Hi André, On 7/21/06, André Wyrwa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You really don't want to have your avarage corporate content provider create the prepress for your flyers. It goes through the fingers of a graphics designer anyway.
If you can afford a graphics designer. Last I checked, most megacorps use MS Office or WP. OOo is used more by individuals, schools, and SMB. People and groups who are much more likely to be doing most things in house on da cheep! But i actually do agree that DTP is big. Much bigger than word
processing. In fact, word processing is a desease, in my opinion. As some good article i read not too long ago, pointed out, you either need a text editor to create content that doesn't need layout or you need to create a layouted/formatted document and hence a DTP application. That's why I'm saying, make Writer more of a DTP application. Trash the whole word processing metaphor. Word processors are unusable. MS is trying to solve this by UI changes now, but it will only help them so far. OOo has potential to solve it by taking the style metaphor further than MS, but still doesn't go far enough. See further below...
Word Processing a disease? Hardly. As someone pointed out - try writing a book in a DTP - or a 20 page report. You want to know why DTP suck for multi-page, single story documents? Two words - Text Boxes. I don't want to have to define a text box on each page for 500 pages. And if all / most that I have is text boxes, why do I need a DTP? I do need spell check. I do need a thesaurus. I do need a grammar checker. I do need bullet points. I do need an outliner. I do need font controls / styles. I do need headers and footers. All these are word processing things. Things that Word does better than PageMaker. You say content that doesn't need a layout. I think there is a lot more to content than layout. And I say that this content needs more than Notepad has to offer. What are these dependencies? For my windows install i only needed
Ghostscript. Well, yes, could be integrated into the installer. Distribution issue.
Distribution issues are issues. And for Mac (check the site) there are like 5 or 6 things you have to find online, then copy and paste into some libraries thing. They should be included in the installer - yes, that's a distribution issue. But it's a barrier for the end user, and it sucks. It could be the best program in the world - but if Joe Schmoe can't understand how to install it - then Joe Schmoe will never use it. I've actually installed Aqua Scribus on my Mac before, using Fink via Fink Commander, but I wasn't impressed eenough to stop using my 8 year old copy of Adobe Pagemaker 6.5 in Classic. ...exactly. If you wanna go that far, HTML/CSS is the ideal thing for
me. In an ideal world you would create unformatted content that is semantically structured, just like in HTML/XML. You would then apply different stylesheets to that content just like in CSS/XSLT to get a print document, an email, a web page or a presentation out of it. But so far no-one goes that way and HTML/CSS is still not powerful enough to replace classic DTP.
That would be interesting. And it has applications. Something like a CMS, except for documents instead of just web pages. I like the idea, and would be interested in using it, if it existed. But I think that probably, the vast majority of people (and I'm basis this on usage statistics) want WYSIWYG. Word is far more popular than LaTex. In other words, it would force the user to apply
styles to everything. But it would also help the user in doing that, it would automatically suggest styles (i.e. based on the previous/next style) settings in the styles themselves.
Forcing users is bad. No means no. So, back to topic: Is web creation really business for an Office Suite
at current state? Look at a random business.
Look at a random SMB. That changes your scenario quite a bit. Problem here is the different environments:
- QT (Scribus) - GTK/GNOME (GIMP, Evolution, etc.) - XUL (Mozilla) - OOo Bridge (OOo) - wxWindows (...) Basically, they are all cross-platform or on the way there. XUL and OOo are just the ones that are the most successful at current state.
That's good to know from a techie standpoint - but that doesn't matter at all to the end user. That may explain why the problem exists - but it does nothing to fix it or make it better. Maybe we should write an office suite in XUL. Look at what projects like SongBird - http://www.songbirdnest.com/- and Flock - http://www.flock.com/ - are doing with it. Your "discrediting" of my point about why a sutie should be a suite and not just some random collection of programs - you seem to think that all programs in the world should use the same format (so they can pull from the same database of contacts, for example) that's great, and in a perfect world, I'm sure they would. But they don't. And they won't. Not ever. But all OpenOffice.org programs can open the same ODF formats. So having an OpenOffice.org email client / PIM / calendar / browser / project manager / diagrammer / DTP / whatever - they would all pull from the same document types. We can't make every other program open our database files. We can't even make every other open source program open our database files. What we can do is make a program that does. Here's another reason for an email client to be a part of the same suite as an HTML editor and the same suite as a word processor and the same as a DTP... Shared libraries. I hate having to add words to 10 different spell check dictionaries to let all my software know that Olmert is a person's name, and that's how you spell it. The same could be applied to jargon for your business, abbreviations, heck, even uniform styles across formats - like in your CMS style suite. I want my sig line in my email to match my letterhead to match my web banner to match my book cover to match my envelopes to match my newsletter to match my presentations.... With a unified suite include email client, word procesor, DTP, HTML editor, etc. - that coudl be as easy as selecting the "Chad's Company" style for each format. Complete with matching headers, bullet points, fonts, colors, logos, etc. OpenOffice.org "working with" Mozilla isn't going to make that happen. What's wrong with creating your avarage low
layouted office text document in a DTP program?
Two words - Text Boxes. Did you ever think about how sick the whole "place anchor for picture"
thing in Word Processors is? It's UI horror. Really. I'm placing a picture. I'm placing it where i place it. Right there. What's that whole anchor thing? In my company the big majority of people doesn't even get that the text in their word documents jumps around weirdly when they move a picture just a slight bit, because suddenly the anchor has jumped to the next paragraph. It's horror! And it's conceptual, not implementational - although OOo's implementation helps it heaps.
I agree that the placing of graphics in a word processor can be difficult, and "wrong" - but that doesn't excuse their right to exist. Just fix the problem - don't destory the category of software. -- - Chad Smith http://www.gimpshop.net/ http://www.whatisopenoffice.org/ http://www.chadwsmith.com/
