SGI: Development

Coming soon to an ftp server near you ...

It's a little odd because Mr Ted doesn't organize it in the common manner so I tried to neko-ize everything. Hope it is all still there and hope it works for everyone. Should be especially good on a slower machine. You may have to install some beta subsystems, I've got most everything at the newest level here.

The how-to is actually installed and accessed from the Help label on the menu. Has pretty good instructions.

Thanks to Jimmer, Duck, Shade, jps et al who made it possible. If I missed anyone I apologize.

If it makes your cat sick, I'll be right over. Promise.

I can't install it, because I'm missing neko_bzip2.sw.lib 6. The last version I can find is the version 5 (that's bzip2 1.0.6) that I built about 1 year ago..

This is quite strange ...

Pretty sure this is not mine, I'm lazy and if I upgrade software I just do a gmake install (which is a bad habit, I know.)

The one that is in nekoware /current is ver 5 and descirbes itself as the "Wheeler-Burroughs data compressor" or something like that. Not "open-surce data compressor." And there's nothing in /beta like this ...

Weird. Phony nekoware ? Are tardists doing the dirty in my file system ?

Meanwhile, is the easiest thing to do a backtrack on the version requirement ? It's the same bzip version so should not be a problem ?

Thanks for looking, Mr Canavan Sir.

I think the various bzip2 versions 1.0x should all be compatible, so reducing the required version should not hurt.

I built a new one that only requires ver 5 of bzip2. Very strange, I wonder where the mystery tardist came from ?

Anyway, should hatch into /beta in a few days.

thanks again for giving it a try.

If anyone does try this program, here's something strange I came across, could use a little confirmation on :

This is the gtk version, I built that to eliminate the possibility that it's a Motif problem. However, the gtk ver behaves exactly like the Motif version.

Helvetica does not seem to space correctly. If you type a line across the page, it line-breaks far too early. Yet the margin itself is fine : right-align and the text goes all the way to the right where it belongs (except that it still does not fill up the line.)

Other fonts don't seem to do this. I haven't tried every font on the system tho ... The author suggests that it's a fontconfig problem. I thought it was perhaps Type 1 vs Truetype but both Helvetica and Formata are Type 1's yet they display different behavior ....

Anyway, confirmation of the problem would be a good start to fixing it (maybe).

Hmm...is it a problem with mixed-up font metrics? It's almost as if it is calculating width using the metrics for Helvetica, but displaying Helevetica Narrow instead. What happens if you print the page? (Preferably on a PostScript printer, which would mean it would have Helvetica as a built-in font.) Does it come out right on paper, suggesting it's a problem with the screen fonts only?

What happens if you do a paragraph in Helvetica and another in Helvetica Narrow? Is the second paragraph the same or narrower still?

Helvetica seems to work for me in any size in left, right or justified text.

If you want ted to be more SGIified, you'll have to add Mnemonics to the Menu and reduce the height of the menu bar.

The properties dialog doesn't close when pressing Alt+F4 or using the system menu, even the cancel button ceases to work. The cancel button starts to work again, if one re-opens the (already open) dialog via the file menu

Redrawing is inefficient, ted doesn't combine multiple redraw requests, instead it redraws hundreds of little slices if one moves another window across ted.

Any Idea how I can set the default page format to A4?

How do I zoom the page display?

It sometimes spills a few warnings / messages:



Aisde from those small problems (most of which aren's the package's fault), neko_ted seems to work fine for me.

I wonder if this is a difference between Helvetica and Heavenetica ?


Ted isn't exactly what I would like if'n I had my druthers ... so, not sure how much more effort I will put in. But at least if someone else gets inspired, the Neko Crew has done a lot of the heavy lifting.


The Help entry on the menubar actually opens a pretty decent tutorial. It's more thorough than you might expect.

Also, in /usr/nekoware/Ted/etc there is a config directory with a sample of .Ted.properties which is the configuration file. Not exactly standard ... but it has a lot of settings which you can configure. Also, many of them can be called from the command line when you start it.

The sample configuration file only mentions 100% and 120% but any percentage works. Or 200 and 300% work, at least. I did not try anything bigger. Unfortunately, I don't think you can zoom in or change the window size while it's in operation.

My main complaint would be, it does a good job of making rtf's, Word can read any Ted file fine and Ted reads any sample rtf's I have found online. But some of the files that Word 2000 saves as rtf's do not open correctly at all. I don't know if that is because our version of Word is Chinese or if that is a common problem.


I have not seen those particular warnings but yeah, it's not perfect. If I knew how to write programs I would want to make some changes. Any of you talented people are welcome to step in here

I have talked with the Ted author and he's pretty amenable to working on it, if you have concrete suggestions. My comments were not as helpful as they should have been but he still jumped in there and found the problems.

But as it is, at least the program works and it's a useful word processor for people who don't have one in Irix. In fact, I think it runs better than Wordperfect and it's a lot lighter to use than Framemaker, so I'll probably continue to use it for small stuff. And the html capabilities are not bad at all for simple web pages. If you need to give documents to Windows-users, Ted's rft seems more cross-platform accurate than Open Office output. And it does direct to pdf pretty well. I've been using it a little, it's not so bad.

Thank you for giving it a run-through.

At least the font thing is not just me ...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=226973

A little update ... been doing some shared dtp-ing with Weird 2000, Ted is not God's Answer to apple pie but it works okay. Both systems can read modify and save, with the exception of one or two files it's been pretty painless. No need to be askairt, dive right in and give her a try, feedback is welcome even if it's negative.