Is there any wordprocessor in unix

[Norman Soley]

In article <1989Jul17.211715.6273 at eci386.uucp>, woods at eci386.uucp (Greg A. Woods) writes:
> In article <1111 at jolnet.ORPK.IL.US> gaggy at jolnet.UUCP (Gregory Gulik) writes:
> > 
> > WP:	EXPENSIVE!  Yes, maybe a company CAN afford to buy it for
> > 	every one of it's users, but there are poor UNIX people
> > 	out in the real world.  Yes, us students dont' exactly have
> > 	$1000+ to shell out for the program.  (Hey, the PC version
> > 	is still pretty expensive)
> 
> How true.  $3,500.00CDN for WP for an NCR Tower 32/600.  

What? you must be talking to the wrong people, I paid just under $2,000 for
exactly this almost a year ago, prices have been coming down fast too. WP 
started out at $995 US for 386 XENIX (that's rougly $1250 CDN), now I can 
consitantly find it for $795 CDN. That's a 33% drop in price in only a few
months.

> But DWB is usually quite inexpensive, if not already bundled with your
> system.  Of course some people find vi so repulsive they'd rather
> use ed!  I don't know why a simple full screen editor is not a
> standard part of Unix yet.  Perhaps it should even have Wordstar
> key-bindings as the default, with Emacs as an option.

Oh how true, I can't get the lusers here to get past the vi-block and
have not found an editor which meets their needs without being just as 
difficult to use (a good example of this is the Interactive Ten+ editor for
386ix, it looks real nice and all but the key bindings are a mess). As 
repulsive as this sounds (even to me) what they really want is SPF. I've talked 
to CTC (the people who make SPF-PC) and they just aren't interested in the idea.

Now considering that I can't even get users to spend the 1/2 hour necessary to 
pick up the basics of vi, guess what happens if I tell them that they're going
to have to learn to use nroff, when something they know and like is available
from WordPerfect, for a few hundered bucks. I'd be run out of town that's what.
nroff is a great tool but face it, it's designed for producing technical reports
not memos and letters. I would no more recommend that a business use nroff for
that kind of work than Lotus Manuscript. 
  
> I've also seen the objection against *roff because of the ease of
> hiring people already trained with WP.  Why not re-train them.
> The experience will undoubtably help raise their understanding of
> computers.  If you can't train a person to use *roff in a very
> short time, they probably shouldn't be attempting to do that kind
> of a job at this time.

OK, my secratary goes on vacation and I hire a temp to replace him. I can just 
picture the conversation:

	Good morning, Temps'r'us

	Good morning, I need someone to fill in for my secretary for a week.

	OK, I'm sure we can find someone, what skills do you need?

	Well, someone who knows vi and nroff

	Huh?

	vi and nroff, that's the editor and text processor that comes with UNIX

	Pardon me [she slips a note to her supervisor about a crank caller]
	we have people who know WordPerfect, Wordstar, Wang or MICOM 3000 will
	any of them do?

	I'm afraid not, maybe I could train someone.

	[By this time the police have been called, the call traced and the cops
	are on the way to arrest you for making obscene phone calls] :-)

vi and nroff are fine tools for acedemics, technical users and dp professionals
but I can't imagine anyone trying to use them for production word processing. 
I also can't imagine trying to use WordPerfect to produce a complex scientific
paper. 



-- 
  Norman Soley - The Communications Guy - Ontario Ministry of the Environment
soley at moegate.UUCP  or if you roll your own:  uunet!attcan!ncrcan!moegate!soley
   The Minister speaks for the Ministry, I speak for myself. Got that! Good.