Re: BOB: GNOME Word Processor Efforts

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

Rebecca Ore <rebecca.ore@op.net> writes:

> My preference would be for a simplier UI than MS Word.

Indeed.  Word frightens me.  Perhaps it looks less intimidating on a
much larger monitor.

> WPs are rare in free software because they're written for users who
> don't particularly want to work with computers and because they're
> quite complex in and of themselves.

This may be what Gnome is aiming at, but I'm not sure that it's
necessarily true.  *I'd* like something which could be called a word
processor, too.  I'd like to be able to write letters, and produce
documentation.  On the other hand, I've always found the hardest part
of writing a document in, say, LaTeX, is finding a suitable example to
copy: once I've got the structure of the letter, it's generally very
easy to use.

Amaya <URL:http://www.w3c.org/Amaya> is an obvious example of
something which is vaguely in an appropriate direction.  Its structure
is something that you couldn't stick on top of Emacs (the internal
structure is apparently tree-structured, not character based).  I'd
like an Amaya with a much improved interface (adding undo would be
nice!), which could edit DocBook, and similar things.

Ideally, for documentation, I'd like something which could read and
write MIF, since at work we use FrameMaker quite a bit.  And it would
need to be able to do letters and things too.  (I understand sgmltools
may provide export to MIF; import would be nice, as far as such a
thing is possible.)

(I'm not suggesting that it would be a good idea to start with Amaya
and make it into a word processor.  It's just that Amaya does its
particular job better than XEmacs does, although Amaya's restrictions
can be annoying: some of the anecdotes in Nathaniel S. Borenstein's
"Programming as if people mattered" are apropos.)