On 06.06.17 23:13, Dede Lamb via luv-main wrote: 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. ;-) 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. 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."

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: 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 :) 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. 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(a)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(a)taz.net.au>