writers

["jack wallen, jr" <jlwallen courier-journal com>]

speaking of writers - i'm not a member of any 'writers club' nor do i
write for a huge industry journal.  what i do write for is an on-line help
site for IT professionals.  i write about Linux from the newbie
perspective.  the company i write for uses Office97 with a little macro
wizard to plug the text they get into the correct 'format'.  typically i
write every document in Star Office and save in word97 format.  the
company (techrepublic) has yet to have a single problem with what i've
given the.  the star office docs have yet to fail in importing into the
macro.

now, on occasion i've writen a quick article with gnotepad+ (being careful
with my carriage returns ;-) ) and then imported into the Star Office for
spell check (sorry - i'm a writer who will quickly admit his spelling has
a lot to be desired).  

now, when i write code i use emacs.  when i write e-mail i use pine/pico.  

to be perfectly honest i've never seen a suite of tools that could really
'do it all'.  gnome is not such a tool kit and neither is kde - nor is
office or word perfect suite.  that's where the industry has gone sour -
trying to convince the user that it's better to do everything in one
place.  by doing this - the applications themselves become a weaker
seperate entity.  as a whole they may function as a powerful force but
take them apart and you see their weaknesses.  

there are ways around everything and there are complaints about every way
around everything (that made 0 sense).  a user is going to use what they
are familiar with or what excites them.  

i wish i were a developer.  i'm trying to get there - it's a long rode.
if i were a developer i'd look at all the things that the various
companies have done right and model my product after that.  for instance:

Word Perfect 8 - with the addition of better .doc filtering
Excel 
Edit Pad (or notepad+ if you will)
Dream Weaver (the best wysisyg HTML editor from my perspective)
Home Site (the best HTML editor in my opinion)
Access

yes, there are two MS products in there - but they are two products that
are very stong in many ways.

these products have become so successful for a reason - they are both user
friendly and powerful.  now, the typical Linux dev doesn't have the time
or the resources to create such huge programs and i think that's where the
problem (if any) lies.  the end user needs documentation - needs manuals
and well written manuals.  there needs to come a time when the dev teams
of Linux have the programmers and the documentors.  let's face it
documentation is a time consuming process - the writer has to use the app
and become familiar enough with it to write about it.  

i would love to offer my assistance in documenting projects.  and when i
have time and someone is interested in having someone work with them on
documentation (and as long as it's not a breech of contract on my part)
i'd certainly go for it!

anyway...just wanted to get that off my chest.  



\||/  J   A   C   K     W   A   L   L   E   N,   J   R.
 00   a prince -nay KING - among spookables
  >   get jack'd at www.techrepublic.com and get a clue!
 _    L     I     N     U     X  - the power of the people