Comments on: Blasphemer! DOSBox and Word 5.5

By: roland

roland — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 07:57:53 +0000

already reading man dosbox but i have no clue on how to mount c drive, can anyone tell how to do it? Thx

By: Mister Shiney

Mister Shiney — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:55:50 +0000

I have a (tiny) dos-based wordpro called Dark Room which is great. A similar linux project is called pyRoom but I don’t know if it is being maintained. I was wondering if you have tried running DOS WordPerfect 5.2 under dosbox. I suspect that would be the most feature rich and best performing option. WP5.2 had the ability to do some pretty impressive things in placing graphical elements on the page, footnotes, endnotes, and so forth.

By: Ben Hjelt

Ben Hjelt — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:04:46 +0000

Hehe, a year ago I set up a Siemens 486 laptop with FreeDOS + MS Edit from my dusty old win98 cd (needed the menus in swedish) and a b&w printer – works well.

By: Jared

Jared — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 13:32:26 +0000

DOSemu does not require X if it’s run in the framebuffer. I’ve used DOSemu to run Word 5.5, Wordperfect 6.1 for DOS and the original DOOM all in the framebuffer. This set up runs fairly light on my PI 133 mhz, 80 Mb RAM Fujitsu laptop.

By: Cian

Cian — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:10:09 +0000

Emacs with org-mode is better than any word processor I’ve ever used. A wonderfully flexible and powerful outliner/organiser, combined with the power of Emacs, which uses a very simple mark up language (a bit like MarkDown). And when you’re finished, you can export it to Latex fairly trivially (or DocBook, or HTML, or…).

And that’s simply scratching the surface. I know a fair number of Emacs haters who converted for Org-Mode.

By: walcar

walcar — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:45:17 +0000

I have been dabbling in groff which is most probably already installed on most Linux distros as it it used to write the man pages.

Groff is not a ‘What you see is what you get’ word processor but a markup language processor somewhat like the TeX package (but not as bloated). This means it takes a bit of effort to learn how to use it.

By using various macro packages, freely available on line, it can produce tables, graphs, colour output and can handle the printing of some fearsome mathematical equations. There are other macros too. Groff uses any text editor to create documents that can be outputted in several different formats i.e pdf, plain text, dvi etc.

A good introduction is Manas Laha’s “An Introduction to the GNU Text Processing System” at http://www.angelfire.com/linux/mlaha/pdffiles/grofftut.pdf

P.S.: Love your site and the “maximilism” philosophy. Keep up the good work.

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:24:08 +0000

Text editor + LaTeX = Word processor, basically.

By: gulrot

gulrot — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:21:36 +0000

You are right about that, wordprossessors do typesetting too, but technically you can use a text editor to do the same, you will just have to use tex or a lightweight markup language, in my experience that makes it be a better workflow than what I have ever had in a word prossessor.

@JP Senior:
I don’t know what kmandla has to say about it, but in my experience vim is better to handle more complex tasks than most of the word prossessors, If I want to edit lots of text it’s a lot faster and more convenient, and easier to focus on what I am supposed to do, and the keyboard shortcuts makes it faster than having to move my hands over to the mouse all of the time.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:31:27 +0000

My point exactly.

By: imgx64

imgx64 — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 06:17:22 +0000

Vim is not a not a real word processor, it's not a word processor at all. It's a text editor. These two are often confused, but they're different, and programs that do both (such as Wordpad and TextEdit) only add to the confusion. Text editors are designed to edit plain text, no formatting at all. Word processors can format the text, change font size, change fonts, etc.