Hi, I am writing lately a document in which I mention repeatedly a chemical formula with subscripts and superscripts. Eventually it has to be written in MS word. But I write the various drafts with Vi, importing them into word only when I have to discuss them with my boss. I hoped I would be able to avoid playing with subscripts and superscripts all the time, by writing _PLACEBO_ instead of the formula, and then replacing _PLACEBO_ globally. It turns out that, when the replacing text contains subscripts and superscripts, this is beyond my command of MS word. OK, I said, and tried abiword: Same story. In the end I changed that manually, once, saved, saw the resulting pattern and made the global substitution in Vi. I was surprized, even disapointed that there is no way to do that from inside abiword (the way you can do sort, for example from inside vim). After all, the ability to apply several tools jointly is one of the great strength of Unix. Just out of curiosity I tried Lyx: Same story again. Now, was I too dumb to find an existing possibility, or, while trying so hard to achieve a style of work similar to what windows users are used to, programmers forgot the Unix ways with their obvious advantages? After all this dichotomy is not necessary. The examples of gvim and of octave show that one can enjoy the best of both worlds.
I would be very happy to be proven dumb... But, if is not my fault, I would like to rise the point to the developers. I do know the debt I, we all linux users have to them. I have no right to complain or otherwise to ask for more. But I think that most devlopers would welcome criticism, if not made in a hurting manner. Could anyone instruct me how to proceed ? Cheers, Avraham ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
