On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:42:09 -0400 Came this utterance fomulated by Douglas St.Clair to my mailbox:
> > On Oct 11, 2008, at 10:55 AM, Michael Adams wrote: > > > On Sat, 11 Oct 2008 09:11:46 -0400 > > Came this utterance fomulated by Douglas St.Clair to my mailbox: > > > >> On Oct 11, 2008, at 7:16 AM, Michael Adams wrote: > >> > >>> <snip> > > > > I think Scribus is trying to become this more than OO.o, or Docbook > > or LaTeX is. Historically a word processor processes words. These > > words are > > then made available to print houses with expensive DTP programs that > > format the text just-so. The gap has closed somewhat but feature > > creep has to be balanced against bloat somewhere. > > This is a work flow issue not a functionality issue. [snip] > Unfortunately people think of Adobe InDesign, PageMaker, FrameMaker, > and QuarkXPress as essentially the same save for the feature set. > Actually this isn't true. Adobe InDesign and Pagemaker are the best > for setting up something like a bunch of unique documents of about > 20-100 pages (i.e. newsletters for example). QuarkXPress is for folks > who are truly anal about the placement of stuff[...] FrameMaker is a > bear, but it handles books and book sets with all the cross- > referencing, indexing, tables, etc you could want[...] > Think of it as a cross with one axis being large documents <> short > documents and the other axis flexible <> structured. Using the > examples from above I see the existing commercial products. > > Item Length & ease of use > > InDesign short & flexible > PageMaker short & flexible > FrameMaker long & structured > QuarkXPress short & structured > No experience with any but Windows Pagemaker circa 1987. How do they handle templates, mailmerge, macros, spreadsheets and database integration? Which ones work on my Linux platform, or my works Windows as well as your OS X? Each step from templates to database integration creates it's own unique requirements. Cross platform integration adds it's own requirements in programming and flexibility. Hell, i don't understand 1/10 of what is involved there. You are saying that the tool is purpose driven, i think? And asking where OO.o places itself as a tool on your above scale. But we have been talking pretty much about Writer and to a much lesser extent, Draw (which i refuse to see as having DTP properties at all - it aint purposed that way). OO.o as a tool is larger than the purposes you list but not as focused. > >> <snip> > > > > Requests for Features and Enhancements (RFE's) are handled by the > > same software and website that handles bugs[i]. Accepted Features > > require knowledge (to write), sufficient votes, programmer input (to > > get it written) and integration (often between several diferrent > > crews doing several different jobs around and within the program. > > OO.o has a roadmap of features it intends to integrate over > > time[ii]. > > I don't see a vision that maps to a set of uses more a group of > applications and a features list. Is this correct? About: http://about.openoffice.org/index.html >From the logo at the top: "The free and open productivity suite" and the mission statement: "To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format." It is aimed as a cross platform office productivity suite. That is a broad brush occupied by several products, none of which you listed in your OS X short list above AFAIK. If we also throw in FOSS, accessibilty and must be low entry level, your two axis DTP requirements are getting lost in the bigger picture of feature requirements. That does not stop you and the OP from putting in a RFE and advertising for votes on it. > > > > <snip> > > > > Yeah, you've got it. As each letter corresponds to a number, sorting > > is generally easy. Throw in a number for an obscure glyph which > > represents two letters and sorting gets thrown off beam. Now copy > > and paste your word into calc, is it meant to handle them? Then > > throw it into an external database like MySQL, we know it won't > > handle them. > > The problem with extending the character set is making sure all the > applications it touches don't get broken. > Yep, if we are writing for the web, spreadsheet or database, we will need to be able to undo the ligatures to pass to them. Unicode and consequently the UTF-8 of a saved ODF document do not well support them. > > <snip> > > > > Postscript is Apples baby, they tend to hold their babies pretty > > close. OpenType may be a better format[iv]. Must admit, i'm getting > > into another grey area here. > > I see it a little differently. There is a bitmapped world and a vector > world. MS chose bitmapped although they have sort of graphed the > vector world on to it so that now its sort of like a wart growing on a > cancer. With Macintosh Apple jumped right into the vector world. The > main advantage of bitmapped over vector is it is cheap and fast. Cheap > in part because the peripherals don't need to be as smart. Vector is > more expensive (printers with computers built in to raster the vector > shapes) but the result is a scaleable output that maps optimally to > the output device. > I was pretty much ignoring bitmapped fonts, they were so last century. Vector fonts now come in multiple flavours. > > It's not hard to create a font with a commercial tool like > Fontographer or an open source one like FontForge. > Be carefull, if a font forge sees that, you may get flamed. What is your experience writing Cyrillic, Tamill or Arabic fonts? LOL rhetorical! We are talking about the high quality fonts that are capable of displaying ligatures aren't we. The OP may have been talking about Devanagari script ligatures. Apologies to JC Ahangama, i am not presuming to know nationality, language, or intended purpose - just positing a posibility. Creating a hiqh quality font is a time consuming specialist field. I've been developing CSS based web sites for the last few years but i am no master of CSS. I wouldn't even presume to put a design forward for the Zen Garden. This is another of those "it's a big thing when you look into it" fields - cue echo. It's not hard to create a font, free/cheap ones are a dime a dozen on certain websites, but if you want a few extra's like lower case and reasonable punctuation marks even, you can probably halve those offerings. Greek letters, halve it again. -- Michael All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well - Julian of Norwich 1342 - 1416 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
