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Software Operating Systems BSD

New Commercial Word Processor For FreeBSD 116

Posted by timothy from the first-mover dept.
martin-k writes "There is commercial software built for FreeBSD after all... SoftMaker, a German vendor of office apps, just ported the TextMaker word processor to FreeBSD, making this the fifth platform it runs on (after Windows, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, and Linux). Blazingly fast, reads and writes Microsoft Word files seamlessly, and offers everything you expect from a modern word processor. Also coming to your desktop: the PlanMaker spreadsheet and DataMaker database package."
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New Commercial Word Processor For FreeBSD More

New Commercial Word Processor For FreeBSD

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  • More platforms to come... (Score:3, Informative)

    by martin-k ( 99343 ) on Saturday October 11, 2003 @03:54PM (#7191027) Homepage
    TextMaker started out under Windows, got ported to Pocket PCs, Handheld PCs, Linux and now to FreeBSD.

    Just for kicks, we did an x86 Solaris port in an afternoon. I guess we'll do a few more Unices -- except for Unixware, of course.

    • Do you guys have anything Visio compatible? That would be a "killer app" for *NIX right now. Right now for Visio, the options are vmware with MS and Visio, CxOffice with Visio, or some serious winex breakdancing to get Visio working.
    • Uh-huh. Currently, Textmaker's asking me to spew a tarball into /opt or wherever.

      How about integrating with the OS packaging system? It's the first concern in my mind when I think about supporting this across multiple desktops along with all the other apps we support.

      J

    • With such an interesting assortment of platforms, do you have any intention of porting to Mac OS X or BeOS?
      • Mac OS X is on my personal wishlist, but if we decide to do it, we'd probably start out with an X11 version running under Mac OS X.

        For BeOS, amount of work vs. userbase is not really attractive (FreeBSD was one changed line in the source code).

        • True -- but there is an X11 server for Be. Compiling on a BeOS target with X11 and BONE installed would theoretically be trivial.
        • Just out of curiosity, can you show us the line 8-)

          - flip
          • It's the beep function which had to be #ifdef'd. If you count the matching #endif, that would be two lines...

            #if !defined(DWFREEBSD) && !defined(DWSOLARIS)
            fd = open("/dev/tty10", O_RDONLY);
            if (fd == -1) return(FALSE);
            ioctl(fd, KDMKTONE, (DUR << 16) + (1193180 / frq));
            #endif

        • Since you mentioned porting, would you give any consideration to doing a port for OS/2 using the Odin libraries ?

          Odin is the OS/2 analog to WINE for Linux.

          There's a company out of Germany, InnoTek, using the Odin technology to port applications to OS/2. So far they have done:

          ~ VPC for OS/2
          ~ Adobe Reader 4
          ~ Java 1.4.2

          And they are working on OpenOffice 1.1 for OS/2.

          Gregory L. Marx
          • We had a nearly-finished OS/2 version of TextMaker in 1996, but since then, interest in OS/2 software has declined so much that we never completed it, let alone release it.

            If and when we do ports, we'll never again use emulation libraries. We used Micrografx Mirrors to port DataMaker to OS/2 in 1995/1996, and I never want to experience such a nightmare again.

            How far along is OpenOffice for OS/2?

    • I tried to display a Japanese document with using Japanese fonts, but I can't.(Mojibake [debian.or.jp] occurred.)

      OpenOffice.org has a project of l10n and i18n [openoffice.org]. Does TextMaker have a framework of i18n?

  • It's nice to hear that, however, I'm mildly surprised. There was a poll at bsdforums IIRC that asked whether people would be willing to pay for it - the vast majority (including me) seemed to see no real need for it. There are already various free office suites that work quite well, and if anybody would need TextMaker, they could simply run the linux version - works fine for lots of other apps, from acrobat reader to a complete Lisp IDE including native-code compiler (generating Linux binaries, of course),
    • I wouldn't expect any significant commercial gain for SoftMaker.

      It got us posted on Slashdot...

    • According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

      I've used the demo TextMaker, and frankly it's awesome. Blazingly fast, does everything I need a WP for, and even handles some Word docs that OO can't format correctly. I'm certainly considering a purchase.

      • Re:Nice surprise (Score:3, Interesting)

        by __past__ ( 542467 )

        According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

        As far as I understand, their main problem wasn't about porting, but about supporting another OS. I have little idea about what kind of framework they use, so I don't know how platform-independent their code really is, but it certainly has at least some potential to make support more complicated.

        It would be really great if SoftMaker - or other company that made the same step, like Opera -

      • According to SoftMaker, all that was involved was a recompile. So it cost them extremely little to support FreeBSD.

        To be honest, this statements bugs me. Even if all they did do is recompile, and if it worked (a recompile is not sufficient in all cases, they're pretty lucky) that just solves the coding aspect of the app.

        Other major aspects:
        Packaging.
        Documentation.
        Testing.

        Of those 3, packaging is sure to be done, since they can't really ship without it being installable. Documentation, well, for the m
        • There's some evidence that they did do some significant QA on the FreeBSD build. The product first came to my attention because someone was beta testing it. It wasn't just built and thrown out there.

          Packaging is simple. At least with the demo, you just untar it somewhere and it's ready to run. Since everything is statically linked but xlib and libc, so there are no installation issues.

          The documentation covers Linux *AND* FreeBSD, since there are no functional disimilarities in the products. Printing is id
    • I run the Linux version of VMWare on FreeBSD. Works fine. Networking is a little trickier, but you can do both host-only and bridged.

      Granted, I'm using version 2.0.4, and don't know whether or not Workstation 4 would run or not.

    • Hey, this software is genuinely a pleasant surprise. I am so impressed that I'm going to buy it. And in the last three years, I have only bought three programs, all of them games. Sure, I have OOo installed under FreeBSD. It works very well for my needs so far. But TextMaker is not only very impressive software, it's a great price, and I want to encourage this behavior. How can I lose by purchasing it? I get a surprisingly good word processor, and I show other companies that, yes, FreeBSD is a platfo

  • Infringement? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by agent dero ( 680753 )
    Maybe I am unclear on the copyright infringement thing and everything, but doesn't this conflict with MS in some way?!

    I mean, Open Office is freeware (also works on FreeBSD) but they're selling something like this with Word capabilities? I smell trouble...or maybe it's just me ;-)

    BTW, I am not a fan of commercial apps for OSS platforms, seems contradicting somehow
    • I am not a fan of commercial apps for OSS platforms, seems contradicting somehow

      You've listened to RMS' ranting too much.
    • In what way is it infringing?

      the .doc format is now an open xml format (with optional digital signing if you want the security), so any wordprocessor can have the ability to import a .doc file (the xml kind).

      Microsofts reasoning behind this move: If .doc becomes the standard format for all documents (on all wordprocessors, despite their OS), then Microsoft Word by default becomes the defacto standard for all documents.

      The question then becomes, who will be able to outdo Microsoft in working with the .doc

  • Regarding Textmaker (Score:3, Interesting)

    by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Sunday October 12, 2003 @12:51AM (#7192984) Journal
    Has anyone here actually tried Textmaker? If it delivers what the web site states, then it is probably worth paying for. They have a free 30 day trial version which I am currently downloading. If I like it and think it will do a better job than the other software I am currently using then I will pay for it. If not, well hey, it is just fun trying new stuff out.

  • Portability: What commercial unix software needs (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harikiri ( 211017 ) on Sunday October 12, 2003 @03:32AM (#7193449)
    The better the codebase is, and if indeed it is so portable a simple ./configure ; make install will suffice, the more platforms software "X" will run on. For commercial software, this means that they don't have to bend over backwards for a slight increase in marketshare by offering a commercial (if unsupported) piece of software for the more esoteric UNIX platforms out there.

    Ie, if you were a company that created a word processor built on C/C++, and you had made an effort to use appropriate configure scripts on Unix to assist in creating builds, by putting a small amount of time in to enable the code to build on esoteric-platform-1, and it worked, you suddenly have an entirely new (if small) market to sell your product to.

    However, if your application sucks, nobody is going to buy it. But if you sold each application with a license that enabled *any* platform (ie, pay $49 and download program for windows/linux/bsd), and not having to pay for a copy of the linux vs bsd version, woo.. happy endusers.

    I dunno what I'm saying at this point, just rambling. :-)
  • Tested it on NetBSD with Linux emulation. Works just fine, was quite fast and sweet. Only problem was that when I tried adding lists, I could not get out of the list mode... Anyway, I wouldn't pay 50eur from it, because there are similar choises for no charge.
    • For the casual word-processor user, geek, and perhaps undergrad student, KWord or OpenOffice is sufficient, and to pay US$69 for it doesn't seem an viable option.

      However, if it truly delivers fast, reliable, feature filled, word processing to linux/freebsd, then *SERIOUS* word processors should be interested. Some of us have to do more than just a letter to grandma.

      For instance (and I don't know if it supports these) as a student in upper level History, and soon to be in grad school (next Fall), I know I

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