Full Circle Magazine FR

As a teacher and author, I get to produce quite a lot of text over the year. Some of it could be considered creative writing (of sorts), and a large chunk is either teaching material, or in the technical realm. In any case, I do consider myself something of an advanced user on this topic. Writing has long been one of the most direct applications of personal computing, as anybody who has had experience with using a manual typewriter -and correcting his or her typing errors- can relate to. In this article, I would like to review some of the various possibilities for the serious writer on Ubuntu or a similar system, in cases ranging from simple texts to larger documents and more complex technical publications. We will start out by reviewing the online editors, then going on to complete software suites and finally simple text editors.

En tant que professeur et écrivain, j'ai le plaisir de produire pas mal de texte au cours d'une année. Une partie pourrait se nommer de la création littéraire (pour ainsi dire) et une grande partie est, soit, du matériel didactique, soit dans le domaine de la technique. Quoi qu'il en soit, je me considère bel et bien un utilisateur avancé de tout ce que comporte le sujet de cet article.

L'écriture est depuis longtemps l'une des applications les plus directes de l'informatique personnel, ce qui semblera évident à quiconque a expérimenté l'utilisation d'une machine à écrire manuelle - et la correction de ses typos. Dans cet articles, j'aimerais examiner certaines des possibilités diverses, sous Ubuntu ou un système similaire, pour un écrivain sérieux, pour une gamme d'usage allant d'un texte simple à de plus longs documents ou à des publications techniques plus complexe. Nous commencerons par regarder des éditeurs en ligne, puis nous passerons à des suites bureautiques entières et terminerons par de simples éditeurs de texte.

Online office solutions One may appreciate online office packages that are accessed through a browser to a greater or lesser extent, but the fact is that in this 21st century they are here to stay. The main, oft-cited advantages include ease of installation -i.e., no software installation at all-, and having your documents directly accessible from various platforms. This can be a point when the edition of file formats such as Open Document Text format (ODT extension files) is not always as well supported as they should on mobile operating systems. In addition, document sharing with other users is greatly facilitated, and since documents are usually updated continuously over the network, there is not much cause for worry if the lights go out or the computer suddenly decides to die. Most work done up to the last few words should have made it up to the great hard drive in the cloud. However, on the flip side there are also several drawbacks. If security is a concern, then using such online services or not boils down to a decision on whether or not to trust the organization behind them. There are also more technical questions that can arise. Since these products are based on a relatively weighty JavaScript application being interpreted inside your web browser, working with long documents or documents with complex formatting and structures, is not an option. Even shorter documents, up to say 10-12 pages in length, can tax the available memory on many computers. Version control may become an issue, especially when various people collaborate on the same document without thinking of making a point backup copy from time to time.

In my personal experience, the use of such platforms is limited to relatively short documents that will ultimately be shared with others. Since most platforms, such as Apple iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365 offer a similar basic functionality, the specific criteria I use to choose between them is the preference of the intended recipient. For instance, I am typing this article in Google Drive (https://drive.google.com), because this works for our esteemed Editor, Ronnie. When working with users of Apple hardware, iCloud (https://www.icloud.com/) can be used to make shared documents appear directly in their applications both on computers and handheld devices. Both of these services work in full-featured browsers such as Firefox or Chromium, though your results may vary with lighter browsers or systems with little RAM. For business applications, there are solutions such as OnlyOffice that give the possibility to have the documents on a company’s own server. Retaining physical ownership of the documents could be seen as preferable to online services hosted by others. For more hardcore keyboard bashing, I will avoid online solutions altogether, preferring to have a local copy of my files that I can edit on my computer, and then perhaps make a copy of in some cloud-based storage.

Office suites LibreOffice, and before it, OpenOffice or even Star Office, have long been the go-to office suites for users of GNU/Linux. There are some points in favour of these applications. One is the ease of conversion to other formats, such as Microsoft’s DOC and DOCX. In general, one must admit that text documents are rather well converted to and fro, with perhaps a bit of a caveat regarding DOCX. However, users of Microsoft Office seem to be happy when receiving files in the DOC format, so all is well there. Another is the relative lightweight nature of OpenOffice, when considering it in its due perspective as a full-featured office suite. For many applications, and even editing long 100+ page documents, one can get by with only 2 GBytes of RAM and a rather wimpy CPU, which would be close to impossible if using an online writing solution. Naturally, having more RAM and processor power under the hood always helps, especially when using plugins. Regarding plugins, one of my favourites is the Languagetool grammar checker (https://www.languagetool.org/). Available both as an online service and as a plugin for several Office suites, it comes in the form of an OXT (OpenOffice software extension) file that can simply be opened to install the plugin into either Open- or LibreOffice. It does need to have a Java runtime available though, and can slow down document editing slightly on older computers. Spelling errors are marked as usual, with a wavy underline in red, while grammatical errors such as agreement or word order are underlined in blue.

At the time of writing, the default version of LibreOffice in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Linux Mint 18.2 is 5.1.6, which works well but only has the default toolbar layout. More recent versions of LibreOffice, such as version 5.4.0, are currently available from the project’s website (https://www.libreoffice.org), and have an option to choose a “ribbon toolbar” that may be more familiar to users of Microsoft’s current offerings. To install the most recent version, one begins with a 267 MByte download in the compressed .TAR.GZ format. Once downloaded, it can be installed alongside any existing versions of LibreOffice, acting as administrator: sudo bash tar xzf LibreOffice_5.4.0_Linux_x86-64_deb.tar.gz dpkg -i LibreOffice_5.4.0.3_Linux_x86-64_deb/DEBS/* rm -r LibreOffice_5.4.0.3_Linux_x86-64_deb Naturally, these commands would be for version 5.4.0.3, and would need to be tailored to suit the version actually downloaded. Once installed, new icons for the suite’s different applications appear in the system menus marked as version “5.4”, alongside the existing ones with no marking.

Once installed, to activate the “Notebook toolbar”, one navigates to Tools > LibreOffice > Advanced, and enables “Enable experimental features”. LibreOffice then needs to be restarted, upon which there are several options available under View > Notebookbar. “Contextual groups” and “Tabbed” are the options that seem to work best, with the first being the most similar to Microsoft’s offering. However, one should bear in mind that this is exactly what is said on the label: an experimental feature. Some options, such as regaining visibility of the menu bar, can become quite challenging if one is not accustomed to entering the advanced configuration and editing LibreOffice configuration strings directly. For a more polished office suite, that is uncannily similar to Microsoft’s own and handles document formats very well indeed, the Kingsoft WPS Office can be downloaded from http://wps-community.org/download.html . However, there have been some concerns about the project’s continuity arising from conflicting messages seen on the Web, the fact that licensing is not open-source, and the lack of support for the open ODT format. So it may not be for everyone.

The predominance of LibreOffice and OpenOffice in the GNU/Linux distributions’ default application sets can make one lose track of other, less known, options. One text editor that is often unjustly overlooked is that of the Calligra office suite, linked to the Qt libraries and that used to be distributed by default in Kubuntu. It can be installed as a complete suite, or individually as separate applications. Installing just the text editor can be done via: sudo apt install calligrawords The interface is very simple, with your text to the left and the toolbars to the right. All the most used options are immediately available, and many small modifications can be performed just by using the mouse wheel. Files can be written in the ODT format, and shared with users of LibreOffice. The general feel of this application is that it is much more reasonable in terms of memory and processor usage than a complete office suite. The latter would need to load a large library of shared objects each time the suite is launched, while a smaller, more focused application such as Calligra Words can dispense with some of this overhead. On the flip side of the coin, Calligra’s offering does seem to have some trouble with text antialiasing, and some fonts may appear less well drawn on screen with Words than with another office. This may be less of an issue for users of KDE’s Plasma desktop, once font antialiasing is turned on inside the desktop manager.

Writing without a complete suite In some cases, it may make sense to write text on an Ubuntu computer without using a complete office suite. Specifically, computers that will be used mainly for writing, and writing text without any special needs in regards to formatting, are good candidates for implementing simpler solutions. In the first place, one could ask if a complete word processing application is really necessary. Depending on the work to be done, a simple text editor such as gedit, xed or kate (the default text editors that come with Ubuntu Gnome, Linux Mint and Kubuntu) could very well be sufficient to bang out even a rather long text, saving it as a pure text file with extension TXT which can then be read by just about any possible destinee. Modern text editors have spell checking if the hunspell or myspell language packages are installed. They also use up very few resources, both in terms of processor power and memory, and text files are positively minute compared to rich files such as ODT or DOCX.

This would, in fact, be the solution I would recommend to someone who is trying to focus on creating a long text: just open up a text editor with no frills and possible distractions, put the computer into airplane mode, and start writing. A similar approach is advanced by several “distraction-free” text editors that have some options for text format such as bold text and the likes, but also go full-screen filling in the unused areas with a neutral color. The end result is that we see just text, and can therefore concentrate more easily on what we are doing. One of these is focuswriter, which has all the basic options, can save files in the ODT format, and is easily installed from the repositories: sudo apt install focuswriter Moving the mouse pointer up into the top border of the screen has a standard menu system drop-down, that can be used to save files, exit the application, or apply text formatting.

Without going to the length of installing a specific application, many of the Ubuntu derivative distributions with an aim to lightweight computing -such as Lubuntu- come with the abiword text editor and lightweight word processor. Here, we also have basic text formatting and the possibility to save in ODT file format in a rather lightweight application, that integrates nicely into a Gnome or Cinnamon desktop. Spelling correction is also available, with the same packages as a simple text editor. However, it should be noted that abiword works well basically with pure text. I have seen problems arise in the past from advanced text positioning or the inclusion of graphical elements, so if interested in such an application, a few simple tests to make sure it has precisely what you need would probably be a good idea. Even if abiword is not installed by default on your system, it is quick to install either using a graphical software manager, or through the command-line: sudo apt install abiword In an entirely different order of ideas, simple text editors can also come in handy when formatting very complex documents containing mathematical equations or other scientific visual elements. In such cases, the goto way of doing things is by using the LaTeX text formatting language, available in Ubuntu with the texlive series of software packages. This would allow one to input $ CH_4 + 2 \cdot O_2 \rightarrow CO_2 + 2 \cdot H_2 O $ in order to obtain CH4 + 2 · O2 → CO2 + 2 · H2O This can be quite a time-saver, especially with more complex equations.

Referencing bibliography and making footnotes is also greatly facilitated. Graphical LaTeX editors are also easily available to assist the newcomer who is still struggling a tad with the syntax, such as texstudio or kile. However, I will not insist on this point since readers who really have this specific need will probably already be equipped with what they require. As a final note, the reader may have noticed the examples presented in this article have been mostly in English. Most of these writing environments have worked well for me in other languages and writing systems, especially OpenOffice and LibreOffice, which seem to make a point of catering to the needs of the languages of Asia and right-left writing systems, among others. Once the appropriate text input manager -ibus, or the more recent fcitx- is set up correctly, any locally-installed editor should handle languages. Things may be a little more complicated in online web-based editors. I have run into problems with such in the past, even with technically less complex niggles such as being unable to input accentuated characters. Quitting and restarting the web browser has often been a solution in such cases. A second point in favour of locally installed applications is when editing complex documents that contain more than one writing system. In such cases, online editors tend to show their limits since quickly switching between languages is not as well supported as inside the operating system and desktop manager.

With this short, and very possibly incomplete, review of the options for text editing and general writing with Ubuntu and its derivatives, we can see that there is quite a mature ecosystem of applications in place that can be used for the purpose of writing. Creative writing and even the basic needs of technical writing are actually well catered for. Nowadays, more specific needs such as dictionaries and thesaurus can probably be better served through online sources than through specialized software. Thus, all that we really need is a web browser in addition to the basic writing software. Several users I know have been convinced to switch to GNU/Linux by the fact that a default installation of Ubuntu or Linux Mint contains basically all they need to become immediately productive in a writing environment: a browser such as Firefox, an email client such as Thunderbird, and an office suite such as LibreOffice is really all such a “normal” user could need. Perhaps the main argument that has convinced them to switch to GNU/Linux in general, and a derivative of Ubuntu in particular, is the ease of use. Most writers tend to want to focus on their own work, naturally enough. They have little time for what, for them, is a bit of a nuisance: needing to procure a (rather expensive) office suite in addition to their main operating system, installing an antivirus software or needing to become aware of multiple alarms and what are in essence commercial advertisements built into an operating system all become something of a hassle they really do not wish to have to handle. The strength of the Ubuntu ecosystem is to help them simplify their lives, which is always nice.