dirkd wrote:As a pendant to the packages-you-like post.
Of course, the list will be small, or you are not here anymore. I'll start with my own disfavourites.
- Ted. I thought I would love Ted. I like to make notes, documenting the steps I take in configuring the system. Simple text-files tend to become sloppy when I write them, but a full-fledged .odt-document seems overkill. In Windows I often use Wordpad to make simple RTF's. But in AntiX I wonder what precisely is meant by RTF file format. Very soon, a Ted-made RTF gets opened by Libre Office, then, saving it as .RTF, it can't be opened by Ted anymore, as it presumably is no longer a correct RTF file. So, different programs disagree about the RTF format definition, which makes it pretty useless I think.
- Xpdf. I'm sure Xpdf is a fine pdf-viewer, which does the job. But esthetics is important to me. I know it's a bit silly, but I can't help it: each time I see an Xpdf window opening I mutter, damn, how ugly. So I switched to qpdfview, which, as a qt-application, looks just fine. I understand why Xpdf is there. It IS lightweight. To put it in perspective: Xpdf = a few 100 kB, qpdfvies = about 7 MB (including PS and DejaVu plugins), while Evince (default with Ubuntu) is about 50 Mb. I think qpdfview will satisfy my needs. It's not exactly a heavyweight itself, seems fast enough, is not very difficult to configure to your needs, and looks rather pretty.
@dirkd: I do not know if this is worth including (I think we've used it in the past), but at some level, Abiword is able to"handle" .rtf."How well" Abiword, or any other tool handles .rtf is a matter of a couple of things: 1) Which interpretation - and implementation - of Rich Text Format is being utilized, 2) Which RTF features are used and 3) What other software packages are interacting with it.
Most of the time people are interacting with some form of Microsoft Office in one version or another. Newer versions of Office are able to export to quite a variety of formats, so RTF isn't the only one, but it may, other than HTML, be the most common and accessible format to use. In the limited exchanges I've made, I've found Abiword to provide sufficient commonality. On the other hand, for those devices and software that can actually handle either .doc or .docx, I've found that OpenOffice, LibreOffice and Abiword can all deal with them. The ODT format is good, too, except OLDER versions of Microsoft Office don't deal well with it, though recent versions do. So in that sense, RTF still works, but produces large files, MUCH larger than .docx or .odt, both of which are more modern formats utilizing varying degrees of markup language that isn't too far from what HTML produces - exchanges between these newer formats, understandably, is much easier.
So for Ted, maybe Abiword is an alternative.
For xpdf, yeah, small size is its best attribute.
There are a LOT of PDF viewers. if that is all that you need it to do. Did you know that Firefox can view a PDF file? I just confirmed it by viewing a .docx version of my resume using LibreOffice, then exporting it to PDF, and a moment later, viewing the same document, now in PDF format, using Firefox. I happened to do all of this on MX-14.4, our distribution"brother".