Hi Bill, (I get this list in digest format, so this reply may have been superseded by others' comments.) On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, Bill Gaughan wrote: > Q. Is there a command status line feature or function key feature in VI? First of all, you probably don't want to use the original vi. I personally prefer vim (VI IMproved), but elvis has its adherents as well. In vim, pressing f1 will put you into help mode. Typing help from vim's command-line followed by a command will give you help on that command. I've found vim to be as detailed and friendly in this area as any word processor I've used--though, truth be told, I haven't really used a word processor in some years. > How do I turn it on? You know, like the command status lines in PICO and > PINE? You'll get help from vim in a different form than you're used to--it'll fill your screen rather than only the bottom few lines a la pine/pico--but it's perfectly usable. > Q. From your experience, which text-processing packages should I start > with. I need to do basic documentation. Maybe a table of contents, > indices, etc. Are LaTex and stuff like that for printing, like desktop > publishing or for reading. The TeX family of markup languages are designed to produce publish-ready documents, but their source is perfectly readable once you get used to it. In fact, for technical material, I now almost prefer TeX to well-transcribed Nemeth code! But your decision on what markup language to use will be strongly influenced by the output you want. If you just want postscript or PDF, then LaTeX is probably a pretty good choice. But I've never seen a LaTeX-HTML converter I was happy with; all the ones I tried produced broken HTML. (Anyone have an update here? I played with latex2html mainly). So if you want good HTML as well as PDF then you might want to look at XML-based solutions. DocBook is a very powerful XML grammar that describes how all kinds of documents should be written; I know there are stylesheets out there now that can use documents written in accordance with certain subsets of DocBook into either HTML or PDF. I'm not sure if there's a totally general stylesheet though. I can give you some starting points in this direction if you want. Given XML's current prominance and SGML's corresponding retreat, you probably don't need to turn that way though. > I type "latex" and I get this mysterious blank > line on my braille display. So, obviously there is a scripting language of > some sort that I need to learn. Right? No. LaTeX is a markup language not a scripting language. > Q. Do I necessarily need to learn postscript and in a nutshell what does > it do for me? It does a lot for your printer but it won't do anything for you but intimidate you. :-) Not too many people outside of printing houses and printer design shops need to know postscript. Look at it as an assembly language for a printer. > Q. I guess what I am asking is this. If I wanted to do lots of research on > the internet and then compose reports and documentation for publication > and do this all in linux, what tools besides LYNX PICO and PINE should I > learn? Well, look at this as your first big research project. :-) Hope that helps, Neil