[Coco] NitrOS-9 EOU (Ease of Use) Beta 5 released

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 01 May 2020 11:09:29 L. Curtis Boyle wrote:

> RTF gives decent enough WYSIWYG formatting, is cross platform, and
> even works and was standard on machines from the 1990’s on, which is
> why it was chosen.
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
I wasn't trying to belittle the use of rtf, libreoffice loaded and 
printed it beautifully.  But it did surprise me a bit because I hadn't 
actually seen any rtf in 20 years, last saw some of it because at the tv 
station everybody had winderz and word's early versions.  The big hp 
4050 printer in news would occasionally missfire and spit out 30 pages 
of teleprompter in raw format.  When it does that with breaking news 2 
minutes till a live cast, there is not time to fix it and thats led to 
some interesting on-air "stumbles" as the talent tries to read it live.

These days folks are used to pdf's, or for oldtimer projects like this, 
plain text.  But in a day and age of hacking, plain text doesn't 
checksum all that well, whereas a pdf will generally do some serious 
splatter if its edited in transmission by non-adobe errors.

But its also hard to print an A4 document on letter paper or vice versa, 
whereas rtf handles that quite well. And there are without a doubt, 
folks out there useing a coco whose only printer uses A4 paper. Here, 
I'm the oddball as I can go on up to tabloid if I have to but its a pain 
in the butt to feed it one sheet at a time.  So about the only time I do 
it is when doing rockhopper output from one of my linuxcnc machines.  
Rockhopper gives me an .svg image of the hal logic to drive the machine 
with, and by the time the .svg has been expanded to a usable scale, the 
printout is many pages taped together and covering most of a 4x8 sheet 
of plywood.  But its a cats meow for finding a logic error in a 
thousand+ lines of .hal code that looks like and is, plain text with one 
typu in it.
[...]

So please do stay well and carry on.  There are those of use who do 
appreciate it and say

Thank you.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
 - Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>