[LINK] RFI: Cross-Media Publishing under Linux/OO

Craig Sanders cas at taz.net.au
Fri Aug 5 19:40:38 AEST 2011


On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 11:25:54AM +1000, Roger Clarke wrote:
> Since 1994, I've been preparing documents in Word that can be used to 
> produce both printed/PDF'd format and web-pages.
> 
> I'm looking at a 2-year plan to escape from the increasingly 
> manipulative Apple world (where I've been since April 1984) to Linux 
> and hence OO.
> 
> (The idea is to buy a pre-IOS Mac, dual-bootable with Linux - 
> although I'm not at all sure which distro yet - and migrate from OSX 
> to Linux over a couple of years.  

IMO, you'd be better off getting a 2nd hand PC, installing linux on that
and running it side by side with your Mac for a while.  If your current
Mac has a separate keyboard and screen, you will be able to share them
with the PC with a KVM switch (don't bother sharing the mouse - replace
it with a good three-button mouse.  Macs *can* use the extra buttons if
they're present, and X on Linux requires at least two buttons, but works
best with three).

Or if your current Mac is powerful enough and has enough RAM, install
VirtualBox and run Linux in a VM.  Still get the three-button mouse.

Either of these options are much better than dual-booting, which tends
to be such a PITA that you will avoid doing it unless it's absolutely
essential.  Not a good way to train yourself to switch.


and if by pre-IOS Mac, you're thinking pre-OSX and pre-Intel Mac -
then the only thing I can say is - don't.  just don't do it.


> Replacing MYOB may prove to be one of the challenges:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_accounting_software ).

as of 2 years ago, June 2009, MYOB 18 worked under Wine 1.01 on linux.

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=17041

I don't use MYOB personally, so i have no idea if newer versions of
MYOB work under newer versions of wine.  If i had to guess, i'd say it
probably does - wine 1.2.x (and the 1.3.x dev series) was a huge advance
over 1.0.x.

NOTE: if you want MYOB support, you may have to buy a windows license
and install it into VirtualBox on linux so you can replicate any
problems you find in MYOB under wine in MYOB on Windows.  Don't know for
sure, but MYOB support is likely to say "tough, unsupported" as soon as
you mention linux and wine.


> But I can't see how to replicate my convenient publishing
> environment!?  (I'm looking for a *functional* equivalent.  I can
> learn new habits).
> 
> OO save-as HTML is far too primitive of course.
> 
> The key requirements are:
> -   headers and footers, incl. parameter-setting
> -   hotlinks, anchors and own-HTML insertions

if you want to do high quality (or even decent quality) HTML or anything
based on HTML like epub, then there are really only two ways of doing
it:

1. hand-coded HTML with a decent text editor.

2. write your own code to generate decent HTML from data stored in
   databases, text files, etc.  the code could add whatever headers,
   footers, stylesheets, etc you wanted.

so, learn how to write HTML and CSS.

or you could use TeX[1] - write one document and generate PDF, HTML, epub,
or whatever from that.


In my experience, all of the specialised "user-friendly" web editor apps
produce HTML of a quality that ranges from abominable to woeful. or
worse.

I fairly frequently have to make changes to other people's HTML pages
(usually originally generated by MS Word or Dreamweaver or some other
rubbish) and, even though I already know from experience just how bad
it's going to be, I'm still appalled and disgusted every time I have to
do it. and the *least* of the problems with the HTML generated by this
kind of app is that it's usually at least 10 times as large as it needs
to be, with far too many excessively verbose font and style changes
(sometimes as often as every few words in each paragraph - and setting
the same style each "change", i.e. no change at all)


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

> A recent document that exercises most of the features (but not all of 
> the styles) is:
> http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/Passwords.html

The HTML in that's not bad - rtf2html must do a pretty good job.

[ i wrote a bunch of stuff about passwords here that i meant to write a
few weeks ago when you were asking about them. it got long enough that i
decided to post it as a separate message instead ]


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

BOFH excuse #315:

The recent proliferation of Nuclear Testing



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