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Old 6th June 2008
DrJ DrJ is offline
ISO Quartermaster
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Gold Country, CA
Posts: 507
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You should also consider groff. It is part of every *BSD (and Solaris and probably Linux and all the rest); it is as powerful as TeX and in most ways I like it better. The preprocessor "eqn" in particular is brilliant, and I have ported "chem" from the AT&T code so that it too works. There are other preprocessors for tables, line drawings and flow sheets; there is a picture import capability.

When necessary I convert the groff input files (with the -ms macro package) to latex for submission to journals and the like. They do require some hand editing.

On the others, Abiword is lightweight and OK for what it does (don't overlook the many add-ins) but it does not read Word files well. It also exports RTF and not "real" .doc files, which is inconvenient. OO.o does much better, but I really dislike it. I probably use "Draw" more than I do "Writer." TextMaker is nice and inexpensive. Their spreadheet is quite good too. Gnumeric is fine for simple stuff, which most of mine is. Its plotting is pretty poor though.
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