On 2019-11-02 11:00, Oliver Leaver-Smith wrote: > Hello, > > What tools do people find useful for writing on OpenBSD? By writing I > mean long form such as novels and technical books, including plot and > character development, outlining, and formatting for publishing (not all > the same application necessarily) >
For writing you need a text editor. I like nvi 1.79 /usr/bin/vi due to its predictability as I agree that Vim sucks http://www.galexander.org/vim_sucks.html nvi is in the base :-) Unfortunately yacc was "depreciated" on Linux in favor of bison so good luck compiling nvi. I have never been able to pull that one on Red Hat 7. Now typesetting is whole another story. In old good times a writter will bring her/his manuscript to a publishing company where qualified individuals would apply typographic rules, enforce standards, and do graphics design before sending things to the typesetter. IMHO letterpress is still the gold standard and nothing comes close to it. However people moved to phototype first and digital to cut the cost. Cutting cost came with the price. Quality sucks but I guess if you have never had a letterpress book in your hands you will not know it. I am guessing you want a computerized solution but you are not a typesetter nor designer and you need some assistance to impose format on the text. Essentially you have two classes of solutions. 1. You will need to use some kind logical markup and enter the mixture of text and commands. In this case typography is embedded into the source file. 2. You want some super clever program to do typesetting for you. You are in luck my friend. If you chose solution one all four typesetting systems in existence are ported and can be found in OpenBSD ports. I am listing them in the chronological order. a. Troff (Please see GNU Troff aka. Groff from the ports) b. TeX (LaTeX is just a set of macros but you can also use key-value driven ConTeXt) c. Lout d. To typeset music use LilyPond. If you chose second option there is only one solution I am aware of. It is Brian K. Reid Scribe. Brian used to work here at Carnegie Mellon University many years before my time. After failing to make millions he essentially left his code to his assistant and my good friend/co-worker Dale Moore who still has a working copy. I am not sure if we can get Scribe to the ports three but for private use should be Ok. I can check with Dale on Monday. > > I have found a number which boast Linux support, but not really anything > that stands out which supports OpenBSD (aside from the obvious LaTeX et > al.) > I am not sure what you have found out but I will tell you a little secret. No matter what you chose these days your publisher if you have one will convert your document into XML as it is the most convenient format for electronic safekeeping. Just to complete this little write up. I am not oblivious to GUI word processors (which typically store things in Rich Text Format (RTF), a Microsoft take onto the TeX). The only problem with them is that they don't change the fact that people who don't know typographic rules can't become experts on typography just because they can drug text with the mouse and click left and right. That is why I personally use LaTeX (typography built in packages) instead of key-value driven ConTeXt. If you must use word processor you are again in luck with OpenBSD. OpenBSD still has the first open source office suite in its ports tree (Siag) and while I still use SIAG spreadsheet my exposure to Pathetic Writer (PW) is only rudimentary. I heard a good things about Ted from people who like RTF Finally I have tried a numerous lightweight markup languages but only found txt2tags to be useful. Keep in mind that using txt2tags+htmldoc to produce pdf document will produce horrible document as there is no line breaking algorithm equivalent of famous TeX algorithm. Getting nicer output from txt2tags will inevitable lead to embedding so much LaTeX code into your txt2tags that you will start wondering why are you using txt2tags to begin with. Cheers, Predrag Cheers, Predrag > Mich appreciated > > ~ols > -- > Oliver Leaver-Smith > +44(0)114-360-1337 > TZ=Europe/London
