XVII.Are there any word-processors available for X?

1. StarOffice is available for several, but not all, platforms (Solaris, Linux, etc.). It is a complete office suite that includes a word-processor, spreadsheet, and drawing tool. It does a reasonably good (but not perfect-- especially padding within table cells, headers/footers, most all complaints are cosmetic in nature) jobs of importing MS Office files. It is noted here because Sun has released the source-code (Oct. 13, 2000) thus enabling the port to other architectures. Be forewarned that it needs a decent (100 MHz RISC minimum) workstation to run responsively otherwise it feels sluggish (it just flies on a 450MHz Ultra 10 =:o).
2. Thot is a structured document editor, offering a graphical WYSIWYG interface for X. Thot offers the usual functionality of a word processor, but it also processes the document structure (it was used as a test-bed for HTML 3.x style-sheets). It includes a large set of advanced tools, such as a spell checker and an index generator, and it allows to export documents to common formats like HTML and LaTeX. (This is a really cool editor but it needs a touch more effort to make it flawless).

   The source is available at:
   ftp://opera.inrialpes.fr/pub/sources/thot/

   Pre-compiled binaries for common paltforms are available at:
   ftp://opera.inrialpes.fr/pub/binaries/thot/

3. SciText. It features:
   • User-Interface
     Object oriented handling
     Full WYSIWYG with free choice of zoom
     Supports Type-1 PostScript fonts
     Context-sensitive toolbars with bubble help
     Independent of language by a special translation-table
     Keyboard and menu shortcuts with a configurable actionevent-table
     Online help with own Tcl/Tk helpbrowser
     User installation with Tcl/Tk-Script
     
   • Wordprocessing
     Parapraph and document templates
     Auto-Correction, spellchecker, thesaurus; no data yet :-(
     Footnotes, table of contents, indices, chapter-numbering, glossary
     Itemize and enumeration
     
   • Layout
     Free frames for text, graphic etc.
     Formulas
     Tables, charts, mathematical plots
     
   • Documentexchange
     Send and receive SciTeXt documents via E-Mail
     Drag & Drop
     Many import and export filters for text and graphics
     Faxing of documents
     
   • Miscellaneous
     Choice of printers with automatic detection of usability
     Usable as an Integrated Development Environment similar to WEB
     

   Pre-compiled binaries are available for Solaris, Irix, & Linux 2.0. The latest version of SciText is available at:

   http://www.uni-paderborn.de/~SciTeXt/archives/getSciTeXt.html

4. LyX is an WYSIWYG front-end to LaTeX.

   Current features are:

   • Different textclasses, for example letter, article, book
   • Numbered headlines, table of contents (with hypertext functionality), nested lists
   • Interactive wysiwyg math editor
   • Postscript figures
   • Interactive wysiwyg tables
   • Spellchecking (uses ispell in background)
   • Infinite undo/redo
   • Labels/references
   • Footnotes and margins
   • Access to whole LaTeX functionaly with plain-latex-style
   • GUI based access to all functions via menus and mouse. Additionally free configurable keybindings.
   • Support for various languages via LaTeX Babel-System
   • Easy to configure support for various national keyboards and umlauts.
   • Supports LinuxDoc-Sgml

   It is available at:

   ftp://fiwi02.wiwi.uni-tuebingen.de/pub/LyX/

   It also requires the XForms library.

5. Cicero is a WYSIWYG wordprocessor that is written in Tcl/Tk and the TIX library; a previous version was written in C++.

   It's available at:

   ftp://ftp.rz.fh-hannover.de/pub/linux/local/cicero/

6. Question 88 in the comp.windows.x FAQ
7. AbiWord is an Open Source wordprocessor (part of an desktop suite). Features include:
   • Basic character formatting (bold, underline, italics, etc.)
   • Paragraph alignment
   • Spell-checker
   • Importing Word97 and RTF formats & exporting to RTF, Text, HTML, and LaTeX formats
   • Interactive rulers and tabs
   • Styles
   • Unlimited undo/redo
   • Multiple column control
   • Images; etc.

   Version 0.7.7 is available for download.

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