CompuServe Messages

Actually, there is a bit of that going on here, John; there are a lot of people who completely mistake what TeX is, and what it can do, and where it "fits in" to the other software on the Amiga. I don't suggest TeX or LaTeX for the average user. It too difficult. Not buggy, etc, it just needs to be run by someone who *really* understands the Amiga OS and filesystem. The fellow who wrote it, while brilliant, is your typical whack-a-few-more-command-line-options-in kinda guy… smells of "big system disease". :^) I do think that TeX, or LaTeX, is the ideal tool for anything that I've tried, which includes most documents with exception of our newsletter, which I still have under PageStream (just did a new one, should be mailed within a week or two, it's off to the printers). For highly graphic things, like forms, I'd go straight for PageStream. But for documents like articles, books, letters, manuscripts, manuals (Especially manuals!) I'd go for TeX, period. I have tried *real* hard with each tool I've used to get "what I wanted" from them. TeX is the first package that will do what *I* want, not some facsimile of what the program author thought would be a good compromise for everyone, which is a good capsule description of WP. I don't have a solid suggestion for a good Amiga WP. I don't think there is one. There is certainly a market opportunity for one, and we've actually looked at that here; well before this WP annoucement. We never considered WP competition for a GOOD word processor. The thing that stops us – cold – is the printer support requirements. The prefs drivers are not adequate; and we're not in a position where we could support zillions of printers. We *did* also consider a "universal printer interface" for the (hypothetical) word processor, so that anyone could do printer drivers for it; but that also has it's problems, it's a huge job, really, if it's done right (which was the idea behind the discussions here). Currently, we do not have an active project here. We do have a specification, though. You never know. Ben