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System Info:
Cyrix MII 250MHz
60M RAM
4M video RAM
Mandrake Linux 7.1
Enlightenment 0.16.5
In my effort to convert over to Linux on a regular basis I began my search for a word processor to take me into the new millennium (since it actually starts on 1 January 2001 for those of you with poor math skills). Actually the millennium has nothing to do with it, but it sounded good. StarOffice is the office suite of choice in the Linux word right now, or so it seems. However I find SO to be heavy on resource usage, of general bad design and while it is a good program, it is not a great program. My object here is not to bash SO tho. It has many strong points (free being one of them and to many in the Linux world that is the only one that counts) but I was looking for more. The search lead me to ApplixOffice.
Originally created by Applix (applix.com) it has been taken over by VistaSource (vistasource.com). A visit to their site will get you right to links about the product and places to purchase it. The site has general information about the abilities of the program and a few screenshots. Nothing to write home about tho. I would have liked to see more information about exactly what it can do.
ApplixOffice 5.0 (hereafter AO) runs $100 but they were having a sale if you buy it from them -- $50. Being the brave (or stupid, not always sure which) soul that I am I went for it. Shipping was $9 for UPS, so the total came to $59. I put my order in on Saturday. Monday I got an e-mail telling me the product had shipped and a UPS tracking number. Friday, the UPS guy came thru. Not only did I get AO, but I got a carton of squares (Natural American Spirit, non-filters). I had software and smokes. Yes, things were looking good for Skip Doggs weekend.
The box AO comes in is thick cardboard. Great for throwing at small children or filling with old Windoze manuals you don't use much, but need to keep anyhow. It can then be put on your shelf with other computer books and it looks like you have more Linux stuff and less Winblows crap. As to the contents, AO comes on one CD. Also included: Registration form, installation guide & a spiral bound users manual. The users manual is typical of any manual that comes with the software. Covers the basics and assumes you know nothing. I found it somewhat helpful, but it is most certainly not advanced level. A quick skim of the pages is your best bet. It will give you an idea of most of the abilities of AO, but not much depth.
AO comes with technical support. First is 30 days free telephone support. Thus implying that after 30 days it cost money. Interestingly, I still haven't actually found the phone number to call. This may be why the first 30 days are free. It will take you that long to find the number to call. Could be an attempt to compete with M$. Second is web support at www.SmartBeak.com. Haven't checked out the site yet so I can't comment on that.
The installation and release notes booklet does have some good information. It includes enhancements and changes in v5.0, limitations of the program with importing M$ Office files and ``Known Issues'' (also known as bugs, also known as undocumented features, also known as things we might fix in the next version). Now, this book is dated March 2000, so some of this may be fixed, and AO can be updated over the internet. Since I still can't connect to the internet under Linux I haven't been able to take advantage of that yet. Most of the known limitations concern XHell, I mean Excel. Thirty-three of them to be exact, tho as I look over the list I'm not sure why some of them are limitations. Wouldn't importing the page settings for printing be a good thing? Not that it matters. I would never allow something as disgusting and nasty as an XHell file to exist on my hard drive anyhow. There are 11 limitations with M$ Word import filters listed, non of which I could care less about. Word files are regarded as viruses on my system and are hunted down & destroyed like L. Ron Hubard fans at a Babylon 5 convention.
Anyhow, on to the install. You are given some ``do this -- don't do that'' info for use if you are upgrading from AO 4.0, then we get to the important stuff. To install one types ./setup, or according to the book ./install.bsh to ``use the RPM-based installation''. Well. Sounds nice. Too bad it doesn't work. Each of these commands got me an error message about not having access. I don't know if this was an issue with the CD or what (still learning Linux you know) so I ended up copying all the files over to my hard drive and executing ./setup from there. It now worked just fine. The install didn't take long, and went in /opt/applix. Along the way it created /optapplix --tho there is nothing in the directory. Ya got me, but I'm just leaving it there for now. Frustration out of the way at last, program installed, I typed ``Applix'' and fired it up. And what appears? A disgusting little task bar just like M$ Office. Ok, the AO taskbar is cuter, and large enuf to be seen. Tho you don't need to use it. Applix Words can be started by ``words'' and the spreadsheets program by ``spreadsheets''. All other applications can be accessed thru the menu of either of them, and in fact thru the menu of any of the programs. The bar is customizable regarding which icons appear. The bar you see in my screenshots has been stripped way down from what can be included.
First thing I set about to was customizing the button bar. One thing I like about AO is that the menus and button bars can be customize. Most anything can be moved, changed, added or deleted. This includes buttons, functions, keyboard accelerators, submenues. Most anything. The one thing I got annoyed with here is that the icons for the button bar are too limited. I think there should be an intuitive looking icon for the button bar for each function. For example, I like to be able to insert page numbering with the button bar, yet there is no icon that looks remotely like ``insert page number''. There is an icon editor with the macro editor, so you can create icons to your desire. It's just that I don't think I should have to be creating them. They should exist. I'll be putting in some time in the future working out some icons.
So how about Words? Well, it's about your typical word processor. Ugly. One thing I wanted, floating tool bars, is not there. It amazes me that AmiPro could do this 10 years ago, yet no one can pull it off today. Are you sure software is getting better? AmiPro also comes with lots of icons. But I digress. The installed font list is acceptable. AO comes with a font installer. However, it doesn't seem to do anything, and clicking on ``help'' gets nothing. Really. Nothing at all. Not too useful. Another thing that is not too useful is the Directory Displayer. At first I was happy to see this but once I fired it up.... My main complaint here is that it doesn't show the entire tree in the left window, only the directory you are in, and the one above that. This makes navigating a bit more tedious than it need be. It does have a favourites list however so that helps somewhat. Directory Displayer is a move in the right direction, but they need to do some work yet on that one. The extras are interesting, but don't expect a whole lot here.
So I began putting Words thru the paces. First off, can it open one of my huge documents. Total time to open a *.aw file (*.aw is the Words native format) which was 1500 pages long: 1 minute, 22 seconds. Once it was open I jumped to the end and got straight there. You will find that some word processing programs, when opening a long document, will only open part of it and it you try to jump right from the start to the very end there will be further delay as the rest of the document is loaded. So, it took a while to load but it did load the whole thing. This file was originally a M$ Works file, saved as RTF, then opened in ApplixWords and saved as an *.aw file.
Then I tried out an Office97 file. This is the only *.doc file I have around, but it was a good test as it contains images. When opening a *.doc file AW presents you with a series of dialogue boxes regarding how to convert what. Since I understand none of it I accepted all defaults and the file opened just fine. All the images were there, page setup was correct. This document is 20 pages long. When paging thru it things are a bit slow when hitting the graphics, but within expectation as I made no effort to compress the graphics or any such thing when I was creating the document. Thus, it appears that Words is reasonably compatible with M$ Office. As if I care, but I know many people do. (God forbid that we don't bring the M$ standard for office & presentation files into the Linux world.) Anyhow, lets get to the important stuff. The features and let downs of Applix Words.
As previously mentioned, I had already set up the button bars and changed some of the keyboard accelerators so things would be more to my liking. Then it was time to set up the general options. It is possible to set the rules for hyphenation (nastyness which I turned off). AW can perform spellchecking as you type, also turned off as my terrible spelling would bog things down, and I was able to select British as my spelling of choice. The spell checker seems to have some problems with words I would expect it to know, but it can be educated via the ``add to dictionary'' button. Looks like I may be making use of that quite a bit as I start things off. You would think that ``internet'' would be in the dictionary by now.
So then, can it do the job? Well, the fonts look not too bad. You can see 'em yourself in the screenshots. AW will generate TOC (table of contents) and an index. It handles footnotes. Also all the things you would expect: Headers & footers, numbering, bullets, variable document fields (date last edited and such as that), lets you do columns, allows you to insert hyperlinks and also saves files as HTML format.
I haven't tried that last one yet, as I'm having low hopes. The HTML editor that came with AO is terrible. Of course, I have yet to find a HTML editor that I like. All of my web site has been written with an ASCII editor. My attempts to load one of my web pages in the AO HTML editor resulted in only one image being displayed and all of the normal text was invisible. That was the end of that experiment as I will never use it anyhow. I've also tried Frontpage2000 and it was no better in my opinion.
One can insert tables, frames and all the other assortment of things to include clipart which comes with the program (the usual assortment of lame images).
It also does subscripts and superscripts which are needed for some technical & scientific writing. However, the method of rendering these is far more complex than AmiPro (worlds greatest word processor) where you do it by selecting the text then hitting a button.
You many notice in the screenshots that there is no ``window'' menu up top. Each file is opened in a whole new window. At first I thought that was going to be a bad thing, but since Linux has multiple desktops (unlike somebody elses toy OS/GUI) this actually works out fine for me.
Ok, yea. So what else is wrong with AW? Well, it has the Winblows assortment of windows that can not be resized. I love it when the window is tiny and you have to scroll thru a list of things, and oh if only you could resize the window, then the scrolling wouldn't be quite so bad..... But noooooo! We can't have that.
There is no provision for line numbering (something that StarOffice does do to its credit). Not making a numbering list, or numbering style sheet, but actually line numbering. For those of you who wonder what the hell I'm talking about, in many printings of Shakespeare they have line numbers beside each line of the text, usually every 5 lines, all the way thru. It's used for easy reference (now class, go to line 547 of McBeth) and pretty essential for the serious writer. Very useful in editing, and it's not here. Or if it is I can't find it, so AW loses some points there.
Another little problem, why does the ``delete'' key do the same thing as the ``backspace'' key? Is someone an idiot or what? I mean what the hell is this? If I ever find the tech support phone number I'm going to bitch about this one big time.
For some reason AW will not remember the size I set the window for, tho Enlightenment has no problem doing this with other programs. Thus I have to resize the window each time I start the program.
And did I mention it's ugly and has no floating icon bars?
So, in the end, what do I have to say? Well, AO has some things over SO that I like and are going to make me stick with it:
1. Each application runs separate.
2. Each application can have multiple occurrences.
3. The program runs faster on my system.
4. There is no ``start'' bar at the bottom.
5. AO can be customized to a greater degree and I like menu buttons.
Of course, a important part of a word processor is it's printing characteristicts. At this moment my printer is not working. I'm waiting for my Mandrake 7.2 disk which I hope will fix that problem. Once I've got it up and going I'll add a report to this page about the printing interface & output.
Should you get ApplixOffice? Well, if you do then get it before 31 Dec 2000 while you can pick it up for $50 (plus shipping) because I don't think it's worth $100. If you are using StarOffice and find yourself happy with that then by no means should you go for this product. I have found some stability & fuctionality problems with ApplixOffice, but the same can be said of StarOffice (which once crashed and had to be totally eliminated from my computer then reinstalled taking a hour to achieve due to lots of error messages and problems with the RPM). Maybe one day StarOffice will become the wonder that it claims to be. At the moment I rate it a solid +5 on a scale of -10 to +10. ApplixOffice has an equal share of problems, but they are problems I can more easily live with or work around (except for that ``delete'' key thing) so I give ApplixOffice a +6.5. Still lots of room to improve. I'll be watching to see what kind of improvement they make.
News Flash: I got the delete key thing fixed. Had to go into ``customize menu bar'' and go into ``keys'' and change the delete key from delete previous character to delete next character.
Got Applix up under Mandrake 7.2 using the CUPS printer system. I have a HP Deskjet 500C and it works great. The output is easily as good as anything I have gotten out of Winblows.
Bug reports:
In your home directory you will have a folder called 'applixhome'. This holds all your config files and personalized stuff. Back it up. If you have problems with Applix being goofy, delete this folder and restore the older one. If it still keeps acting dumb delete it and start all over. There is nothing in here you can not replace. Your custom menus are saved in files in the applixhome directory (not one of the subdirctories) and will be obvious to you. Sometimes you may have to delete everything except for those files.
Also, be sure you exit Applix applications before exiting your window manager. I know that shutting down Enlightenment with Applix open will cause the program to bug up next time you try to run it, and it will just get worse. I can't say for sure with any other WM, but why take a chance?
Not on Applix, but on StarOffice. The SO 6 beta is out (has been out for a while actually as of this day, 11 JAN 02) and I have played a bit with that. SO has finally broken each application out from that silly "desktop" mess. SO 6 looks much much better, so check it out. You can download it from the Sun website.
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