Is FreeBSD simple enough for Novices, Will FreeBSD accept Office 98 + Publisher?

[Garrett Cooper]

Murray Taylor wrote:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
>> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of 
>> Garrett Cooper
>> Sent: Sunday, 29 April 2007 4:28 AM
>> To: perryh at pluto.rain.com
>> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>> Subject: Re: Is FreeBSD simple enough for Novices, Will 
>> FreeBSD accept Office 98 + Publisher?
>>
>> perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
>>>> OpenOffice in OSX still isn't that great either because there
>>>> still isn't a native (Aqua) build.
>>> I suspect the NeoOffice folks would be surprised to hear that :)
>> Yes >_>.. I mean that the latest and greatest version of OOo isn't 
>> available for Aqua native yet. It's going to take another 
>> year to port, 
>> as someone has claimed already.
>>
>> There was a big leap in terms of functionality from 1.x vs 
>> 2.x in OOo, 
>> but then again considering that the OP was asking about 
>> running Office 
>> 98 (:D..), I don't think he'd mind running the 1.x version binaries.
>>
>> -Garrett
> 
> 
> As the original poster wants to write books .... may I suggest that he
> use
> a text editor and then a typesetter combination rather than any form of 
> WYSIWYG wordprocessor.
> 
> IE use (insert favourite text editor here) then use the LaTeX / Tetex
> port
> to actually properly format the material as a book.
> 
> Yes there is a learning curve here, but the end result is all 
> over a wordprocessed attempt.
> 
> mjt

Good point. I fully agree with Murray, because I've found many WYSIWYG 
editors to have large shortcomings when it comes to writing properly 
formatted documents. I still have to fight Word 2003 to not erase 
bullets in a larger document I maintain, at its own whim, not mine. I 
can't begin to imagine what Publisher 98 would be like (ew..).

LaTeX works wonderfully for regularly written documents and Texinfo for 
technical documents or procedure manuals. Then for writing web 
documents, you can always invest some time in just learning VIM + 
colorizing the output, or maybe invest in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, and 
touch up little things here and there. Bluefish works wonderfully for 
this purpose I've discovered.

-Garrett