i dont see any real advantage to unix in the task of writing. yes, you can
use the whole wysiwyg word processor thing available and the text
formatting thing available but both are available on most other platforms
as well (ive never seen such on windows or mac, and doubt text procssors
such as tex or troff exist for it, but porting would not be difficult).
of course the environment is one where unlike windows you dont have to be
paraniod of your files (though you should be anyway) and unlike the mac,
you dont have pre defined limits on how much memmory a process needs (id
love for any mac bigot to explain that one me!) so any other process you
run shold not be a problem. also unix tools are availble that may make
your life easier. for example, rcs, the revision control system. it allows
you to store multiple versions of that file systematically and without
using nearly as much space depending on how different the versions are.
also, having a text only verison of your document is very flexible in the
long run. so i guess unix is a good platform to write in. (just did not
realize this when my point was there was no real difference)
of course, with a unix background, i know all our tricks. people with
backgrounds in other platforms may give you similar information regarding
thiers.
another thing not to overlook is the power of xemacs. but thats also
available in windows(havent tried it, just noticed its build tree in the
source code). you could go to xemacs.org for more info on that.
other things to look into if you want to use the text -> formatting method
are troff and LaTeX. LaTeX has provisions for importing graphics. i dont
know of any way to do this with troff. both can be output to postscript.
decayed kisses,
Pixel Fairy
http://www.pitzer.edu/~zkazi
