On 06.06.17 23:13, Dede Lamb via luv-main wrote:
I'm working towards a setup that is lightweight as possible. I've used Open and Libre offices before, I'm wondering can I do away with the suite entirely?
I could use md + pandoc to produce text documents which takes care of my main use case for office.
You asked for it. ;-) I'll assume that md is a text editor. For several decades I've managed very well with only occasional use of Openoffice about 15 years ago. Back then, I composed in Vim, imported and fontifed (even using underline or bold once or twice), then fed the beautified report to higher management who became spontaneously and acutely dyslexic when confronted with a monospaced font.) Today you could use Vim and Latex - with that you can compose a book with even mathematical symbols like integral signs. I've heard of Markdown, and understand that Vim has some support, but haven't looked into it. It should be lower hanging fruit than Latex. As for drawing, ATM I'm typing up house plans in Postscript, textually defining objects like windows, doors, and stud walls, adding a 180° flip capability for convenience, then using native rotation for making rooms. Feeding that to ps2pdf directly produces a drawing viewable with xpdf or the gnome desktop "document viewer", whatever that is. Presumably, muggles can also read pdf, using some M$ application. (I intend to print the drawings for communication, so don't rely on that.) By using "Wall" and "End_wall" constructs, wall elements can chain along the defined orientation, and total wall length is auto-accumulated. Thus when I define a truss length e.g. "a_truss" as "west_wall eaves add veranda add", and use a_truss in the elevation drawing, then the truss auto-redraws itself when I change the length of west_wall, the width of the veranda, or the eaves in the somewhat dynamic floorplan. (Who needs to unearth the rat from under the papers on the desk?) It is a different way to draw, and it avoids the endless frustration of trying to fight one's way through the defences of an inscrutable unintuitive uncooperative graphical drawing app. (Yes, I've tried some - thus the accuracy of the description. ;-)
The only other thing I use office for is the occasional spreadsheet manipulation (auto-filling and basic math functions, tinkering with sums etc). I'm not sure of a suitable stand-in for this.
gnumeric - spreadsheet application for GNOME - main program gnumeric-common - spreadsheet application for GNOME - common files gnumeric-doc - spreadsheet application for GNOME - documentation gnumeric-plugins-extra - spreadsheet application for GNOME - additional plugins pyspread - cross-platform Python spreadsheet application There was a very light one, available back in the days of SunOS 4.1.3, but I'm not sure that it's still around in the new millenium.
Thoughts? No idea too crazy, bonus points if it works in a console, minus points for cloud services ;)
If it doesn't work in an xterm (so presumably also on a console), then it's not in my daily toolset. (I have endured the pain of learning Eagle, a GUI schematic capture & PCB layout tool. Farnarkle, some of its quirks are not what I'd design, but I think it's better than the rest.) Erik -- The meta-problem here is that the configuration wizard does all the approved rituals (GUI with standardized clicky buttons, help popping up in a browser, etc. etc.) but doesn't have the central attribute these are supposed to achieve: discoverability. That is, the quality that every point in the interface has prompts and actions attached to it from which you can learn what to do next. - Eric Raymond, in "The Luxury of Ignorance."