RE: Equation Editor.

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Paul Topping wrote:

> Martin,
> 
> So, let me recap. I wrote a long email saying how I hoped Gnome could do
> better than MSWord and I included my views on how it could be made better.
> Now, you take the opportunity to slam my product and say that you can do it
> better than my company. What did I do to deserve this? If my attempt at a
> marketplace reality check is too much for you, I think you'll have a real
> hard time when you have to go up against Microsoft.
> 
> If you think TeX is so great, why bother implementing a word processor at
> all? TeX creates beautiful documents. Just a thought.
> 

Hi Paul,
	First off I did not realize I was having a go at your company.
Word 97 is 4 years old now and I thought you sold an enhanced equation
editor that was considerabally better than what was available for word 97.

I was emphasizing we would not aim as low as MS Word 97. My aim is Latex
quality. It will be hard work I know to get that good.

I would PERFECTLY happy to live in a latex world but unfortunately this is
not possible. Even though I and my collegues can produce beautiful tex
documents I now realize that the learning curve to produce such documents
is beyond most secretaries, University administrators and funding
agencies. They constantly send me *.doc files that I cannot read on my
workstation of choice, more over MS does not produce MS Office for my
platform of choice. I have used the equation editor for MS Word 97. It
took me 20 minues to do what would take me 5 minutes to do in Latex.  The
output was much inferior to what latex can do. More over there are these
extremely annoying pop-up boxes urging me to buy an enhanced equation
editor. Not a good marketing move. Having just spent $500 for MS Word that
takes longer to use and produces poorer results I was not the least bit
happy about this.

You tell me to get a reality check. I tell you to get one. I know it is
possible to do better than what is in MS Word 97. It certainly does not
please me or my colleagues. I have used a better equation editor in the
Lyx latex pre-processor. It is free GPL code. I can use that and enhance
it too. I know of 4 other GPL'd math projects in Mozilla, Amaya, kword and
a new academic project from Italy. I can study all that code and choose
the best for us.

I don't care about MS. They will not produce what I need. I know we can do
better than them. I'm an MS user I know we've already done our features
better than they have. Abiword already has an installed base of over
100,000 users on Unix and Windows and we're way short of even being
feature complete. We now have BeOS and QNX front ends par with Windows and
Unix. MS will never make ports to those platforms.  Once these are
released we will have an extra million or so users. We will be included in
redhat 7.0. Strike up another few million users. Once we reach version 1.0
we should be included in PC magazines covers everywhere. We'll make our WP
available for download anywhere and everywhere. At around 5 megabytes it's
not such a big deal for people. We encourage poeple give copies to their
friends and send documents in *.abw format. Not every windows user can
afford MS Word but everyone needs to read Word format. I've found that out
myself. Strike up another 10 million users.  

With bonobo embedding people can use Abi on servers from within their own
browers. I don't know how this will pan out, I'm not such a big fan of
thin clients but it certainly lowers the barriers of entry for people who
may decide to copy native version of Abi to their platforms. More users
means more developers. We have Mac front end waiting the wings. We can
import MS Word documents reasonablly well already. I can export abiword
documents to latex too. Over the next few months I know we will add many
more features to Abi. I could these things myself but I won't have to do
them all because we a great team in place. We have over 20 active
developers working on Abi already and about 115 people who have made some
contribution to the code. Some of these guys can produce 10,000 lines of
great code in 3 weeks. I've seen it. Sun's GPL'd Star Office is a wild
card. I don't the quality of the code but it could be useful.

Now all this may not matter you're right. MS will continue to sell 10
million copies of Office every year. I can't see this changing quickly
although I don't see much growth there. You'll get your 1% of those. It
doesn't matter to me. I'll have a great word processor that could do math
the way it should be done and I can read and write documents anybody sends
to me.

Good Luck to you too. I truely didn't mean to offend but I think you
should do better than Word 97.

Best wishes,

Martin Sevior