Lightweight Wordprocessors for Linux?
Hi Everyone, I have an older laptop that's running linux and I'm mostly using it for taking notes and the like. It's running Ubuntu Natty but with LXDE for a window manager. Today I had to edit a word file that had been exported to ODT to update documentation for a project I am working on. In the process it launched Libre Office. This software feels bloated and heavy. It takes a little over a minute to launch and sometimes seconds will pass between the time I type something and the time it appears on the screen. Normally I would just use a text editor like gEdit, but the documents I'm starting to work with are ODT. I was able to get some speed using google docs, but I don't like the idea of relying on gdocs when I know there have to be better options. Anyone use on of the lighter weight word processors lately and if so what was your opinion on it overall? (Not looking for a vi or emacs answer here please). Thanks in advance! Sincerely, Dale /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Lightweight Wordprocessors for Linux?
On Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:27:32 -0600 "S. Dale Morrey" wrote: > Today I had to edit a word file that had been exported to ODT to > update documentation for a project I am working on. > In the process it launched Libre Office. > This software feels bloated and heavy. It takes a little over a > minute to launch and sometimes seconds will pass between the time I > type something and the time it appears on the screen. Try AbiWord, available in the Ubuntu repos. -- Charles Curley /"\ASCII Ribbon Campaign Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Lightweight Wordprocessors for Linux?
On Sep 16, 2011 6:19 AM, "Charles Curley" wrote: > > On Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:27:32 -0600 > "S. Dale Morrey" wrote: > > > Today I had to edit a word file that had been exported to ODT to > > update documentation for a project I am working on. > > In the process it launched Libre Office. > > This software feels bloated and heavy. It takes a little over a > > minute to launch and sometimes seconds will pass between the time I > > type something and the time it appears on the screen. > > Try AbiWord, available in the Ubuntu repos. > > > -- > > Charles Curley /"\ASCII Ribbon Campaign > Looking for fine software \ /Respect for open standards > and/or writing? X No HTML/RTF in email > http://www.charlescurley.com/ \No M$ Word docs in email > > Key fingerprint = CE5C 6645 A45A 64E4 94C0 809C FFF6 4C48 4ECD DFDB > > /* > PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net > Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug > Don't fear the penguin. > */ There is also an entire office suite for KDE. Of course it doesn't have ll the feautures of Open or Libre Office but I'm sure it handles ODT. Ubuntu should automatically include the needed KDE libraries. I forget the name (maybe koffice). Let me know if youneed more info on it and I can look it up when I am on the desktop. - Ed Felt /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Have lunch and learn about content management
When I joined Alfresco, I thought content management was a tool for building web sites. Now I wish I had been exposed to content management systems in school so that I would have avoided reinventing the wheel a couple of times. Alfresco Community Edition is the most widely adopted open source content management system. Version 4.0 is due to be released in early October, so we are having a release party! Join us for lunch, Tuesday October 11. It is an informal event. Only plan is for good conversation! http://www.meetup.com/Alfresco/Salt-Lake-City-UT/359482/ We plan to meet at the Pizza Factory in Lindon Utah, but we might change that depending on who signs up. Bring some money for food. Alfresco will buy soda and bread-sticks. Feel free to invite other people you think would enjoy hanging out with us! Would someone mind forwarding this invitation to the Utah Java Users Group, and the UVU Linux Users Group? Hope to see you there, Richard Esplin Community Technology | Alfresco /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
On 09/16/2011 10:29 AM, Richard Esplin wrote: > Alfresco Community Edition is the most widely adopted open source > content management system. Just curious, but how do you figure that? It seems like Drupal, Wordpress, and Plone (among others) are more widely adopted than Alfresco. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
I should have been more precise and said open source content management system for unstructured content. Drupal, Wordpress, and Plone are web content management systems that focus on presentation management. Alfresco is a general content management system that can handle web content management (structured content, usually XML) and any other type of content like documents and images (unstructured content). Alfresco is regularly deployed as a back-end to Drupal and Plone to add a robust authoring platform to the web presentation system. It is also used in non-web scenarios for workflow, content transformations, search, and more. Common application domains are invoice processing, insurance forms, user documentation, publishing, records management, video, images, etc. Unstructured content management is one of those generic tools, like a database, that can be applied in a wide range of scenarios. But most developers don't realize such tools exist off-the-shelf and end up building their own. Richard On Friday September 16 2011 10:57:44 Shane Hathaway wrote: > On 09/16/2011 10:29 AM, Richard Esplin wrote: > > Alfresco Community Edition is the most widely adopted open source > > content management system. > > Just curious, but how do you figure that? It seems like Drupal, > Wordpress, and Plone (among others) are more widely adopted than Alfresco. > > Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Utah Open Source : Project Day / Raffle : UTOSC 2012 : Tomorrow : Mumble Server UP
Greets all! Project day event tomorrow! We've got several great projects that will be there tomorrow you can help with or you can work on other OSS. Food + Code + Wifi = FTW! UTOS Project Day - Sept 17, 2011 10a – 5:30p Miller Professional Development Center http://project-day.utos.org/ *Mumble Server Available for UTOSC Call for volunteer meeting* ## 10" XOOM Raffle ## One lucky community member will be taking home the Xoom! Will it be you? http://project-day.utos.org/rules/ ## UTOSC 2012 Call for volunteers & planning meeting ## Also at the UTOS project day, we will be speaking about the up coming UTOSC 2012. Please come in any time of the day to register to be a volunteer and attend our UTOSC 2012 planning meeting at 2p to help us plan another great event! For those of you who are far away and would like to participate, I do have a mumble server up and running. You will need to install the client on your computer. Please contact me for information on how to connect. mj/v /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
On 09/16/2011 11:19 AM, Richard Esplin wrote: > I should have been more precise and said open source content > management system for unstructured content. > > Drupal, Wordpress, and Plone are web content management systems that > focus on presentation management. > > Alfresco is a general content management system that can handle web > content management (structured content, usually XML) and any other > type of content like documents and images (unstructured content). > > Alfresco is regularly deployed as a back-end to Drupal and Plone to > add a robust authoring platform to the web presentation system. It is > also used in non-web scenarios for workflow, content transformations, > search, and more. I'd like to understand, but I'm struggling because I would describe Plone with the very same words you used to describe Alfresco. In fact, these days people often use a separate process to present Plone on the web (see Diazo, XDV, or Deliverance), so that Plone can focus on authoring (with all its workflow, collaboration features, and modularity) instead of presentation management. If I download and install Alfresco to figure out what I'm missing, what should I pay attention to? I want to be impressed. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
I have no hands-on experience with Plone. Before responding to your question, I spent a few minutes brushing up on the features. I was surprised that Plone has a lot more document management features than I was previously aware of. Alfresco and Plone have a lot of overlap in web content management scenarios. Though Plone has features like WebDAV support, workflow, and metadata, it appears to be optimized for web content management. In my quick search it appears that: * It has limited facilities for inspection or transformation of non-text based content (full-text search, metadata extraction, preview). * It stores everything in a single large binary database file, with BLOB capabilities for extracting some unstructured binaries. * Its workflow capabilities appear to be tailored to web publishing scenarios (no event model). That doesn't mean that Plone isn't a strong platform with a solid use case. I merely highlight those as examples of where Alfresco's focus is different from Plone. Though Alfresco can often be used in the same situations as Plone, Alfresco's focus is being a scalable content repository in back-office use cases (intranets, business workflow, embedded in applications). Alfresco is most widely used in scenarios involving office documents, images, video, and audio. Useful features include: * Automatic extraction of common metadata (EXIF, PDF), plus easy hooks to insert custom metadata extractors. * Automatic transformation of common formats (MS Office to PDF), plus easy hooks to insert custom transformers. * Out-of-the-box full-text search and preview of common office, image, video, and audio formats. * All content is stored on the filesystem, so there are no limits to the size of content. Performance is comparable for lots of small files or lots of really big files. * A configurable event system that fires when content is uploaded, modified, or removed. * BPMN2 compliant workflow engine. * Easy onramps for unstructured content like CIFS, WebDAV, FTP, SharePoint Protocol, IMAP, SMTP, NFS, etc. * Compliant with the CMIS standard for REST and SOAP integrations. * A system for easily writing your own rest services using JavaScript and XML. * Able to publish content to external endpoints via email, REST, and other transfer services. Out-of-the-box endpoints include Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and WordPress. * Scales to the 10's of millions of documents. I have recently helped clients deploy Alfresco in scenarios like: * Serving large amounts of video or Flash games through a custom web portal, * High performance scanning and ingestion, * Processing loan applications, * Storing business documents for HR, Marketing, Legal, and IT, * Authoring and distributing product catalogs, datasheet, and marketing information to a team of resellers, * Records archives for SOX compliance, * Storing the multi-media assets used by an online game. What I have been calling unstructured content management, lots of people call a content repository. It is a generic term applied to a specific class of technologies. Explaining it is like introducing someone to the idea of a database or web portal. These solutions do lots of things in lots of ways, but they share a set of strengths and weaknesses that make them good at a certain type of problem. As engineers, most of the time we hear about these types of needs we solve them using a database plus custom code, or a filesystem and custom code. A robust document store saves you from building these solutions yourself. Like other building-blocks, content repositories often don't do much out of the box; they need to be configured and integrated to be useful. Alfresco's chief competitors are solutions like Documentum, Filenet, and Oracle Content Management. SharePoint is increasingly playing in this space, but I think it still has too many limitations. To complicate matters, Alfresco has been adding a lot of features that make it competitive with SharePoint as a collaboration portal. Here is a good article which probably describes this better than I did: http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/alfresco-as-a-platform/ Richard P.S. I didn't find any quick numbers to estimate the size of the Plone community (number of downloads, commercial customers, installs), so I can't say much about that. On Friday September 16 2011 13:36:52 Shane Hathaway wrote: > On 09/16/2011 11:19 AM, Richard Esplin wrote: > > I should have been more precise and said open source content > > management system for unstructured content. > > > > Drupal, Wordpress, and Plone are web content management systems that > > focus on presentation management. > > > > Alfresco is a general content management system that can handle web > > content management (structured content, usually XML) and any other > > type of content like documents and images (unstructured content). > > > > Alfresco is regularly deployed as a back-end to Drupal and Plone to > > add a robust authoring platform
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
On 09/16/2011 02:38 PM, Richard Esplin wrote: > I have no hands-on experience with Plone. Before responding to your question, > I spent a few minutes brushing up on the features. I was surprised that Plone > has a lot more document management features than I was previously aware of. > Alfresco and Plone have a lot of overlap in web content management scenarios. Thanks for a thoughtful response! > Though Plone has features like WebDAV support, workflow, and metadata, it > appears to be optimized for web content management. In my quick search it > appears that: > > * It has limited facilities for inspection or transformation of non-text > based content (full-text search, metadata extraction, preview). Well, I know of several large intranets that use Plone for managing office documents and PDFs. Those deployments have full text search using either the internal catalog or Solr. > * It stores everything in a single large binary database file, with BLOB > capabilities for extracting some unstructured binaries. Large deployments of Plone use RelStorage or ZEO instead of a single database file. RelStorage puts all objects in Postgres, MySQL, or Oracle. (Disclaimer: I wrote RelStorage.) > * Its workflow capabilities appear to be tailored to web publishing scenarios > (no event model). Its workflow is actually an arbitrary finite state machine that can be built or customized through the web or in code. There are books that explore the workflow capabilities in depth. (Disclaimer: I wrote DCWorkflow, the core of Plone's workflow.) > That doesn't mean that Plone isn't a strong platform with a solid use case. I > merely highlight those as examples of where Alfresco's focus is different > from Plone. Though Alfresco can often be used in the same situations as > Plone, Alfresco's focus is being a scalable content repository in back-office > use cases (intranets, business workflow, embedded in applications). > > Alfresco is most widely used in scenarios involving office documents, images, > video, and audio. Useful features include: > > * Automatic extraction of common metadata (EXIF, PDF), plus easy hooks to > insert custom metadata extractors. > * Automatic transformation of common formats (MS Office to PDF), plus easy > hooks to insert custom transformers. > * Out-of-the-box full-text search and preview of common office, image, video, > and audio formats. > * All content is stored on the filesystem, so there are no limits to the size > of content. Performance is comparable for lots of small files or lots of > really big files. > * A configurable event system that fires when content is uploaded, modified, > or removed. > * BPMN2 compliant workflow engine. > * Easy onramps for unstructured content like CIFS, WebDAV, FTP, SharePoint > Protocol, IMAP, SMTP, NFS, etc. > * Compliant with the CMIS standard for REST and SOAP integrations. > * A system for easily writing your own rest services using JavaScript and XML. > * Able to publish content to external endpoints via email, REST, and other > transfer services. Out-of-the-box endpoints include Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, > and WordPress. > * Scales to the 10's of millions of documents. > > I have recently helped clients deploy Alfresco in scenarios like: > > * Serving large amounts of video or Flash games through a custom web portal, > * High performance scanning and ingestion, > * Processing loan applications, > * Storing business documents for HR, Marketing, Legal, and IT, > * Authoring and distributing product catalogs, datasheet, and marketing > information to a team of resellers, > * Records archives for SOX compliance, > * Storing the multi-media assets used by an online game Good to know. I have been involved in similar projects with Plone. As a developer, I prefer Plone because it's written in Python, which reduces the complexity of the code somewhat so I can extend it more easily. (Even so, every big CMS seems to have insanely complex code!) Plone also benefits from a large developer community with a strong core. However, if I were managing a business instead of developing software, I would certainly give Alfresco a serious look. :-) Thanks again. Shane /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
Re: Have lunch and learn about content management
On 9/16/2011 3:47 PM, Shane Hathaway wrote: > On 09/16/2011 02:38 PM, Richard Esplin wrote: > You're both pretty. Let's move on. =cP -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
