Writely and Friends

A few posts back I was writing about the various rational versus emotional things that went into chosing the GUI you, or someone very like you, prefers to use on their computer. I think the same things apply to very personal applications like word processors. I bring this up in a Linux column of course because if Linux does not satisfy the application needs of the end user, people can always walk down the street to the other acts in town like OS.X or MS Windows.

My wife loves Word Perfect. No other WP (Word Processor) will do it for her. I have to admit that for all my MS Windows using years it was my favorite as well, and part of why I switched to OpenOffice (NeoOffice on the Mac) was that WP was not available on either of my personal or professional OS platforms. Corel has made a few feeble attempts to put Word Perfect on Linux, but nothing that has stuck. I have three different versions that they released, and none are 100% useful:

• I have the version that came with Corel Linux. That was WP8, and that version only works with the Corel Linux it came with. That Linux is just ancient in Linux evolutionary terms. The Modern version is called Xandros, and does not include Word Perfect.

• I have Word Perfect Office 2000 for Linux: That version was an early attempt to run an MS Windows app transparently under WINE. It has several problems, chief of which that it supplied it's own X font server. I recently tried to install this on Fedora Core 5, but it was totally busted.

• I have the top secret re-release of WP8 that works under modern distros. The problem here is that the fonts are wretched, and the printing capabilities limited. I did use it to convert some things I wrote in Word Perfect to RTF, for later import into OpenOffice, before OpenOffice would just read the Word Perfect format directly.

I also did a test install of Word Perfect X3 under Codeweavers Crossover Office Beta (as an unsupported application). It is running imperfectly but very close to being good enough. This is a public beta for the upcoming Crossover Office 6.0.

I also recently installed the new NeoOffice Beta 3 on the Mac. A busy few weeks of after hours word processor evals. I worked a long time on the research for this post!

For a number of weeks I have been trying Writely , Googles web based word processor. I wrote this and the last 4 or 5 entries for this weblog with Writely.

I was thinking as I did all this about the same types of things that I was writing about in my post about GUI preferences: What drives a word processor preference? Like in that post, I assume both technical and emotional things are in play here. What parts are which may not always be obvious, or at least in mind when picking ones favorite WP.

Technical Requirements

Technical things: Actually, this one is pretty easy.

First and foremost, anything I personally use has to be able to create files I can manipulate without grief on Linux, OS.X and to some degree MS Windows. Just because I live in a Linux / OS.X world does not mean everyone I deal with does. These are my requirements only. First: Document formats:

• RTF: I have messed with RTF enough now to feel that it is not a well defined, cross platform standard. Things I save as RTF in Linux just do not look the same on other platforms. Ditto things saved on the other platforms.

>

• HTML: I write this weblog entry in HTML directly rather than writing in some other format then saving it as HTML. Word processors inject all sorts of markup-junk I do not care about or want. I just need simple tags for this, and that is beyond much I have used. Even OpenOffice writer creates junky HTML if I do not force it to start a document as HTML in the HTML/Web write mode. But other documents I am doing internally are more complex often, and need the features that a full featured WP gives, so HTML doesn't seem to be a great choice here. OK. Workable. Not great. And there is the small point that if I, of all the BMC webloggers, turned in non-standards-compliant HTML, with all my harping on standards well.... I would richly deserve the ribbing I will get from the production folks at talk.bmc. As an aside, Writely does not *save* HTML I like, but when I look at it with the built in HTML editor, and then copy it directly into my weblog, I do not have to clean that up very much. Kind of weird. I hope they fix that. It is still 'Beta'.

• PDF: I save as PDF when I need to send things to other folks, especially those on MS Windows, but nothing I currently have is a PDF editor in the sense that it can read PDF from disk and open it for edit. Be nice if OpenOffice would do this, but that does not appear to be happening.

• OASIS: Ahh: here is my default format. Everything else can be created from it, including .doc if need be.Writely and OpenOffice work with it. WordPerfect and Word are supposed to have that "coming soon".

Features that I need / care about / want (want is emotional... right?):

• Bullets

• Spell checking

• Standards compliance when saving in different formats.

• Tables, Tables of Contents, Indexes, and footnotes. Other tables like tables of figures also good.

• Basic text changes like fonts and emphasis. And WYSIWYG for these: WP 5 for DOS used to use all sorts of text effects to try and display that "This here text will look different when you print it." I could and did deal with it, but there just is no reason to anymore.

• Stability: Don't lose my stuff. One reason I quite using MS Word was a time it crashed and took a 60 page document with it. Fortunately OpenOffice (Star Office actually...) was able to read the 'corrupt' file and I was able to delete the trash on page 30, re-enter it, and re-save it as .doc so that MS Word would be happy again. But that started me thinking about just using Open/StarOffice all the time instead. I actually switched default word processors before I switched default operating systems. That may be part of why it was easier for me to switch OS's though.

Features not needed or wanted by me: Strong negative emotional reaction here.

• Grammar checking: You might argue with me about my need for this one after reading this entry. Grammar and I are clearly loose acquaintances. But I hate it when grammar checkers underline entire paragraphs and say "Passive voice: Consider revising". For writing tips, I read Anne .

• Prefilling in my word choices: OpenOffice defaults to doing this. Stop it Stop it Stop it! (see how emotional that one is? Three 'stops its')

Differentiators (Word Perfect rules these first two):

• Mail merge

• Show Codes

• Online Collaboration

Writely

Cote set me up with a Writely account... which I got the same day they opened registration to everyone. He thought it was useful, but being a professional curmudgeon he also noted that he likes to write the way Turing intended, using a text editor. You know, like 'vi' or 'edlin' or something. Clearly he spells better than I do. His other comments (and I quote) were:

• The best feature is, by far, the Revisions, which are even (more or less) live.

• The export to HTML or post to blog can get wonky if you don't use the styles. Otherwise, it puts in inline CSS with span tags.

I can work around that latter one. Cut and paste if nothing else. I wrote "Which GUI " (and every post since then) in Writely, and when the time came to post it, I did a 'view HTML' which displayed the simple HTML I wanted, and I copied that directly into the talk.bmc.com Plone weblog data entry widget. If it needed major cleaning, I copied it into OpenOffice first to let the program do some atg organization and scrubbing. No problems.

The span tags Cote mentioned are not obvious when I am editing, but I dislike them being there are all. That is fine for document layout, but I like to leave placement to the browser. That way it looks the best it can on each platform and with each browser. Just because I am a Linux person writing a Linux column, I am not assuming everyone reading it is sitting at Linux using the same browser as I. Some may be using Camino on OS.X even.....

My first general use of Writely shows some of it's promise. I started this doc at the office, then went home and worked on it some more. Then I went to the library and worked on it some more. Three different computers. No file transfer between them. Same doc everywhere there was Internet. I had at one point six different weblogs in various stages of being written on Writely. It's cool because no matter where I am, as long as I near a computer and the Internet when an idea strikes me, I can scribble down for later updating.

I can write it in plane
I can write it on the train
I can write it here and there
I can write it most everywhere
The only place my document can't be seen
Is all the places in between

Sorry (apologies to Ted Geisel)... Actually this would assume the plane and train have Internet access. Point being, since it is stored on the Internet I have to be connected to the Internet to use it. As I don't live in San Francisco, I often go minutes at a time without Internet access. But I don't have to be happy about it.

Spellchecking works but is a slight disappointment relative to Gmail's spellchecker. Gmail is far more obvious about the way it highlights mis-spelled words. Ditto the Google toolbar's built in spell checker (which I use all the time for work on the internal Wiki)

I tried to upload my lab doc from the "Linux Desktop in a Windows World" thing I have been doing at LinuxWorld and more recently SHARE, but it was too big: there is a 500k limit on the document size. The lab doc is many times that. Over 120 pages in OpenOffice, including 70 or 80 screen caps, TOC, Index, etc. Bummer: I was really looking forward to testing out collaboration features using that document, since that is the one I need it on the most.

To test out the collaboration features, I set up my collaborator on the Linux labs, Sam Stengler at Empyrean Benefit Solutions, with a few documents in Writely, this one included. He made some changes. I went back later and reviewed them. Cote is correct. Revisions is cool. I could easily compare my last version of the document with Sam's and see what he had done. One annoying thing (and reported by me to Writely) about Writely for me is that vertical spaces are squished out of the presentation. By that I mean if I enter paragraph tags <p>stuff</p><p>more stuff</p>, and then view them in NVU or OpenOffice, there is a blank line between the two paragraphs. When I view it after I have posted it, there is a blank line. But in Writely there is not. It's vertical spacing display is not WYSIWYG. I fix this by displaying the HTML, then cut n pasting it to OpenOffice, which removes the <p> <br> <p> sequence that Writely sticks in to get vertical spacing. Yuch.

The interaction with tabbed browsing in Firefox is nice. Right now I have three different weblog entries open, and am bouncing between them as things occur to me to write in each one. It saves each version extremely often, so it feel pretty safe to be doing this as well.

WordPerfect X3

As I mentioned up top, WordPerf has been a favorite WP around the house for years and years. It has been hard not having it follow me to my new platforms when I switched away from MS Windows. As an experiment, I loaded it up under the new Beta version of CrossOver Office on the Mac (assuming that this would be more or less the same under Linux). It loaded great as an unsupported application. I can not always open or save a document, but so far that is the only problem. It is just one thing, but it is a big thing. Other than that it is fast, and it is pretty cool seeing WordPerf again after all these years apart. I have missed it, even if OpenOffice has been working pretty well, all things considered. For me, if OpenOffice had show codes, I guess I would not even bother with WordPerf any more. My wife on the other hand will need a bit more convincing than that. She spends a great deal of time in forms and mail merge, and the OpenOffice support for those features usually leaves her cussing. I may try to re-install WordPerf a few more times taking different options to see if I can get it to go in. It would be nice to have if I can get it to work. As an aside, I went ahead and pre-bought a copy of CXOffice for the Mac. It is just too handy to be able to run some things on the Mac the same way I do on Linux.

NeoOffice

This is not strictly speaking a Linux bit of information. I was having a conversation with someone here at the office about using platforms other than MS Windows to do things here at the office, and I was talking about the fact that one of the nice things about the Mac these days (with OS.X, the move to X86 chips, X11 support, ports of many Linux packages, Parallels, and CodeWeavers) was that I can use Linux at the Office, the Mac at the house, and move things around as suits me without issue. It is all seamless. Actually, I could do the same thing on MS Windows for the most part too, since most of the packages also have MS Windows versions.

One package that makes that work for me is NeoOffice, the Aquafied version of OpenOffice. Well... An Aquafied version. It looks like the OpenOffice folks are doing another Aquafication port of their own, to be released next month . And you can run OpenOffice now, under X11 on the Mac, but... why? I use the Mac in part because I like the interface. I point all this out to say I will now be watching what happens to NeoOffice once the OO team has a direct Aqua port available. NeoOffice often takes the hit that it is slow to load, and it was on my iBook. The Intel version on the MacBook has been much better. Most everything loads faster there.

I think my preference for NeoOffice over OpenOffice on the Mac is largely emotional. It just looks and acts like a Mac apps should, which my brain checks off as a "Good Thing"(tm)

Requirements met?

If you look back over what I want out of a word processor, you might question why I care about WordPerf at this point. It does not yet have the OASIS support in it that I require. But they have announced that they intend to add it , so I'll assume that they will for now, because I would sure like to have 'show codes' again...Why hasn't OpenOffice picked this up?

OpenOffice on all platforms, and NeoOffice for OS.X meets my needs, (once I turn off word completion. I have no idea why that is on by default. Its as annoying as 'custom/personalized menus' is in MS Office apps)

Even MS Word, after it adds OASIS document format support would be workable since I can run it under Linux and and OS.x via Crossover. Well, once I turned off Grammar checking. And Custom/Personalized menus. And Clippy. I bet I don't use 95% of the stuff this program does.

Writely adds a nifty new dimension to my capabilities too. If they get the HTML options cleaned up such that I don't have to use other programs to make nice simple HTML from it, I will be very happy with it. Even now, for Weblogs it is just too handy. And being utterly platform independent is pretty nice: Makes using Linux as my full time professional desktop, and OS.X as my full time personal one very easy.

It will be very interesting to see just where this world of AJAX applications takes us. Clearly AJAX adds back in to a web application a look / feel / response that makes it feel like a regular application. That emotional response : that it feels and looks right, is the core of why so many people just love AJAX. OK: It appeals to my geek side too, because of the way it frees me from platform dependence. But you know... that may really be emotional under the covers there someplace too. I like to have a choice.