Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Gnuxo]

I stumbled upon Ted recently, and it seems to do alot of what I'd expect from a word processor without excess bloat. It's a smaller install then abiword and uses less dependencies. Has a decent amount file extensions.

It can open .doc files though it can't save to them, but for the small size, you get a hell of a lot. There's even a butt load of dictionaries, spell checkers and scripts download to extend functionality.

An old version of Ted comes standard on Damn Small Linux.

My question is: for it's small size, would Ted be a better fit for puppy then Abiword? It would probably reduce the iso size by a few megs.

I've used Ted for the day, and I really don't know what features I miss from Abiword that justify choosing it over Ted.

[disciple]

I think Ted was included in Puppy many years ago, but Abiword's compatibility with MS Word is so much better that I doubt it would be switched back... although you may have an ally in the people who claim that Abiword and Gnumeric should be left out of Puppy because so many people install Libreoffice/Openoffice anyway.

[Makoto]

The thing about Abiword is that it's always been rather buggy for me... each version (even across platforms) usually behaves badly for me in different ways.

We've had discussions (and I think disciple participated in most or all of them ) about what else we could possibly use in Abiword's place, but many of them require other environments to be installed (some want KDE to be installed, for example. Open/LibreOffice is good, but it'd add another ~200MB to a Puppy disc, not to mention the likely Java requirement (adding even more to the size of that Puppy).

[disciple]

I hope you report the bugs

[Makoto]

Is that why they keep replacing the bugs with all-new sets of bugs?

[tlchost]

[Gnuxo]

Well, I don't believe TED requires any desktop environments. It's very small.

And I haven't found glitches with it either.

I would rather use LYX over Abiword if I need something with that many features. It's larger then Abiword but has even more features then Abiword.
*Most people don't know that LYX is a word processor and not just some stupid LATEX editor*

For the barebones full screen writing, I usually use WordGrinder anyway, but for formatting, I still need a real word processor and TED does formatting just fine.

I find huge office suites major overkill. I wish Siag was still actively developed because I'd rather use that over Libre Office.

[darkcity]

I believe one of the reason Abiword has so many bugs is that Puppy tends to pack development versions rather than stables releases. For example, Slacko 531 comes with abiword 2.9.1, but the last stable release was 2.8.6.
http://www.abisource.com/

I find Abiwords MS support confusing in that it saves .docs as rich text files (rtf) rather than its native format. This isn't a problem if you know about it though.
http://www.abisource.com/wiki/Microsoft_Word_documents

[disciple]

How is it a problem if you don't know about it?

[darkcity]

Because when AbiWord saves a .doc you expect it to behave like a binary file, rather than a rtf . I can't remember the details, but had problems with someone being unable to opening .doc because it was in the .doc rtf format. Could double check anyone thinks it worth it.

[canbyte]

Hi. Someone sent me a .docx file to edit, I opened it with Abiword 2.9.1 (in Slacko 533 dual screen) made a few edits and gave up in frustration. I'll do the rest in geany as it's mostly just text but will miss the strikeout function.

Reason - as each character is typed, the screen goes blank and then refreshes with the new text. Each freakin' character!! Drove me nuts very quickly (which isn't saying much as it's not far to go )

I'm quite content to continue with geany but what would others suggest? is there a .pet or better yet an .sfs for other editors (TED, LYX, etc. )? Or .......?
Thanks in advance.

[8-bit]

Even if one uses MS Word, one can have problems with a docx file.
It depends on what version of MS Word was used to create the file.
I have had MS Word 97 not want to open some docx files.
So why would some program in Puppy be any different?

[disciple]

Word 97 doesn't open any docx files

[canbyte]

Hi 8 bit, disciple
The problem wasn't opening the file, it was the screen action while typing. I'm assuming that it has nothing to do with where the file came from. I tried to change it from docx to rtf and finally to .txt but Abiword reacted the same to all. Having said that, I just tried reloading the .txt file and found to my surprise that indeed, the flow was smoother and the screen had less 'flash' than before. Not as smooth as geany, but better than it was and reasonable enough that i would be happy to use Abiword for the final formatting and polishing up which geany can't do.

Edit: FWIW, I just noticed a couple of other things. Pasting a long series of (Yahoo) emails into Abiword, I found that text was 'disappearing' around/below page breaks. It reappears when highlighted or moved. I also noticed that there was an option to save as .rtf or 'old' .rtf for older apps, whatever that means.

So with that (and my editing job done), I suppose I'll just remember that little lesson but for sake of posterity, someone might want to add pet or sfs files for other processors that might be useful.

Thanks again.

[charlie6]

Hi,