Ted, an easy rich text processor
Ted is a text
processor running under X Windows on Unix/Linux systems. Ted was developed as a standard easy word
processor, having the role of Wordpad on MS-Windows. Since then, Ted has evolved to a real word processor that still has the same easy
appearance as the original. The possibility to type a letter, a note or a
report on a Unix/Linux machine is clearly missing. Only too often, you have
to turn to MS-Windows machine to write a letter or a document. Ted was made to make it possible to edit
rich text documents on Unix/Linux in a wysiwyg way. RTF files from Ted are fully compatible with MS-Word.
Additionally, Ted also is an
RTF to PostScript and an RTF to Acrobat PDF converter.
Compatibility with popular MS-Windows
applications played an important role in the design of Ted. Every document produced by Ted fully compatible with MS-Word without
any loss of formatting or information. Compatibility in the other direction
is more difficult to achieve. Ted supports many of the formatting features of the Microsoft
applications. Other formatting instructions and meta information are
ignored.1 By ignoring unsupported formatting Ted tries to get the complete text of a document on screen or to the
printer. Ted can be used to
read formatted e-mail sent from a Windows machine to Unix, to print an RTF
document, or to convert it to Acrobat PDF format. Below we explain how to
configure Ted as an RTF viewer
in Netscape and how to convert an RTF document to PDF with Ted and GhostScript.
I hope that you will find Ted useful. Please report the bugs you find, such that I can fix them.
·
Wysiwyg
rich text editing. You can use all fonts for which you have an .afm file
and that are available as an X11 font. Ted is delivered with .afm files for the Adobe fonts that are
available on Motif systems and in all postscript printers: Times, Helvetica,
Courier and Symbol. Other fonts can be added with the
normal X11 procedure. Font properties like bold and italic are supported;
so is underlining and are subscripts and superscripts.
·
Ted uses Microsoft RTF as its native file format. Microsoft Word and Wordpad can read files produced by Ted. Usually Ted can read
.rtf files from Microsoft Word
and Wordpad. As Ted does not support all features of Word, some formatting information might be
lost.
·
In line
bitmap and windows metafile pictures.
·
PostScript
printing of the document and its illustrations. Saved PostScript files
contain pdfmarks that are converted to hyperlinks when they are converted
to Acrobat PDF.
·
Spelling
checking in twelve Latin languages.
·
Directly
mailing documents from Ted.
Mail in HTML format is a multipart message that contains all images
hyperlinks and footnotes.
·
Cut/Copy/Paste,
also with other applications.
·
Find/Replace.
·
Ruler:
Paragraph indentation, Indentation of first line, Tabs. Copy/Paste Ruler.
·
Page breaks.
·
Page
headers and footers. Page numbers in page headers and page footers.
·
Tables:
Insert Table, Row, Column. Changing the column width of tables with their
ruler.
·
Symbols and
accented characters are fully supported.
·
Hyperlinks
and bookmarks.
·
Footnotes
and endnotes.
·
Colored
backgrounds and table borders.
·
Saving a
document in HTML format.
·
Probably
the best illustration of what you can do with Ted is its documentation that has been made with Ted.
This is the documentation for Ted 2.17. Release Notes with a change log
are in a separate document.
Ted is free
software. By making Ted freely
available, I want to contribute to the propagation of Linux as a viable
platform for technical computer enthusiasts. As Ted is free software, I assume no responsibility for the
consequences of using it. It is up to you to decide whether Ted suits your purpose or not. Ted is distributed with absolutely no warranty under the terms of
the
GNU Public License. If you include Ted on a CD-ROM or any other medium, or
publish Ted in any other way,
it would be nice to tell me. Please send me a copy of your publication or a
reference. I like to see what happens to Ted and to show off to my friends. You should not publish Ted or software that is based on Ted without mentioning me as the original
author in all textual documents that accompany your software. If you
publish Ted, or any piece of
software that is based on Ted,
you must include a copy of the original Ted documentation in your distribution. The Ted documentation is part of the source code that you have to make
available to respect the GPL.
Ted is an X11
program. To start it just invoke Ted & or /usr/local/bin/Ted &. To start Ted with a
certain file invoke Ted something.rtf &. Several special purpose calls of Ted are documented below.
The installation of Ted depends on the platform and on the kind
of distribution. Binary distributions for Intel ix86 Linux are available
from the download site ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted. The
distribution comes in the form of compressed tar archives and as Red Hat
package manager (RPM) packages. Binary distributions for other platforms
might be available on CD. For more or more recent information refer to the Ted web site http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted.
To install Ted or one of the localization packages from an RPM package, log in
as root, and give the command rpm -i
<package-details>.rpm . To upgrade from a
previous version of Ted give
the command rpm -U <package-details>.rpm. The executable in the binary package is linked statically, so
there are no dependencies on shared libraries. If you like shared libraries
and their intricacies, you will have to compile Ted yourself.
Installation from compressed tar
archives is best done in combination with the corresponding Linux Software
Map (LSM) files and the installation script
installTed.sh. Download the files to a scratch
directory such as /tmp; log in
as root; run sh installTed.sh
from this directory. If you do not have the possibility to log in as root,
you can run the command sh installTed.sh PRIVATE.After a private install the install script tells you what to
include in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file to make the installation
work.
If you do not like easy installation,
you can unpack the compressed tar archives manually. The software assumes
that you do so in /usr/local. The Adobe font metric files are stored in
/usr/local/afm and spell checking dictionaries in /usr/local/ind. This
online document is installed as /usr/local/Ted/TedDocument-en_US.rtf. The
example application resource file Ted.ad.sample is installed in
/usr/local/Ted. If you decide to install Ted in a different location, you can change these locations by
setting X11 resources, e.g. in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file. Refer
to the section on configuration below. Do not forget to call umask 0 before you unpack.
It is also possible to compile Ted from source. Refer to the compilation
instructions at the end of this document.
Overview of the different packages:
|
Package
|
RPM package: file
|
Tar archive, LSM file
|
|
Basic binary package for Intel Linux. (Includes
American spelling)
|
ted:
|
|
|
Install script for Tar archives and LSM files
|
|
|
|
Dutch spelling and messages
|
ted_nl_NL:
|
|
|
British spelling
|
ted_en_GB:
|
|
|
German spelling and messages.
|
ted_de_DE:
|
|
|
Spanish spelling and messages
|
ted_es_ES:
|
|
|
Argentinian Spanish spelling and messages
|
ted_es_AR:
|
|
|
Portuguese spelling
|
ted_pt_PT:
|
|
|
Brazilian Portuguese messages
|
ted_pt_BR:
|
|
|
French spelling and messages.
|
ted_fr_FR:
|
|
|
Italian spelling and messages
|
ted_it_IT:
|
|
|
Czech spelling and messages
|
ted_cs_CZ:
|
|
|
Danish spelling and messages
|
ted_da_DK:
|
|
|
Swedish spelling
|
ted_sv_SE:
|
|
|
Norwegian spelling and messages
|
ted_no_NO:
|
|
|
Polish spelling and messages
|
ted_pl_PL:
|
|
|
Slovak spelling and messages
|
ted_sk_SK:
|
|
|
Hungarian messages
|
ted_hu_HU:
|
|
|
Malagasy messages and manual
|
ted_mg_MG:
|
|
|
|
ted:
|
|
|
Original Documentation and Release Notes
|
|
|
|
Translated Documentation
|
|
|
Spelling dictionary examples.3
|
|
|
|
rtf to pdf script
rtf to PostScript script
|
|
|
|
Translated resource files for translators and those
that like to install them by hand.
|
|
|
The spelling packages have been renamed since Ted 2.6 to
comply with naming conventions. If rpm complains about conflicts, please
remove the conflicting old package using the command
rpm -e old_package.
For languages that use the Latin 2
character set, Latin 2 fonts are best. The ult1mo package is a useful
collection of Latin 2 fonts. The current version does not give an
ItalicAngle for the bold italic fonts. For the correct operation of Ted, a
negative italic angle should be inserted manually.
To compile and link Ted, get the source code from the download
site
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/editors/ted. Unpack the
archive and follow the instructions below. When you use other Unix versions
than Linux, realize that the construction of a distribution package uses
the gzip compression utility and the chown root:root syntax. Although
statically linked executables of Ted run on any X Windows system, to compile and link, you need a motif
development environment. If you do not have one you can use LessTif, a free
motif implementation. Ted has
been tested with LessTif, and though there are a few peculiarities, the
combination of Ted and LessTif
works quite well. LessTif is available from http://www.lesstif.org. Alternatively you can use the Open Motif distribution by the
open group refer to http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif.
Ted 2.11 can be
compiled with the GTK+ 1.2.8 toolkit or a later version. The GTK version is
not complete and should be seen as step in the right direction. Not as a
finished piece of software. Jouk Jansen made fixes to the Ted source to compile on Compaq OpenVMS.
Additional files, including an explanatory notice by Jouk can be found in
the vms_files.tar archive that is part of the source.
Apart from a motif development environment, you might
need one or more of the public graphics libraries that Ted uses.
·
Libtiff by Sam Leffler. If
you do not have it, download it.
·
Libjpeg by the independent
JPEG group. If you do not have it, download it. Version 6 is required. If the link stage complains about
undefined symbols like jpeg_std_error, you are using version 5.
·
Libpng by the PNG group. If
you do not have it, download it. You will also need zlib by
Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler. If you do not have it, download it.
·
LibXpm by Arnaud Le Hors of
Groupe Bull. If you do not have it,
download it.
I want to express my gratitude to the
authors of all the free software libraries I have used for Ted. Without them, a project like Ted would have been impossible.
Unpacking the source archive results in
a Ted-<version> directory. The compilation procedure has some support
for graphics libraries that are not preinstalled on the system. It assumes
that they are installed in the Ted-<version> directory, that a link
from a generic name to a version dependent one exists, and that the library
has been successfully compiled. Compiling the executable is simply done
with the command make in the
Ted-<version> directory. There is no need to call configure as this is done by make. You can
change some compilation options by editing the top level makefile. Refer to
the comments in the top of the file. When make is successful, there is a Ted executable in the
Ted directory. To make an installation package, call make package. This must be done as root. The installation package
tedPackage/Ted_<platform>.tar.gz is now ready. To install it on your
machine, call make install.
Installation must be done as root. Those that cannot perform the last steps as root can call make private to get a private installation.
The make private call will
suggest the necessary modifications to your .Xdefaults or .Xresources file
to run from a private installation. The ultimate possibility is to copy the Ted executable to a suitable location and to
unpack the relevant files from the tedPackage/TedBindist.tar archive. Refer
to the sections on installation and configuration for details.
On some platforms, in particular Sun
Solaris, no static Motif and X libraries are available. For those
platforms, and for shared library zealots, the alternative make targets
compile.shared, package.shared and install.shared are available.
Mark de Does
January 28 2005
P.S.
Please do not insert my
mail address in web pages that refer to me or to Ted. Plain text email adresses are automatically harvested from the
web to send unsollicited email. You can either refer to the web page or use
an image.
1
Some of the ignored information is not saved either when you modify and
then save an RTF document with Ted.
2
Please read the compilation instructions at the end of this document before
you start compiling Ted. They
are short and easy.
3
Please refer to the explanation at the end of this document.
