Baslinux mailing list

[Day Brown <daybrown AT hypertech.net>]

3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:
> Wordprocessors probably need some sort of graphical
> display (if only to preview the completed document).
> If a perfectly good graphical display scheme exists
> for Linux (X), why use anything else?
First off, most of us compose text for this screen, not to be printed on
paper. Second, if you have gone to the bother to actually learn how to
type, the gui mouse system sux. Theoretically, the text editors have
hotkey alternatives, but only in the dos text mode ansi color scrollbar
menus have I seen the hotkey indicated *with* every available function.
Third, there are lots of people who are trying to write novels, not
office memos; and again, most text editors suck when trying to deal with
documents that long. 

I have seen dos text mode tools that use color in a systematic way. The
gui, with 16 gazillion colors has so many that no one bothers to try to
make a system of it. This *lack of functionality* is most obvious to
those of us who remember the BBS qwkmail newsgroups, in which, on my
screen, I set my words yellow, yours are green, if you quote a third
person, then his are blue, and so on. We hardly *ever* saw someone
complain of being misquoted.

Documents destined for the office file cabinet dont havta be easy to
read, only provide the evidence if needed in court. Those composed for
sales brochures sacrifice clarity for eye candy. then too, compare what
you see in a magazine or newspaper, which is designed to communicate
complexity with what you see here; which is to say lines that run all
the way across the screen compared to the narrow columns seen in the
print media. They do it that way because it is easier to read. It would
be elegant if you could produce a quoted document on the left side of
your screen, and your annotated comments on the right. But because you
have a gui, you dont know how many lines will be on the reader's screen,
so you cant be sure the two columns of text will line up unless you use
/pre... and if you change anything on either side of the screen, then
you havta go back and realign the whole damn document.

You will also find that in long paragraphs like the above, that by the
time the eye gets back to the left edge of the screen, it often begins
reading the wrong line. HTML composers have begun to compensate by using
very short paragraphs like this.

However, the original authors often had longer lines of logic, and
breaking it up for this purpose left no sense of separation between it
and the next section.