Site-licensed Document Prep (WP) Suggestions Wanted

[Wm Randolph Franklin]

RPI, which has several hundred Sun and IBM RS6000 workstations, is
considering standardizing on some word processing, i.e., WYSIWYG document
preparation package.  The requirements are the obvious: technical
equations, etc, figures, images, import/export files, portability to both
platforms, reasonable cost, etc.

We're eager to hear of suggestions, experiences, etc.

At this point, the only 3 choices appear to be Publisher, Frame, and
Interleaf.  Is this correct?

We may actually recommend 2 packages: a big one for long documents, and a
simple one for naive users and short papers.  Some people recommend
WordPerfect here.  Is this reasonable?

Finally, what is a reasonable standardized editor?  Emacs, perhaps with
all the fancy commands set to default to be disabled, looks reasonable.
(=> I like it :-))  However it does have the reputation of complexity.  As
configured, takes far too long to load, and emacs-server is a touch too
complicated for novices.  Suggestions?

Since the most important part of decision-making is to avoid disasters,
I'm also interested in horror stories and warnings of pitfalls to avoid.

Please email even if you post.  I'll summarize replies.  Thanks.

This is an official posting (unlike most of my postings :-)).

						   Wm. Randolph Franklin
Internet: wrf at ecse.rpi.edu (or @cs.rpi.edu)    Bitnet: Wrfrankl at Rpitsmts
Telephone: (518) 276-6077;  Telex: 6716050 RPI TROU; Fax: (518) 276-6261
Paper: ECSE Dept., 6026 JEC, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst, Troy NY, 12180