Re: [dev] Suckless word processing solution?

Hi Илья,

2009/9/22 Илья Илембитов <ilembitov_AT_yandex.ru>:
> I am looking for a lightweight solution to create rich formatted content in
> any MS Word-editable format - I think RTF is more likely to happen, since it
> is an open format.

I'm looking for such thing as well. On IRC in the #suckless channel
someone posted a link to Word 5.5 just now, I think that might be an
option for the interim. I think Word 5.5 is the most usable MS Word
release ever created, it definately sucks less than any FOSS
alternative. But I'm uneasy on relying it in the long term.

> Basically, what I am looking for is a lightweight, distractionless
> (preferably no menus or toolbars) word processor with support for all common
> formatting option. Basically, I don't need the word processor to be capable
> of doing things I wouldn't be able to do with a real piece of paper - which
> means that I just need common beautifiers, font styling, paragraph styling
> and footnotes/TOC support, tables and images, since I often need to write
> academic papers following a certain style. However, I don't need any math
> support.

Your requirements sound acceptable.

> I was looking for something that would suit my needs for quite some time.
> AbiWord is bloated, slow and buggy and has numerous GNOME and other
> dependencies. Ted got updated recently, which means that it finally got
> UTF-8, gtk interface and proper font rendering, but at the moment is still
> buggy and it is uncertain, in which way will it improve. Other than that, it
> is a really nice word processor. WordGrinder has a nice interface concept,
> but CLI interface can show many style features of the text, which is why WG
> supports only a limited number of formatting capabilities. Besides, it can
> only export to troff and html. Finally, it wasn't updated since late 2008.

Well all these alternatives aren't any.

> Then I looked in the area of humane markup languages. txt2tags is nice (the
> syntax is really clean and easy), but doesn't support RTF and footnotes (not
> to mention the proper paragraph formatting). I tried MarkDown extensions,
> such as pandoc (which involves having a Haskell infrastructure installed)
> and multimarkdown. Both support RTF export, but still look more like an
> easier way to get HTML output than a word processing solution. The same is
> true with the other lightweight markup languages: they are either tools to
> get HTML source, or an easier way to produce man pages.

RTF sucks.

> Finally, i started looking at the full-blown typesetting systems. I admire
> LaTeX, but it's just too big for my needs. Besides, latex2rtf utility wasn't
> updated for quite some time and still doesn't work properly. Then I tried
> lout. Lout is nice, because it's small and has a pretty straightforward
> manual, but it only supports PS and PDF(?) output. Besides, I had some
> issues with producing texts in Russian (since it is my native language).
> Then I tried Groff. Groff look uber-geeky and traditional to me, it is
> smaller than LaTeX (bigger than lout, though), but there are still a lot of
> problems here. First, there is a huge lack of documentation - basically,
> there is only a Unix Text Processing textbook back from the late 80s (and
> it's not clear as to whether one could use it as a guide to contemporary
> troff). Second, groff devteam seems to be more focused on the needs of man
> writers (which is understandable). Which is why many issues specific for
> common word processing and desktop publishing are ignored or are being
> solved really slowly. Specifically, I couldn't solve the localization
> problem. Furthermore, troffcvt utility (a troff converter, supports RTF) is
> also deprecated and is of inferior quality - basically, it just ignores many
> formatting options. I also checked other implementations: Heirloom project
> might be nice (at least, it is said to support UTF-8 and modern fonts), but
> again it is unclear as to which documentation should I use. Besides, the
> project wasn't updated since April 2008. There is also a new C
> implementation called mdocml (designed by BSD people to replace groff), but
> it only supports man macros (although it is pretty active and should run on
> Linux too). Furthermore, there should be another flavour in MirOS BSD source
> tree (which is said to be an original AT&T version), but it is actually
> broken. Finally, I couldn't find any mention of Plan 9 version of troff
> being used outside of Plan 9 itself (but I suppose it should definitely
> support UTF-8).

It might be an option to write a troff front-end, though for real
stuff it requires lot's of PS so that I think this isn't a real option
either (having PS as output is fine though). But there has to be some
decent intermediate format.

> Currently, I am really desperate. IMHO, there were always two main problems
> for those, who wanted to build a lightweight Linux/BSD environment: there
> were no lightweight graphical web browsers and no lightweight word
> processors. The situation with web browsers gets improved by surf and uzbl
> developers. But what about word processing? Do you have any suggestions on
> the original problem?

Well usbl or surf aren't really lightweight, they only appear to be.
(The binaries for themselves are lightweight, but that doesn't tell
you on which mountain of complexity they rely on). I think writing a
decent less sucking word processor is much more achievable than
writing a lightweight browser. So this sounds like a good idea.

> P.S.: Sorry for this post being so enormous, but I wanted to sum up my
> efforts for somebody who would like to solve the same problem.

Thanks, next time in plain text please...

Kind regards,
Anselm
Received on Tue Sep 22 2009 - 15:06:16 UTC