On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 22:44, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Well publisher is a dtp joke actually. I wasn't writing "let's do > publisher" but "let's add a serious dtp mode to oo.o"
It'll have to get in the queue behind a lot of other rfes unless you know a source to fund the development. > (For those who've never touched anything but a word processor : in dtp > you write text by the kilometer then pour it in pretty presentation > molds. Sometimes the writing and the presenting are not even done by the > same team. In wisiwig word processors the damn thing does not let you > forget about the presentation a single second, so you do half-hearted > attempts at presentation while your text isn't finished yet, at by the > time you get to prettifying things most of those attempts either stand > in the way like the cruft they really hard or are just plain obsolete > since you've reworked you text dozens of time since then) There really isn't any need to separate the two if you have the stuctures in which to pour your text or type it in directly. It really shouldn't make much difference > Writer is actually a bit worse even than word in this regard btw, at > least word got a serious plan mode. Both are significantly worse in that respect than Impression Publisher on the Acorn RISC OS platform in the early 90s. Impression Publisher could be used quite happily for both word processing and DTP on a 25 MHz machine with 4 meg of RAM but then it was written largely written in Assembler optimised for one processor. In fact a Psion netBook is in hardware terms considerably more powerful than those machines. This seems to indicate that coding efficiency is more important than hardware performance but there are very low expectations in this respect because people believe products like MS Word and MS Publisher represent state of the art hi-tec and that code efficiency doesn't matter too much because hardware keeps getting more powerful. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
