Use of ``vi'' for business office word-processing

[guy at sun.UUCP]

> Yes, I think you're wrong.  Secretaries don't have time, nor do they usually
> want to learn something like Unix.  They will prefer EVERY TIME something
> which works as similarly as possible to their typewriter.

I agree with this.  Heck, *I* like UNIX (I think), but *I* get rather
annoyed at the text processing tools sometimes; for almost all the stuff I
do, some sort of good WYSIWYG editor would probably let me do all I need and
*much* more conveniently.  A *really* good one, i.e. one whose formatting
primitives aren't all at the "indent 5 spaces, left margin at 10, right
margin at 70" type, but which permits you to say "make this a standard
paragraph" and then edit a style sheet telling it what a "standard
paragraph" looks like, and which will permit you to change that style sheet
later and have the document's appearance change as soon as the style sheet
is changed, would be even better.  I think Microsoft Word, for example, does
this; versions definitely exist for UNIX, since I think they were offering
it for the AT&T UNIX PC.

> The combination of vi, nroff, troff, etc., and the Unix utilities do
> provide, for those that are computer literate or will take quite a lot
> of time to learn, a great deal of flexibility.

I think I fall into the category given, but frankly I think I can get most
of the flexibility I need without having to pour so much energy into
figuring out how to get the programs to do what I want.  "tbl" is especially
annoying here; anybody who can get it to produce the table they want on the
first try, every time, deserves a Grand Master of "tbl" award.  A WYSIWYG
system at least gives you feedback more quickly; you don't have to wait for
"[nt]roff" to grind through N pages before it gets to the page you're trying
to get right.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)