On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Chris Frost wrote:
> have Applixware, however it seems to be slightly feature-deprived to me. I
> was wondering what people's thoughts were on things such as Star Office
> and LaTeX. Being a student (and just buying a car and big computer
> upgrade) I really have zero money, so something commerical is really a no
> go for me (I really shouldn't spend the money to buy a latex book if I go
> that way).
I have no experience with Applix so I cannot compare, but have been using
StarOffice (on a casual basis) for a while. The features match those of
Word very closely. So if you are comfortable with Word, you shouldn't
have any major problem with it. The only drawback I've noticed is that SO4
is a resource-hug. On a 32M machine it swaps like hell!!! On a 64M
machine it becomes comfortable, but for any given document it needs more
RAM than Word (despite what some say).
> Mostly what I do is type papers and such, which are normally "nice" (to
> quote most other students words when I turn something in), and like to use
> shading, photo's, etc a lot in my documents.
As a PhD student myself I'm amazed that you've been using Word. I used
Word for my Master thesis, and I regretted it more often than not. At the
start of my PhD I used Word up to the point that my thesis got to about 30
pages. Then Word kept dieing on me almost everyday; and it corrupted the
thesis so badly that I had to start from scratch on a couple of occasions.
Mind you I use a lot of pictures, tables, and equations in my thesis and
papers--the 30 pages document produced a postscript output of about 65meg
:-)
For long documents with lots of pictures and tables and so on nothing
beats LaTeX. And it's free. If you don't want to buy any book for it, get
a working template from someone, and use it--you basically don't need to
know a lot about LaTeX if you don't start from scratch.
The next best thing is FrameMaker from Adobe. I am not sure if they have
a Linux version. Even if they did, it would cost you real money. And it
is very expensive--Windows version cost something like $1000 :-(
In my opinion, your best bet is Lyx. It is a free Tk/Tcl interface for
LaTeX. It gives you a near WYSIWYG interface, and it saves documents in
LaTeX format; so you'll have best of both worlds :-) It doesn't have a
wealth of options, but you can always use LaTeX to make final adjustments
to your document (once you become familiar with it). I think you can
download LyX in rpm format from contrib directory.
Also you may want to look at Xtem. It is a very nice "wrapper" for LaTeX.
It doesn't "hide" LaTeX from you as Lyx does; but you have more control
over your document at your finger tips :-) It also provides very good
on-line help for (almost) all LaTeX commands. So if you "want" to learn
LaTeX, Xtem is probably better than LyX.
cheers,
Hossein
,-----------------------------------------------------------------------,
| .. Mary had a little ram and Windows was so slow... |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Hossein S. Zadeh | |
| Dept of Aerospace Engineering | [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| (YES! I AM a rocket scientist!!)| [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Royal Melb. Inst. of Tech (RMIT) |------------------------------------|
| Melbourne, Australia |http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~zadeh|
'-----------------------------------------------------------------------'
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