Txt2tags is better in this regard, but there are still features it really ought to have:
text alignment (when I’ve last seen it, it didn’t have a straightforward way to get
center position of text and stuff like this)
it’s probably possible to do this by using macros:
For example I implemented footnote in LaTeX using this macro:
(in html it’s only displaying notes in brackets but it could be improved)
the ability to define intervals and the ability to manage the page layout
If your target format is html or latex or whatever, you can consider making a similar macro for alignment as the one above. You can also make a code/shortcut for adding <–div align=center> for example, or special margin intervals. (the reason why I made the projet described above, txt2tex)
Apologies for picking this thread up again so late, but if you install the QT4 demo pack -http://downloads.beosfrance.com/Qt4HaikuDemoPack_a1.zip - you will find an interesting proof-of-concept word processor that will write .ODT files, though it does not seem to read them.
Now I’m no regular Mac user, but from what I’ve seen there are lots of high quality non-Apple that appear to fit in perfectly with the OS. I think it’s just that Apple seem to have better design guidelines, while in Linux and to some extent even in Windows developers do what they feel like. And once all applications follow this well defined standards, both in how things look, feel and communicate with other apps, even new developers will probably get things right even without having studied all design docs in detail. Well that’s my theory at least
So I think Haiku doesn’t need total control central applications, as long as they have clear and concise design documents (The HIG is a good start). But there’s no doubt the OS would benefit from being shipped with a suite of fully functional free software.
[quote=leavengood]
Another nice thing about Haiku is that I think it will foster a much better commercial software ecosystem than Linux. People are probably more likely to produce better applications if they can get paid for them (rather than just scratching their own itch or doing stuff for recognition.) Firefox is probably a lot better because Mozilla can pay people to work on it (because of their revenue from Google.) Linux has improved a lot because people are paid to work on it. Not that people can’t produce good software purely as volunteers (Haiku again serves as an example), but money always helps :)[/quote]
I think you have a good point there. Though Firefox is also an example that all products with paid developers don’t have to be commercial
Now I’m not against commercial software, but I think there seems to be a lot of hobby programmers who over estimate the value of their programs. Personally I’d rather have 100000 people who use my software for free (possibly giving me a few donations and revenue from ads on my homepage) than 100 users paying $30 each (also assuming distributor would take a cut and that I’d pay taxes). But that’s of course up to each and everyone to decide for their own software. Umm, maybe going a little too much OT… sorry about the rant
Good point about HIG. I don’t like Mac OS X looks (basically, I hate everything 3D, glossy and transparent in interfaces and hardware as well), but all the apps do look intergrated in terms of appearance. Don’t know about their interaction, though. However, many of them seem to use Growl notification, for instance - something Ubuntu and KDE try to do now.
Yes, I know this thread dates back to when dinosaurs roamed the earth, but here’s a bit of shameless self-promotion that is actually relevant to the thread:
Rondel is a text editor. Nothing special about it, you’ve used text editors before. But Rondel allows you to insert Markdown formatting codes and to generate HTML files from its own files.
Rondel is built on the Trope engine and contains a copy of mkd2html (part of the Discount Markdown package, licensed under a BSD-style License, source included). Version numbers for Rondel track those of the Trope engine.
which is to say, apart from ‘ADDSPACE.EXE’, which is just a C program, it just uses SED and GREP plus a DOS batch file, basically, plus CHOICE, a simple DOS command which I’m sure would be easy to implement if not already done.
I suspect this is of interest to no-one, but I thought I would mention it. I suspect someone who knows something about computers could implement lxRTF in Haiku pretty easily.
People say that Abiword and Koffice run under Haiku but I don’t think they do. If you personally are running Abiword or Koffice on Haiku A3, please let me know. I am VERY interested and would like to document the installation process.
I can confirm that the current TiltOS build of koffice (2.1.0) doesn’t run under recent builds of Haiku and nor does the Haikuware Abiword package. I had a quick search but I failed to find any BeOS source code for AbiWord 2.4. I would be delighted to see TiltOS updated with the latest KDE/QT libs as well as Calligra, which is the new name for the koffice project.
Calligra is supposed to have made significant advances since the last koffice release - 2.3.3 - notably in its handling of both MSXML and opendocument files.
I have wrote to the admin of TiltOS to see if he had and plans to update TiltOS with no response so it looks like a zombie project which is a shame as it formed the basis of the koffice standalone installer. which I should imagine will also not work under recent Haiku builds.
Even better of course would be if Haiku became an officially supported platform of either Calligra or Libreoffice - should any of these things occur it will be a huge boost for both the validity and usability of Haiku as a desktop OS. Work has started on porting OOo4kids, a stripped-down OpenOffice, to Haiku but its early days for that project and the GUI doesn’t even build yet the last I heard.
Another great boost to Haiku as an open source desktop would be if someone added Excel, ODS and CSV support to the open sum-it spreadsheet.
I just noticed that Abiword 2.8 is in Haikuports. I’ve not tried it yet but it sounds like its best not to get any high expectations about actually being able to use it yet.
It’s my understanding that Calligra, LibreOffice, OpenOffice ports would require a lot of work to run on Haiku. Not out of the question but would certainly require dedication by a good programmer.
ABIWord is open source, and getting it to run would be an incremental update. Probably a lot less work.
The same goes for KOffice. This also would be an incremental update.
Having a decent word processor for Haiku is a top level necessity. Maybe we should put a bounty on it.
Calligra is simply the new name for koffice so it should be no harder to get calligra running than the latest koffice release (2.3.3) and significantly easier to update/port than any other office suite or wp app I would imagine save a fully native BeOS one like Gobe.
When the standalone koffice installer used to work under Haiku I was greatly impressed with the load times and responsiveness of kword, kpresenter etc. The K apps seemed every bit as snappy as native Haiku apps and seemed to run better than they did under Linux bar the fact that kspread wasn’t included and nor did printing directly to a printer work at the time.
I can only talk about KOffice/Calligra as I tried to port it once, I had built most of its dependencies, then accidentally deleted all of those libraries and called it a day… I was frustrated since it took me hours and hours of tries.
Now, about porting Calligra… it’s not a huge amount of work, really, we have Qt and some of the dependencies for KDE stuff is available on HaikuPorts. The real problem there is compiling the KDE libs needed for it to run, which need lots of dependencies needing other dependencies and so on… I can tell you it’s not an easy task, but it’s pretty much doable in a reasonable amount of time (1 week, tops) and way easier than porting Abiword, since we’d neet either GTK+ or a new GUI for it IIRC.
Now, if TiltOS worked we could just download the needed KDE libs right away, as the ones ported meet the minimum requirements to build Calligra… too bad the downloader is broken and I have no idea how to unpack those .box files.
I’m working on a native app called masterpiece, its not a word processor per say, since i hate the constant fighting with word processors, but it uses the restructured text docutils python backend to use rst formatted text to convert it to xml, html, odt, tex and if i can get the rst2pdf python code working, it’ll also convert to pdf. its in its infancy, I need to add settings and formatting templates for custom styles, rst is pretty robust and brings a lot of features with it, I just need to build the framework to support all the features. you can head on over to http://code.google.com/p/masterpiece/ if anyone’s interested. there aren’t any graphics or documents, just the ability to browse the source.
if anyone is interested in the app and would like me to work on one feature over another let me know.
Thats great news about the KDE libs in Tilt meeting the min requirements for Calligra, something I was going to check up on, because I know the downloader and its repo do still work under recent Haiku builds or at least they did work a couple of days ago when I downloaded koffice for Tilt. I have no idea how to extract (not install) a box file though but I don’t think you’d need to as long as they install OK right? I’ve got the nasty feeling that the Tilt KDE libs won’t work under recent Haiku builds but I hope I’m wrong.
I would note though that I had to try about 10 times before I successfully downloaded the oxygen-icons package from Tilt.
