Again, Appleworks does this pretty good... well, basically.
ok, then, do this:
first page: first letter three lines down, text + 10 mm from left side, header: none, footer: none, page# bottom middle, graphic between first title and the text
first page after above: header: top, right with current chapter, footer with page # bottom right,
second page: header: top, left with current hcapter name, fotter with page # bottom left. and so forth
last page in chapter: header: top, middle, current chapter, fotter with page " bottom middle
add to this:
side line titles/text that follow with appropiate text, automatic indiece/TOC made interative in pdf-s, automatic creation of standardised tables (visible in index/TOC with table numbers, insertedgraphics in text; text can flow along the graphic and not only above and below, creation of expressions as for tables, certain paragraphs will have graphical dividers automatically (e.g.: introductory text in a new chapter has lines above and below the text to show that it is in a sense separet)
footnotes: chose automatically dividing graphics (everybody do not want a normal line), chose at the same time differnt types of footnotes with different formats/behaviour
well, there is even more. sure, not everything was pretty, and some things word could do (line numbering for example, takes me why it didn't exist in frame). the point is also: once all things were done, one couyld simply write and everything would look according to plan, including graphics and so forth. no more adjusting here or there: just plain fun when writing.
Ok, Writing is no fun, writing is hard work, suffering, ... elegantly staring onto blank shiny white space. Struggling with words and characters Hoping the next block won't kill you. Seeking a neat explanation for your child for what you are really doing. Yes, Fun, thoroughly. Soaring....
Hell yes support OO's file format(if it's unique and open). It's rather daft that in 2005 we will still have files being sent that are based on proprietary formats. Now encryption is a must but the actual file format need not be proprietary.
MS needs to start earning things on the merits of their applications and not some draconian lock in.
Tiger is looking so yummy I want to see what Apple and its 3rd parties can do. I still can't get the Quantrix Modeler out of my mind. It functions like a spreadsheet should. I really wish Apple could hit the market with products that redefine how office applications are used. I hear people crowing sometimes about how good excel is or word is but is that because these apps are intuitive and powerful or is it that they just learned the applications and what was once difficult is now easy?
I'm sooo glad Keynote looks to be alive I guess I shouldn't be complaining too much.
MS needs to start earning things on the merits of their applications and not some draconian lock in.
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
Not really... they dominate because they're an acceptable suite. Windows, Office, and most MS stuff wins because it is 'good enough'. It's not so poor people notice its flaws and cringe, but it could be a heck of a lot better.
Having said that, though, most apps could be better. Office isn't dire, once you've turned off all the defaults like AutoEverything
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
And let guess you think IE dominates the browser market because it's just a great piece of software?
Sorry, there just isn't anything special about MS office software other than the proprietary format(s) that has people and companies locked into. Companies and governments across the globe are looking for ways to get themselves out of being locked into the MS office formats and upgrade treadmil.
It's long past time for Apple to be bold and take their future into their own hands by doing what they did with IE and Safari. Are we better or worse now that Apple dumped IE? It's time for them to finish the job with OpenOffice or the OpenOffice formats at least.
I just checked out the Nisus Writer Express web site for the first time. That is one beautiful app! I'm going to download it and play with it tomorrow. Wow. I am so amazed at the difference between Cocoa and Carbon. Wow.
The more I think about it, all I really want is a low end Cocoa spreadsheet app to crunch some budget numbers. Why aren't third parties jumping on this?
Omni can write business apps, it should also be child's play for Mellel and Nisus as well. What's the holdup?
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
I disagree. It is exactly because of the file formats that office maintains its dominance. Imagine that we never shared files and that we only used WPs like old mechanical typewriters. To send someone a document you would print it out and mail it to them. In that case you could imagine a rich variety of WPs.
However, in our world, especially in the business world, MS office formats are important because many people need to share documents. Person A creates it, person B modifies it, person C formats it and prints it. In such an environment one format eventually had to become dominant.
If we had a public domain document format (IEEE Word Processor Document Format) then we could have a large variety of WPs. You could choose software for Linux, windows or the Mac with some confidence that it would manage your data in the same fashion.
In the data world we have a few portable formats such tab delimited or comma separated value files. Data formatted like this can easily be moved from a File Maker Pro database to a Mariner Calc spread sheet to an Excel spreadsheet to a text editor to a printer. As soon as calculation methods are included with the data then much portability is lost as these are not standardized.
Bingo. MS figured this out decades ago while everyone else was worried about what app had the best features: it doesn't matter.
To put it simply: It's the DATA, stupid.
No one is ever going to switch to another application if they can't take their hard-created data with them, if their current application is even baseline 'good enough'. They will put up with any number of crappy things they have to work around, known bugs that never get fixed, and bizarre behaviours... as long as they're held hostage to their files.
MS knows this. Why else would they try and *patent* an *XML* schema for describing Office files?? Lock-in. Period.
If we had a public domain document format (IEEE Word Processor Document Format) then we could have a large variety of WPs. You could choose software for Linux, windows or the Mac with some confidence that it would manage your data in the same fashion.
I guess we won't be seeing PDF as this file format, as Adobe wants to seel everyone their Acrobat software. It's a shame, as the format is already there .
Could XML be used to define a standard WP file format?
They've been approved by OASIS, which *everyone* who is anyone in documents and data is signed up for, even MSFT, though they are being dicks about it as it will kill both of their monopolies when it becomes popular:
The EU recently told MSFT to stop being dicks and open their formats since part of the EU mission is to standardise so that the EU can be as efficient as a single country the size of the US, rather than lots of individual countries with their own laws and regulations and office formats for government data.
MSFT hummed an hawed. Sun meanwhile took the EU's advice and put OO.org formats forward for ISO raticification:
Apple better have this stuff waiting in the wings. I don't care if they keep it shtoom to avoid pissing of MSFT but they better have it in a lab or I'll be very disappointed.
A closed (or proprietary) file format is unly understandable when someone creates a new technology for dealing with data. Word processing and spreadsheets are not a new technology by any stretch of the imagination. They have been used on the desktop for over 20 years! In computer time, that's prehistory! Yet, we still don't use a standard file format for dealing with them!
Once all the major software start using a common file format, their differentiation now becomes how they help you to work on that data, thus forcing innovation. That is why it is long overdue for everyone to standardize on a file format. And currently, one of the best implementations and also the only one that's being submitted for standardization is the OpenOffice.org file format.
Apple, like most other software houses, should embrace this file format for their office suite. If Microsoft won't play nice and use this standardized file format, a few governments will force them to, unless Microsoft is willing to lose their business. Every week, there is a story of a government or big business that just decided to standardize on this file format. It is the future, so Apple doesn't have a choice here.
Kind of interesting to realize that the .pdf format is in many cases a workaround for these problems with common file formats. For example, we often use .pdfs so others can open and print our CAD documents. AutoCAD is fighting .pdf with their own portable format, and Acrobat 7 seems mostly geared towards this specific market, so I guess there is some major money and power at stake with this kind of function.
Since I don't use Word, I've had to give people .pdfs of my resume and other text documents too. I do it for anything that uses graphics as well, though for printers, I will also supply .tiffs at the same time on disc.
At times, I've offered simple .rtf and .txt files to people for this purpose, but people feel safe with knowing that they can read .pdfs, or rather "Acrobat files," since there's an app called Acrobat reader that is free. But that's savvy marketing than anything else.
Anyway, I wonder where the .pdf format would be if word processors saved in a more, uh, graphics-savvy format, and that format was an open standard. PDF isn't really breaking the lock on the .doc format or .xls but it just demonstrates that 1. people don't trust these formats for locked or secure info and that 2. people seem to be demanding a workaround to these proprietary formats.
PDF isn't a 'workaround' for .doc issues. It is *the* perfect format for delivering read only documents that are intended to be printed. If a European sends a .doc file to someone in the US, the change in paper size (A4 -> US Letter) breaks the formatting. How dumb is that? Your beautifully laid out CV, created on a screen and emailed, gets its formatting broken because of a printer setting even though the majority of Word documents are never printed. Whereas PDFs do get printed, and still don't have these problems.
Not having the right fonts also breaks the formatting. That's why the new Novel Linux Desktop ships with fonts that are 'metrically-compatible' with the standard MSFT selection. Because even if OpenOffice read the document 100% correctly, the document file format is so irredeemably broken that it still wouldn't display the same as on Windows due to different fonts.
So if PDF is so cool and useful, why can't MSFT Office make PDFs?
Because MSTF is a fat lazy monopolist and what is good for the consumer is generally speaking bad for Microsoft, and the very smart people that MSFT employs know this. If PDFs gain further ground as a document interchange format, even if the editing is done in .doc then their Office monopoly is on a shoogly peg, and their OS monopoly will follow if it goes.
On the other hand, OpenOffice (the program, not the file format) will let you create read-only PDFs from your document, after you've collaborated and edited it in OpenOffice's format or even Word's. That's PDFs, built-in, for free, on every platform, meaning you can distribute read-only files to anyone.
And of course the Mac lets you create PDFs of damn near anything so it's a given that AppleOffice will let you do it too (though probably in a more intuitive, and hopefully more controllable, manner).
Yes. I have been using it for two months - primarily for theological papers (English, Hebrew, Greek, German, and Latin). The style sheets are unique, but once I figured them out, I find it far more intuitive than any other program (using F-Keys for variations, Bold, Italic, Greek, Hebrew, etc.); very fast switching between languages.
It is a great program. Of course, there are needed refinements. But it does a very nice job. The Redlex programming team interacts with users almost daily on the Yahoo groups discussion list; they are very responsive to features requests. Also, some very experienced users there.
Added benefits:
1. (true) OpenType compatible (only OS X program that is fully so).
2. And - it's current version is 1.8, the next major release (2.0?) will use the XML format as its base - thus fitting in with the OOo approach.
Comments
Originally posted by Vox Barbara
Again, Appleworks does this pretty good... well, basically.
ok, then, do this:
first page: first letter three lines down, text + 10 mm from left side, header: none, footer: none, page# bottom middle, graphic between first title and the text
first page after above: header: top, right with current chapter, footer with page # bottom right,
second page: header: top, left with current hcapter name, fotter with page # bottom left. and so forth
last page in chapter: header: top, middle, current chapter, fotter with page " bottom middle
add to this:
side line titles/text that follow with appropiate text, automatic indiece/TOC made interative in pdf-s, automatic creation of standardised tables (visible in index/TOC with table numbers, insertedgraphics in text; text can flow along the graphic and not only above and below, creation of expressions as for tables, certain paragraphs will have graphical dividers automatically (e.g.: introductory text in a new chapter has lines above and below the text to show that it is in a sense separet)
footnotes: chose automatically dividing graphics (everybody do not want a normal line), chose at the same time differnt types of footnotes with different formats/behaviour
well, there is even more. sure, not everything was pretty, and some things word could do (line numbering for example, takes me why it didn't exist in frame). the point is also: once all things were done, one couyld simply write and everything would look according to plan, including graphics and so forth. no more adjusting here or there: just plain fun when writing.
Originally posted by dividend
ok, ...
just plain fun when writing.
Ok
MS needs to start earning things on the merits of their applications and not some draconian lock in.
Tiger is looking so yummy I want to see what Apple and its 3rd parties can do. I still can't get the Quantrix Modeler out of my mind. It functions like a spreadsheet should. I really wish Apple could hit the market with products that redefine how office applications are used. I hear people crowing sometimes about how good excel is or word is but is that because these apps are intuitive and powerful or is it that they just learned the applications and what was once difficult is now easy?
I'm sooo glad Keynote looks to be alive I guess I shouldn't be complaining too much.
Originally posted by hmurchison
MS needs to start earning things on the merits of their applications and not some draconian lock in.
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html
Originally posted by Telomar
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
Not really... they dominate because they're an acceptable suite. Windows, Office, and most MS stuff wins because it is 'good enough'. It's not so poor people notice its flaws and cringe, but it could be a heck of a lot better.
Having said that, though, most apps could be better. Office isn't dire, once you've turned off all the defaults like AutoEverything
Originally posted by Telomar
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
And let guess you think IE dominates the browser market because it's just a great piece of software?
Sorry, there just isn't anything special about MS office software other than the proprietary format(s) that has people and companies locked into. Companies and governments across the globe are looking for ways to get themselves out of being locked into the MS office formats and upgrade treadmil.
It's long past time for Apple to be bold and take their future into their own hands by doing what they did with IE and Safari. Are we better or worse now that Apple dumped IE? It's time for them to finish the job with OpenOffice or the OpenOffice formats at least.
Omni can write business apps, it should also be child's play for Mellel and Nisus as well. What's the holdup?
Originally posted by Telomar
I hate to break this to a lot of people but Microsoft doesn't dominate the office market because of their file formats and they aren't dominant due to their evil ways. Like it or hate it Office dominates because it is an excellent suite of programs that are very usable for a wide range of applications.
I disagree. It is exactly because of the file formats that office maintains its dominance. Imagine that we never shared files and that we only used WPs like old mechanical typewriters. To send someone a document you would print it out and mail it to them. In that case you could imagine a rich variety of WPs.
However, in our world, especially in the business world, MS office formats are important because many people need to share documents. Person A creates it, person B modifies it, person C formats it and prints it. In such an environment one format eventually had to become dominant.
If we had a public domain document format (IEEE Word Processor Document Format) then we could have a large variety of WPs. You could choose software for Linux, windows or the Mac with some confidence that it would manage your data in the same fashion.
In the data world we have a few portable formats such tab delimited or comma separated value files. Data formatted like this can easily be moved from a File Maker Pro database to a Mariner Calc spread sheet to an Excel spreadsheet to a text editor to a printer. As soon as calculation methods are included with the data then much portability is lost as these are not standardized.
To put it simply: It's the DATA, stupid.
No one is ever going to switch to another application if they can't take their hard-created data with them, if their current application is even baseline 'good enough'. They will put up with any number of crappy things they have to work around, known bugs that never get fixed, and bizarre behaviours... as long as they're held hostage to their files.
MS knows this. Why else would they try and *patent* an *XML* schema for describing Office files?? Lock-in. Period.
Originally posted by neutrino23
...
If we had a public domain document format (IEEE Word Processor Document Format) then we could have a large variety of WPs. You could choose software for Linux, windows or the Mac with some confidence that it would manage your data in the same fashion.
I guess we won't be seeing PDF as this file format, as Adobe wants to seel everyone their Acrobat software. It's a shame, as the format is already there
Could XML be used to define a standard WP file format?
Originally posted by Dave Abrey
Could XML be used to define a standard WP file format?
Sure.
Originally posted by Ra
Sure.
Could you elaborate? If it can be used, why hasn't it?
http://xml.openoffice.org/
They've been approved by OASIS, which *everyone* who is anyone in documents and data is signed up for, even MSFT, though they are being dicks about it as it will kill both of their monopolies when it becomes popular:
http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php
The EU recently told MSFT to stop being dicks and open their formats since part of the EU mission is to standardise so that the EU can be as efficient as a single country the size of the US, rather than lots of individual countries with their own laws and regulations and office formats for government data.
MSFT hummed an hawed. Sun meanwhile took the EU's advice and put OO.org formats forward for ISO raticification:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/20.../09/24/SmartEC
Apple better have this stuff waiting in the wings. I don't care if they keep it shtoom to avoid pissing of MSFT but they better have it in a lab or I'll be very disappointed.
A closed (or proprietary) file format is unly understandable when someone creates a new technology for dealing with data. Word processing and spreadsheets are not a new technology by any stretch of the imagination. They have been used on the desktop for over 20 years! In computer time, that's prehistory! Yet, we still don't use a standard file format for dealing with them!
Once all the major software start using a common file format, their differentiation now becomes how they help you to work on that data, thus forcing innovation. That is why it is long overdue for everyone to standardize on a file format. And currently, one of the best implementations and also the only one that's being submitted for standardization is the OpenOffice.org file format.
Apple, like most other software houses, should embrace this file format for their office suite. If Microsoft won't play nice and use this standardized file format, a few governments will force them to, unless Microsoft is willing to lose their business. Every week, there is a story of a government or big business that just decided to standardize on this file format. It is the future, so Apple doesn't have a choice here.
Since I don't use Word, I've had to give people .pdfs of my resume and other text documents too. I do it for anything that uses graphics as well, though for printers, I will also supply .tiffs at the same time on disc.
At times, I've offered simple .rtf and .txt files to people for this purpose, but people feel safe with knowing that they can read .pdfs, or rather "Acrobat files," since there's an app called Acrobat reader that is free. But that's savvy marketing than anything else.
Anyway, I wonder where the .pdf format would be if word processors saved in a more, uh, graphics-savvy format, and that format was an open standard. PDF isn't really breaking the lock on the .doc format or .xls but it just demonstrates that 1. people don't trust these formats for locked or secure info and that 2. people seem to be demanding a workaround to these proprietary formats.
Not having the right fonts also breaks the formatting. That's why the new Novel Linux Desktop ships with fonts that are 'metrically-compatible' with the standard MSFT selection. Because even if OpenOffice read the document 100% correctly, the document file format is so irredeemably broken that it still wouldn't display the same as on Windows due to different fonts.
So if PDF is so cool and useful, why can't MSFT Office make PDFs?
Because MSTF is a fat lazy monopolist and what is good for the consumer is generally speaking bad for Microsoft, and the very smart people that MSFT employs know this. If PDFs gain further ground as a document interchange format, even if the editing is done in .doc then their Office monopoly is on a shoogly peg, and their OS monopoly will follow if it goes.
On the other hand, OpenOffice (the program, not the file format) will let you create read-only PDFs from your document, after you've collaborated and edited it in OpenOffice's format or even Word's. That's PDFs, built-in, for free, on every platform, meaning you can distribute read-only files to anyone.
And of course the Mac lets you create PDFs of damn near anything so it's a given that AppleOffice will let you do it too (though probably in a more intuitive, and hopefully more controllable, manner).
Originally posted by adamrao
Has anyone seen this? Used this?
http://www.redlers.com/mellel.html
Yes. I have been using it for two months - primarily for theological papers (English, Hebrew, Greek, German, and Latin). The style sheets are unique, but once I figured them out, I find it far more intuitive than any other program (using F-Keys for variations, Bold, Italic, Greek, Hebrew, etc.); very fast switching between languages.
It is a great program. Of course, there are needed refinements. But it does a very nice job. The Redlex programming team interacts with users almost daily on the Yahoo groups discussion list; they are very responsive to features requests. Also, some very experienced users there.
Added benefits:
1. (true) OpenType compatible (only OS X program that is fully so).
2. And - it's current version is 1.8, the next major release (2.0?) will use the XML format as its base - thus fitting in with the OOo approach.