Office suite functionality without an office suite?
Hi all! 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. 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. Thoughts? No idea too crazy, bonus points if it works in a console, minus points for cloud services ;) Best Dede Lamb
The evil side of me wants to say "Emacs" then run away and hide. https://xkcd.com/378/ It's bound to have all the functionality you need hidden away somewhere. Regards, Morrie. From: luv-main [mailto:luv-main-bounces@luv.asn.au] On Behalf Of Dede Lamb via luv-main Sent: Wednesday, 7 June 2017 9:13 AM To: luv-main@luv.asn.au Subject: Office suite functionality without an office suite? Hi all! 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. 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. Thoughts? No idea too crazy, bonus points if it works in a console, minus points for cloud services ;) Best Dede Lamb
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."
Erik Christiansen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
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.
Markdown is syntactically simpler, easier to convert to other formats such as HTML, OOXML, ODF or EPUB, thanks to Pandoc, but doesn't give you the control over presentation offered by LaTeX, or its wealth of optional packages. I like Markdown, with Pandoc, for relatively simple documents, but I prefer to write papers in LaTeX. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis in LaTeX, taking advantage of the automatic citation and bibliography generation tools available (see BibLaTeX). Unfortunately, I've encountered journal and book editors who demand Microsoft Word (OOXML) format, or RTF, with very specific formatting, in which case, document format conversion and subsequent formatting and editing in a word processor are a necessity.
I somehow missed this message when you first posted it. here's what I use, or have used in the past. NOTE: my needs for "Office" type programs are quite simple and minimalist - easily met by even basic software. It sounds like your needs are similar. On Tue, Jun 06, 2017 at 11:13:27PM +0000, Dede Lamb wrote:
I could use md + pandoc to produce text documents which takes care of my main use case for office.
yep, good idea. I use markdown + pandoc for almost all documentation and writing these days. I always used to write my docs in vim and then do the markup and formatting in libreoffice or abiword in the past (IMO writing and markup are two completely separate things) so doing it this way was not a big change. vim's syntax highlighting works quite nicely with markdown too. If I need more than what markdown can do i use pandoc to convert to ODF and finish the document with libreoffice. (This is usually complicated tables - really the only thing it can't do that i occasionally need is tables with multiple headers...not multi-line headers, but multiple levels of headers - e.g. a top-level with 2 or more columns, each of which has two or more sub-columns.) if i was less lazy, or needed to write complex documents more often, I'd make the effort to learn TeX....I can do simple things in it easily enough, but real mastery of it requires more effort and time than i'm willing to put in. markdown's got the "80% good-enough" seal of approval :)
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 is a fairly light-weight spreadsheet - lighter than libreoffice, anyway. It's not as capable as localc but it will do all the things you mentioned and more. I used to use it whenever I needed to do spreadsheety stuff (which isn't all that often). I mostly use libreoffice calc now, largely because I've spent enough time fixing, rewriting, and improving "macros" (i.e. functions and subs in LO's version of Basic) in spreadsheets I've downloaded or that people have sent to me that I know the language reasonably well now.
Thoughts? No idea too crazy, bonus points if it works in a console, minus points for cloud services ;)
I used to use sc occasionally years ago. No idea if it's still worth using. Package: sc Source: sc (7.16-4) Version: 7.16-4+b2 Installed-Size: 440 Maintainer: Adam Majer <adamm@zombino.com> Architecture: amd64 Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libncurses5 (>= 6), libtinfo5 (>= 6) Description-en: Text-based spreadsheet with VI-like keybindings "Spreadsheet Calculator" is a much modified version of the public- domain spread sheet sc, which was posted to Usenet several years ago by Mark Weiser as vc, originally by James Gosling. It is based on rectangular table much like a financial spreadsheet. . Its keybindings are familiar to users of 'vi', and it has most features that a pure spreadsheet would, but lacks things like graphing and saving in foreign formats. It's very stable and quite easy to use once you've put a little effort into learning it. Description-md5: 0925a794779dba23662eeb41fb663c7e Tag: office::spreadsheet, role::program, scope::application, uitoolkit::ncurses, use::editing, works-with::spreadsheet Section: math Priority: optional Filename: pool/main/s/sc/sc_7.16-4+b2_amd64.deb Size: 211774 MD5sum: 94c7293bbb4ed7858f861d0e1bc3dfe5 SHA256: 1a676b93a1e376f18f8efc30e574c1b65b84be12157289d4105850810f2804e5 craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
On 02/07/17 13:21, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
if i was less lazy, or needed to write complex documents more often, I'd make the effort to learn TeX....I can do simple things in it easily enough, but real mastery of it requires more effort and time than i'm willing to put in.
I recommend LyX as an excellent graphical front-end for TeX, and it fully supports embedding raw TeX wherever you want to.
markdown's got the "80% good-enough" seal of approval :)
I use Markdown a lot, but sometimes when writing technical documentation I find asciidoc goes the extra distance that Markdown is lacking. Hope that helps, Andrew --
On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 01:50:58PM +1000, Andrew Pam wrote:
On 02/07/17 13:21, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
if i was less lazy, or needed to write complex documents more often, I'd make the effort to learn TeX....I can do simple things in it easily enough, but real mastery of it requires more effort and time than i'm willing to put in.
I recommend LyX as an excellent graphical front-end for TeX, and it fully supports embedding raw TeX wherever you want to.
LyX is great for people who like graphical front-ends. I don't, I can't stand them...may as well use a GUI word processor. IMO vi (any vi, preferably vim) is the best tool for editing any kind of text, with markup or without. My only use for tools like LyX is to do things that require more knowledge of TeX than I have....and even then just to get a chunk of sample TeX code that I can modify/re-use in vim. Using the evil power of cargo-culting as a learning tool :) I'm very uncomfortable with using tools that magically do things for me that I don't understand well enough to do myself. I see that as a problem to be fixed, ASAP. Once I know how to do something in a markup language like markdown or TeX, if I need to do it repeatedly I'm inclined to write scripts (usually just awk or perl or sed one-liners) to generate the code - e.g. convert some tab- or comma- separated data into a table. For really simple things, vi/vim's capability for defining editing macros and even ':map' are enough - especially when I need to edit large text files, performing the same operations in lots of places but need to exercise human judgement (e.g. where a global search and replace will do at least as much harm as good). The end result is that I have very patchwork knowledge of TeX - most simple things and some complex things that i needed to do at least once before, but with very large knowledge gaps. Markdown is much simpler, so I have nearly complete knowledge of that, and it's adequate for most of what I need to do. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
Yes! This is all good info. In the meantime I've been doing some experiments of my own. Python interpreter has replaced trivial math stuff that I used to do in spreadsheets. When I need to produce documents I write them in markdown, convert them to html using pandoc and then convert that to pdf using wkhtmltopdf. I style the html document using css which is the easiest way i know of to apply styles, very little code is required to get something fairly snappy looking. I've gotten to writing makefiles for common sets of documents like my cv and accompanying cover letter. I'm loving the office-free life! And whenever someone sends me a .docx now i html it and read in less D On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 3:20 PM Craig Sanders via luv-main < luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 01:50:58PM +1000, Andrew Pam wrote:
On 02/07/17 13:21, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
if i was less lazy, or needed to write complex documents more often, I'd make the effort to learn TeX....I can do simple things in it easily enough, but real mastery of it requires more effort and time than i'm willing to put in.
I recommend LyX as an excellent graphical front-end for TeX, and it fully supports embedding raw TeX wherever you want to.
LyX is great for people who like graphical front-ends. I don't, I can't stand them...may as well use a GUI word processor.
IMO vi (any vi, preferably vim) is the best tool for editing any kind of text, with markup or without.
My only use for tools like LyX is to do things that require more knowledge of TeX than I have....and even then just to get a chunk of sample TeX code that I can modify/re-use in vim. Using the evil power of cargo-culting as a learning tool :)
I'm very uncomfortable with using tools that magically do things for me that I don't understand well enough to do myself. I see that as a problem to be fixed, ASAP.
Once I know how to do something in a markup language like markdown or TeX, if I need to do it repeatedly I'm inclined to write scripts (usually just awk or perl or sed one-liners) to generate the code - e.g. convert some tab- or comma- separated data into a table. For really simple things, vi/vim's capability for defining editing macros and even ':map' are enough - especially when I need to edit large text files, performing the same operations in lots of places but need to exercise human judgement (e.g. where a global search and replace will do at least as much harm as good).
The end result is that I have very patchwork knowledge of TeX - most simple things and some complex things that i needed to do at least once before, but with very large knowledge gaps. Markdown is much simpler, so I have nearly complete knowledge of that, and it's adequate for most of what I need to do.
craig
-- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list luv-main@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
Dede Lamb via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
When I need to produce documents I write them in markdown, convert them to html using pandoc and then convert that to pdf using wkhtmltopdf. I style the html document using css which is the easiest way i know of to apply styles, very little code is required to get something fairly snappy looking.
I like Markdown and Pandoc for relatively simple documents; where greater control of presentation is desired, I use LaTeX.
I've gotten to writing makefiles for common sets of documents like my cv and accompanying cover letter.
My makefile can also produce HTML slides from Markdown source (again using Pandoc to do all of the work).
I'm loving the office-free life! And whenever someone sends me a .docx now i html it and read in less
In my current work environment, there's a heavy dependence on Microsoft Office, but I still write most of my work in Pandoc or LaTex. When editing the work of colleagues, however, the only reasonable option is the Microsoft tools. As I'm using a screen reader for accessibility reasons, I need working assistive technology support. LibreOffice has been declining in that respect ever since Sun (with their accessibility group then intact) left the scene. Apple's word processor doesn't yet support the accessibility of comments and change tracking in docx (Office Open XML) files. Google Docs has given me problems too. At least the Microsoft solution works (for the most part), though it crashes more frequently than anything else that I've encountered, so the statement that it "works" comes with significant qualifications. Some journals also demand precisely formatted docx or rtf files, for which one really needs a word processor. So, although the office suite-free existence isn't available to me at the moment, at least I write and edit most of my work in Pandoc Markdown or LaTeX (even if it's on a Microsoft machine running Emacs).
On Sun, Jul 02, 2017 at 09:47:08AM +0000, Dede Lamb wrote:
Yes! This is all good info. In the meantime I've been doing some experiments of my own. Python interpreter has replaced trivial math stuff that I used to do in spreadsheets.
For "trivial" math stuff, there's also bc (or dc if you want RPN) - but both are capable of a lot more than just trivial arithmetic, although i tend to use awk or perl for complex stuff (i'd rather spend time improving my skill with generic languages than math-only languages). You may also be interested in GNU octave. I use bc a lot, as well as speedcrunch if i need a semi-programmable GUI calculator with good history (of both input and results). I find simple calc apps like gcalculator to be annoyingly difficult to use **because** they work like a basic hand-held calculator so you can't see (and edit) the entire calculation you're entering before you execute it.
When I need to produce documents I write them in markdown, convert them to html using pandoc and then convert that to pdf using wkhtmltopdf. I style the html document using css which is the easiest way i know of to apply styles, very little code is required to get something fairly snappy looking.
You can do that in one step if you want. pandoc knows how to use wkhtmltopdf - it's one of the two options for generating PDF (the other is via latex). e.g from a Makefile in one of my document directories: $(BOOKNAME).pdf: $(TITLE) $(CHAPTERS) $(CSS) Makefile pandoc -r markdown -w pdf -t html5 --css $(CSS) -o $@ $(TITLE) $(CHAPTERS) The '-w pdf' combined with '-t html5' tells pandoc to generate a PDF by first generating html5 and then processing it with wkhtmltopdf. The same Makefile also has similar rules for producing epub and html output. Multiple output formats from the same source file(s). The epub and html rules use slightly different CSS files. wkhtmltopdf has some oddities and bugs but is mostly good enough for most things. getting page breaks exactly where you want them can be a real PITA. OTOH, I do know HTML & CSS fairly well, so it's easier for me to work with than latex. BTW, one of the things I **really** like about using plain text formats for writing is that it works perfectly with git, so I get to use the exact same revision control tools for documentation and other writing as I do for programming. ".md" and ".css" files are source code, just like ".c" or ".pl" or whatever. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>
participants (6)
-
Andrew Pam -
Craig Sanders -
Dede Lamb -
Erik Christiansen -
Jason White -
Morrie Wyatt