Introduction

When I was at university, a software engineering class had a huge argument with a lecturer. It wasn’t about any high flying computer science ideal, just how people do their word processing.

My lecturer maintained that people were interested in the text and the text alone. People should be willing to use standard text mode editors to lay down the text and then use a text formatter such as TeX to print it. The text and the formatting, she said, were completely separate.

Most students in the lecture agreed that while, say, Emacs could handle much larger files than Microsoft Word, most people were unprepared to hack around with command lines and obscure key-strokes just to write a letter. Most ‘normal’ people agree with us.

Unfortunately, the former approach has many advantages when writing long, structured documents. What we could do with is a compromise. What You See Is Almost What You Get perhaps.

LyX, as you may have guessed, is just that compromise.

What does it do?

In short: long documents. Okay, it’s quite happy letting you edit a letter, in fact it comes with a number of templates to allow you to do just that, but this is not what it excels at.

To test out LyX, I converted a long document that I’ve been using Microsoft Word to edit until now (don’t get too excited, this was a manual process!). Word wasn’t having too much difficulty with the size, but I was starting to have problems with styles and cross-references.

The first thing to note is that you have to be organized. It’s tempting in Word to just change the font or its size directly, but this is a big no-no in Lyx. You should create a style for every type of paragraph that you need. In my case I used the defaults that came with LyX and applied them to my text.

All this was incredibly straight-forward and very Windows-like. You can high-light the text by dragging the mouse over it (it turns cyan), delete text with the delete or back-space key and all the usual conventions — not something to be taken for granted in Linux.

Then I hit a bit of a problem. In Word, I had all my lines of code numbered. How could I replicate this in LyX?

To cut a long story short, while I’m sure that you can do it, I have no idea how. I suspect it has something to do with the style-sheets (like in Word), but I couldn’t figure out how to change it graphically and I have no inclination to start hacking around in the TeX source files.

In fact this is the most damning criticism of the program as a whole: you still need to know about TeX. If I’d wanted to know about that I might have stuck to Emacs! It is still a very useful program, but to get the full flexibility of the system you’ll need to get your hands dirty!

From bad to worse

Having found my first problem, things started getting even worse. I couldn’t get the cross-referencing to work either. I’m pretty sure that this time it’s because I’ve been brain-washed with nearly eight years of using Word for Windows. When I say that I want a cross-reference, I expect to be able to say which heading I want to reference and how I want it to be displayed (i.e. the text or the section number or the page number, or some combination of them). In LyX what I get is a box with five buttons and a message saying “No labels found in document.”

I managed to partly solve this by creating a number of labels which I could create cross-references to. However, this was nowhere near as flexible as Word. Do I have to create a label at the source of every cross-reference? (This looks like something else that’s been carried over from its TeX heritage.)

User Interface

Taking a step back from my difficulties, what’s it like?

LyX uses the XForms library, which some purists hate as you can’t get the source code for. In its favour, it does look very smart. The menu’s are a bit more ‘sticky’ than I’d like, but there’s nothing wrong with them. It makes LyX look like a modern Windows application, and I mean that as a compliment.

However, it’s not quite as intuitive as it might be. For example, many of the keyboard short-cuts are non-standard. What’s wrong with Ctrl-I to start and stop italic mode? How do I change the formatting of a style? How do I create a blank line?

It’s also fair to say that the configuration isn’t as easy as it could be. As has been mentioned before, I tend to use TrueType fonts rather than those that come with XFree86 and I wasn’t too upset to learn that I’d have to configure LyX to use them. It was good to see ‘Screen Fonts…’ under the Options menu; it was equally good to see that changing ‘times’ to ‘times new roman’ had immediate effect. What was not so good to see was that it had forgotten the setting next time I started. It turns out that the best way to keep the settings is to edit the ‘lyxrc’ file in the LYX_DIR directory. Okay, we can’t expect LyX to make global changes, but why not local changes?

Overall

As someone that writes many more structured, technical documentation than letters (sorry Mum), Lyx is just the kind of thing that I’m looking for.

It’s not as easy to use or well integrated with the print system or print preview program as Microsoft Word, but it is much better at handling tables and equations, not as though I use many of the latter.

However, for my purposes I think I’ll stick to dual-booting and Word 95. LyX shows a lot of promise and is very good at what it already does. However, I think that you’d have to be a TeX guru to get the best out of it, and that rules me out.

Introduction

I’m not sure why, but I just about always use the Explorer to do file manipulation in Windows and always use the command-line in Unix. I don’t think that it’s just because the Unix shell is more powerful than the NT equivalent, although it is a factor. Let’s face it, some things, such as moving a number of files that have unrelated file-names, are much easier using a mouse.

It could be that I’ve not found a reasonable file manager in Unix yet. While the X-Tree like programs, FileRunner and the like, can be quite nice they just don’t seem to be a huge improvement over the command-line to me. Then, at the other extreme, you have the big, GUI packages. Click here; drag over there. It’s all point and click, often with no keyboard alternative.

I guess SFM sits in the middle. It uses the GTK+ tool-kit to display itself and, while you can click files a get a short-cut menu, the intention is that you do everything using the keyboard. An unusual approach, but does it work?

In use

I usually stay clear of GTK+ applications. It’s not because I don’t like GTK+ — in fact I think it’s one of the best looking and most functional of the many alternatives — but because there are so many versions in circulation that I always seem to have the wrong one and have, historically, ended up breaking just about everything on my machine by installing or upgrading it. SFM was quite simple by comparison. I chose a behind-the-bleeding-edge version because it claimed to work with GTK+ 1.0. It did, and what’s more I managed to leave the rest of my computer completely functional in the process.

The first thing that struck me when it loaded was how minimal SFM is. I know it claims to be the simple file manager, but you can take some things too far. In the middle of the screen is a list of files and directories, at the top is a panel displaying the current directory and at the bottom is a status bar (which is usually blank). There’s no menu, no tool-bar, no buttons, no hints.

So far is could quite easily be a character based application, but there are some concessions to GUI. One of the most noticeable is the use of colour. Colour-coding is used to good effect, with directories in blue, links in cyan, and regular files in grey. It makes it easy to tell which is which without resorting to obscure hieroglyphics that the command-line is so proud of.

And when I said that there was no menu, I mean that there on no standard on-screen menu. You can get a ‘context’ menu by right-clicking in the window. The menu has fairly simple options such as ‘up directory’ and ‘down directory,’ rename, delete and quit. Further down are its concessions to Windows terminology: you move files by cutting and pasting them. I actually quite like this way of working in Windows, but I know of a lot of people who think it’s annoying and counter-intuitive.

The sub-menu ‘More’ has a lot of not-very-obvious menu-items. What does ‘precise the action’ mean’? Why should I ‘fast quit’ rather than just exit normally? What does ‘toggle sort type’ toggle between?

Starting a theme

While I’ve started with the things that I don’t like, I may as well continue…

SFM is very proud of the fact that it’s entirely usable by keyboard. What they don’t say is that isn’t not always easy. Let’s see: select a file, press return. A dialog pops up asking what program we want to use to read that file. Only I selected the wrong file. Press escape. Ah. Doesn’t work. What I have to do it press TAB twice to highlight the cancel button and then press return. Neither quick nor immediately obvious. Worse, I select an executable and press return. It asks me what program I should use to run it. I don’t know the answer to that one.

Although I like the colour coding, I don’t think that it’s a good idea to label normal files using grey-on-white. They’re quite difficult to read and there’s no easy way to change them. I guess I could use the standard X method of diving into configuration files, but I think that a dialog is the best place to put them.

In fact it’s the lack of configuration options that annoys me about the whole program. Personally, I prefer not to see the ‘dot’ files in a directory — conventionally they’re hidden files and I’d like them to remain hidden until I say otherwise.

Overall

Some thing really benefit by having a graphical user interface, not all of them obvious. If you’d told me that there was a GUI version of ‘vi’ previously, I’d have laughed. But that’s what I’m typing in right now. It’s picked up the good GUI bit like scroll bars, point-and-click and menu’s for when I can’t remember the vast array of keyboard short-cuts.

As the Macintosh taught us, a file manager in a GUI environment can be both simple and powerful if it’s implemented well. Although I have no doubt that technically SFM is very good, as an end user tool it falls short of the mark. It’s neither especially easy to use nor fantastically powerful.

Introduction

I should look forward to a look at a new word processor for Linux. I think we all agree that we need more good ones, preferably not just free but GPL’d.

Pathetic Writer is all of these things, but, before I even started it up, I was lacking enthusiasm. Why? Well how do you rate something like a word processor? I tend to write long, structured documents most of the time. My dad, on the other hand, tends to write mostly two- to four-thousand word articles. I know what I need, but what does my dad like to use?

Look and feel

PW is commendably GUI in nature. The authors have gone a long way to make it look familiar and friendly to users of Microsoft Office. The tool bar has clear, colourful icons that turn into buttons as the mouse passes over them, and below that are font family, font size and style pull-down pick-lists. Unlike Word the buttons cannot be changed for more suitable ones, however the ones that are there are likely to be useful for most people.

Above the tool-bar is the menu. Again they’ve tried to go for the Office look. However, while the look is pretty much there — except for the icons at the side that indicate their short-cut — the feel is all wrong. Although UI purists may prefer the Windows ‘anything that might work’ approach rather than the Mac ‘the one true way’ mantra, I’m sure the former works for more people more of the time. PW takes pull-down menus to their Mac-like extreme — you have to keep the mouse button pressed down until the option you want is selected. It’s also necessary to be a bit too precise for my liking too, especially where sub-menus are concerned. The hit-and-miss approach to menu selection reminds me of the Acorn Archimedes.

Of course the main focus of the screen is a large, white expanse that displays a good attempt at what your document will look like. Of course it’s stuck with X’s lousy font handling and the fact that it doesn’t use the same fonts in the printer and display, but we can hardly blame the development team for that.

Something that we probably can blame them for is some of the idiosyncrasies. Example: I’m on the first line of a document and decide to right-align it. I enter my name and press return. Where is the cursor? Answer: PW has decided that I no longer need right-aligned text and has placed the cursor to the left of the screen.

Okay, keep typing. When finished I can can just highlight the whole she-bang and right-align it in one go, right? Er, no. Once highlighted, only the first line ends up being right-aligned. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was applied consistently, but it isn’t. With the same text high-lighted if I change the font style or size I find the complete selection changed. What’s going on?!

Down sides

There are no huge humdingers as far as problems are concerned. As I’ve already touched upon, there are just a number of niggles here and there.

I experienced a few small stability problems — try loading the Microsoft Halloween I document with Eric Raymonds excellent annotations — however it’s nowhere near as bad as Word 97. Having said that, PW certainly feels much smaller than Word even if most of the often used functionality is there — there are bound to be less bugs in a considerably smaller program.

Another issue I’ve already mentioned: configurability. The tool-bar appears not to be changed at all, while the menus can only be changed by editing a complex configuration file. And all without documentation! These things should really be altered using dialog boxes. It’s not possible to move around the bars either. I don’t care about being able to move the menu bar (are you listening Microsoft), but shifting around the others can be very useful.

The main issue is with the display, and I guess this comes down to the configuration options again. By default, PW comes with four fonts installed, the usual Times, Courier, Helvetica and Century Schoolbook, however I couldn’t see a way to add all the other fonts on my system. Okay, these fonts are perfectly good and are usable in almost all circumstances, but…

Overall

Well, I can’t honestly say that I’ll use it once I’ve finished this review. If I’ve not made it clear already, I shall spell it out: there is nothing seriously wrong with Pathetic Writer. It is, by no means, pathetic.

It has almost all the basic features and some of the advanced ones that are needed. It can import and export in a number of popular formats, it supports styles, different fonts and what you see is what you get. What it doesn’t support is the ability to simply deal with long documents, and the ability to configure the user interface. And worst of all, while the user-interface looks good, it’s riddled with inconsistencies and small but annoying flaws.

Pathetic Writer shows much promise. This could be the great, free Linux word-processor, just not yet. It just doesn’t look like a stable third release yet.