Re: Looking for a text mode word processor

[Ben Goren <ben@trumpetpower.com>]

Gaah...sent to misc@ instead. Apologies; here it is to ports@.

b&

How  'bout  {t,n,g}roff? It's no  harder  than  HTML and  produces
pretty  decent  output  to   either  screen  or  printer. Or,  for
that  matter,  HTML isn't  a  bad  choice,  though it  isn't  very
paper-oriented.

You're used  to control  sequences to  set bold,  etc., right? The
only difference here  is that you type a  couple characters rather
than  hold a  couple keys  while you  type one  character. There's
also  no show/reveal  codes, but  I always  had show  codes turned
on--otherwise, I  got all sorts of  crap going on that  I couldn't
see.

I wrote at  least a few papers in college  with troff. They looked
better than anything any of the word processors of the time turned
out,  and--except for  the  first  one--I spent  a  lot less  time
screwing around with the word processor.

If  you need  a spellchecker,  ispell and  friends understand  the
format.

Finally,  don't be  too scared  by  LaTeX. A bit  of Googling  for
``LaTeX  tutorial''  will  reveal  all  sorts  of  quick-and-dirty
instructions that should have  you duplicating the capabilities of
WordPerfect in no time at all.

b&

On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 11:04:38AM -0500, Sam Stern wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I'm not certain if this is topical or not but here goes. I would
> like to locate a text mode  word processor (layout much beyond a
> tab ordered list  is unimportant) like the  old WordPerfect Unix
> 5.x, Word Star 6 Unix, etc that I can run over ssh. Any hints on
> what to look for in the ports tree are welcome! Please note that
> the complexity  of Latex is  so vastly  beyond what I  need that
> it's a non-option.
>
> BTW, if anyone  has managed to get WordPerfect  or WordStar Unix
> working  under  OpenBSD i386  3.0  I  would  like to  hear  from
> you. Given that that these word processors are so cheap on eBay,
> if I  can get one  of them running reliably  on OBSD I'd  be one
> happy camper.
>
> TIA,
>
> Sam Stern
> Bethesda, MD, USA

--
Ben Goren
 mailto:ben@trumpetpower.com
 http://www.trumpetpower.com/
 icbm:33o25'37"N_111o57'32"W

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