Subject: Re: footnotes and tables (was Re: 1.0 features)
From: Sam TH (sam@uchicago.edu)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 05:04:53 CDT
On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 10:27:38AM +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>
> being an academic :), I am reluctant to dismiss the academia as a
> marginal user group, and footnotes and equations as not very
> critical features.
Academia is an important market. As a faculty brat, and now a college
student, I've been in academia since I was born. But academia today,
at least in the US, has many of the characteristics of business
software deployment. At the college where my folks teach, the campus
is gradually converting to Word from WordPerfect. You are allowed to
have whatever you want, but IS basically provides support only for
Word. So it may not be as easy as you think.
And yes, for academia, footnotes are a critical feature. Equations
are much less so, since most academics don't need the math, and if
they do, lots of them use LaTeX.
One of my goals with AbiWord has always been to get my parents to use
it. My parents have been WordPerfect users since they used WP 4.2 on
AT&T 6300s with green-screen monitors. And they aren't ever going to
think about using it before it has footnotes. But I still don't think
holding 1.0 for footnotes is a good idea.
AbiWord needs 1.0 lots more than it needs my parents.
sam th --- sam@uchicago.edu --- http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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