10. How to generate something worth printing.

Here we get into a real rat's-nest of software. Basically, Linux can run four types of binaries with varying degrees of success: Linux, iBCS, Win16 (with dosemu and, someday, with Wine), and Mac/68k (with Executor). I'll just discuss native Linux and common Unix software, except to say that WordPerfect for SCO, and quite probably other commercial word processing software, runs fine under Linux's iBCS emulation.

For Linux itself, choices are mostly limited to those available for Unix in general:

10.1 Markup languages

Most markup languages are more suitable for large or repetative projects, where you want the computer to control the layout of the text to make things uniform. Trying to make a pretty sign in a markup language would probably hurt...

nroff

This was one of the first Unix markup languages. Man pages are the most common examples of things formatted in *roff macros; many people swear by them, but nroff has, to me at least, a more arcane syntax than needed, and probably makes a poor choice for new works. It is worth knowing, though, that you can typeset a man page directly into postscript with groff. Most man commands will do this for you with man -t foo | lpr.

TeX

TeX, and the macro package LaTeX, are one of the most widely used markup languages on Unix. Technical works are frequently written in LaTeX because it greatly simplifies the layout issues and is still one of the few text processing systems to support mathematics both completely and well. TeX's output format is dvi, and is converted to PostScript or Hewlett Packard's PCL with dvips or dvilj.

SGML

There is at least one free sgml parser available for Unix and Linux; it forms the basis of Linuxdoc-SGML's homegrown document system. It can support other DTD'S, as well.

10.2 WYSIWYG

There is a general shortage of WYSIWYG document text processing software. Feel free to write some, and do let me know of anything I've omitted here.

Lyrix

Lyrix is a front-end to LaTeX which looks very promising.

The Andrew User Interface System

AUIS includes ez, a WYSIWYG-style editor with most basic word processor features, HTML capabilities, and full MIME email and newsgroup support.