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<!-- addedByLfdynahead ver 1.4 --><TABLE ALIGN="right" border=0><TR><TD ALIGN="right"><FONT SIZE="-1" FACE="Arial,Helvetica">This document is available in: <A href="../../English/July2003/article301.shtml">English</a> <A href="../../Castellano/July2003/article301.shtml">Castellano</a> <A href="../../Deutsch/July2003/article301.shtml">Deutsch</a> <A href="../../Francais/July2003/article301.shtml">Francais</a> <A href="../../Nederlands/July2003/article301.shtml">Nederlands</a> <A href="../../Russian/July2003/article301.shtml">Russian</a> <A href="../../Turkce/July2003/article301.shtml">Turkce</a> </FONT></TD></TR></TABLE><br>
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<IMG src="../../common/images/Guido-S.gif" alt=
"[Photo of the Author]" height="164" width="173">
<BR>by Guido Socher <a href="http://linuxfocus.org/~guido/"><font size="1">(homepage)</font></a>
<BR><BR>
<I>About the author:</I><BR>
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<P>Guido likes Linux because it is a very flexible and offers
much more possibilities than any other operating system.
</P>
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<BR><i>Content</i>:
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="#301lfindex0">Introduction</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#301lfindex1">Features</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#301lfindex2">The test</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#301lfindex3">Font support</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="#301lfindex4">Conclusion</A></LI>
<LI><A HREF="http://cgi.linuxfocus.org/cgi-bin/lftalkback?anum=301">Talkback form for this article</A></LI>
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<table border="0"><tr><td>
<H2>Product Review: Textmaker</H2>
<img src="../../common/images/article301/301illu.jpg" alt="tml" hspace="10" >
<!-- ABSTRACT OF THE ARTICLE -->
<P><i>Abstract</i>:
<P>
<!-- articleabstract_start -->
Textmaker is one of the new commercial word processors for
Linux. The article reflects the authors opinion and is
neither sponsored nor influenced in way by anybody else.
<!-- articleabstract_stop -->
<br><!-- HR divider --><center><font color="#8282e0"><b>_________________ _________________ _________________</b></font></center><br>
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<A NAME="301lfindex0"> </A>
<H2>Introduction</H2>
The number of word processing applications available
for Linux is growing steadily. The most important ones
are probably Staroffice, Openoffice, Kword, Abiword, Ted and
now also Textmaker. Applix used to be a very nice alternative
but declined after Redhat did not sell and maintain it anymore.
It is also possible to run Microsoft products using crossover office
but then we are not talking about a real Linux application.
<p>
This leaves us with basically 2 commercial products: Staroffice and
and Textmaker (<a href="http://www.softmaker.de/tml.htm">http://www.softmaker.de/tml.htm</a>). I always had a love and hate relation with Staroffice.
It has a lot of features but it is very slow and really heavy. I absolutely
hate it when Staroffice starts up and occupies the screen for almost
a minute with a big logo which you can't click away. You notice also
in many places that Staroffice wasn't really a Unix application
from the beginning. So I was quite excited when I found Textmaker.
It seemed to be quite slim:
7Mb download is an acceptable size.
<A NAME="301lfindex1"> </A>
<H2>Features</H2>
The list of features is impressive for a new office application.
Import and and export of documents to all major formats including
all versions of word for Windows works without problems. It supports truetype fonts under
Linux which means that you can possibly use millions of fonts in any size.
The rendering and printout quality of documents with mixed pictures and
text is also very good.
<p>There seems to be no support for mathematical formulas or technical
drawing which makes it not a choice for scientific
applications but it has definitely everything that a home user or
business person expects from a word processor.
<p>I will not continue to list all the features. Instead I will
focus on things that I personally really miss: A fast, lightweight,
true Unix office application. With true Unix I mean things like:
Runs with no problems from a central installation in a multi user
environment. X11 offers a seamless integration of local and remote
application so a true Unix application should support that too.
<br>
<center>
<a href="../../common/images/article301/301_tmltest_big.gif"><img src="../../common/images/article301/301_tmltest.png" alt="Textmaker for Linux in action"></a>
</center>
<br>
<A NAME="301lfindex2"> </A>
<H2>The test</H2>
When I install an application for the the first time the I always install
it just once on a server and the users start it via a small shell
script remotely. Home directories are available via NFS so most users
will not even notice that this program is not running locally on their
computer. The advantage is that I have only one installation to maintain and
it does not use memory or cpu on the users workstations. Since
everything is in one place it is easier to monitor crashes or hanging processes.
<p>How about Textmaker? Textmaker is quite stable no crashes within
several days of using it. It uses about 8Mb Memory per running process and does not seem to
have big memory leaks. <br>Problems? Yes. The separation between users
is not very good. If one user starts a document and does not save it
then a second will user gets a notice at startup that there is an unsaved
document. If she opens it then she gets the document of her colleague.
Rendering of text and pictures on the screen is very slow even if it
is running on a fast server. Something is wrong with the way Textmaker
updates the screen. I don't type very fast but the text on the screen
was always about one word behind my typing. This problem with the
rendering of the screen does not seem to
exist for a locally started Textmaker.
<p>
An other point that speaks for it self is that fact that all
files in the Textmaker installation are executable (chmod 755),
even font files. The happens usually when somebody who
has no clue that a Unix file system is different from Windows packs
files together under Windows. Textmaker is basically a Windows program
that was re-compiled for Linux. Therefore most of the Linux specific
things do not work. That is very unfortunate because Linux has
much more possibilities and features than Windows.
<p>
Something that is probably a feature and not a bug is the fact
that you can only start one instance Textmaker. It you try
to start a second Textmaker process it opens the already running window.
It is rather unfortunate that one can not disable this behavior (e.g
via command line option). I personally like to have 2 separate top level windows
when I copy/paste text parts. With Textmaker I had to use its own
small internal text windows.
<A NAME="301lfindex3"> </A>
<H2>Font support</H2>
Textmaker supports truetype fonts. That's very good because it gives
you access to millions of high quality fonts. Textmaker reads at
startup the file /etc/X11/fs/config to find the fonts and something
is wrong with that code. On most installations it did not find any
font and I had to copy the fonts to /opt/textmaker/fonts. In one
case it would even crash during startup. I deleted some comment lines
in /etc/X11/fs/config and it started. Very strange.<br><br>
Textmaker shows you a preview of the font in the list where you can select the font.
I tried an installation with 248 fonts and it was almost impossible
to scroll that list because it was so slow. So finally I decided that
is is a good "bug" that Textmaker fails to understand the font-server
config file. This way you can copy a selection of fonts to /opt/textmaker/fonts
and the list of fonts in Textmaker becomes usable again.
<A NAME="301lfindex4"> </A>
<H2>Conclusion</H2>
The test ended with a mixed feeling. Especially multi user support and
remote X11 failed totally. That's a pity because those are really some
of the very best features of Unix. On the other hand you won't notice
it on an isolated single PC Linux installation at home.
<p>Which version did I actually test? Well the home page of Textmaker
(<a href="http://www.softmaker.de/tml.htm">http://www.softmaker.de/tml.htm</a>) says Textmaker
2002 but the "about menu point" in Textmaker says 389. What ever that is.
In the end I decided to buy a license even though this looks still
like beta version to me but I wanted to encourage softmaker to continue.
It has the potential to become a really good word processor if they
remember to fix bugs before and after adding features.
Softmaker should also focus on the integration into Linux. Just re-compile
it for Linux is not enough.<br><br>
What I liked most in this version? The developers at Softmaker have some humor. I never understood what the following
pop-up meant but it makes me smile every time I see it:
<br>
<center>
<img src="../../common/images/article301/funny.gif" alt="cool dialog">
</center>
<br>
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<p><font size=1>2003-06-26, generated by lfparser version 2.38</font></p>
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