have gotten a head start on Star/OpenOffice. I'll have a poke around to see if I can find any more information about it, shame I had to delete my copy when I left :-( I find it strange nothing in Linux does booklet printing, that's just criminal! It's just the sort of thing DTP was created for. As for the photo printing, you should try Digikam and its Print Wizard. You select a bunch of photo's, then start the wizard, tell it the page size (currently only A4 or letter) and the required image size, and Digikam arranges them on the page(s), then lets you adjust the cropping for each image by dragging an outline box. It's not perfect, but handy. You need to have the digikam and digikam-plugins rpms installed, it has some other great tools like calendar printing, mpeg movie encoding or slideshow to CD/DVD, web-page generation, batch effects processing, etc, etc. Of course, there's always a catch, and the current 0.6.2 version of Digikam has poor album management: it doesn't allow for nested folders, and leaves album data files all over the place. This is solved in the 0.7 version, currently in beta testing (compile only, no rpms available yet) and due out Real Soon Now. And even better news is that all those cool plugins are now a shared library between several of the KDE image programs like Gwenview and KimDaBa, so if you prefer those for image management/viewing, you can still get all the cool stuff (or will when the next versions hit the streets). John.
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