Are you opposed to using the cloud? Google docs fits the bill, ie, lightweight resources on the host, and you can do some disconnected work, I think...
don 2009/9/22 Илья Илембитов <ilembi...@yandex.ru>: > Hi,all! > > > > 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. > > > > 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. > > > > 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. > > > > 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. > > > > 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). > > > > 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? > > > > 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. > > -- > wbr, Илембитов -- Don Harper, RHCE
