[Scribus] Re: Difference between DTP and word processor

Haines Brown brownh
Fri Dec 17 11:49:24 CET 2004


In this thread I've not seen a distinction that used to be made, which
is that a desktop publishing program is frame based, while a word
processor is character based. I wonder if that distinction still holds
any water.

Some time ago, the world's greatest word processor ((;-)) was named
Describe (actually, a number of people said that about the old OS/2
application, which disappeared when its author quit the field in
disgust), and the reason for its virtue was that it derived from an
Australian frame-based desktop publishing program.

Not having troubled to follow these things closely (I do without a
word processor these days, relying instead on emacs and LaTeX), I
naturally wonder the extent to which word processors have become more
frame based, and if so, the extent to which word processors and
desktop publishers might be converging toward one paradigm. The
distinctions made in this thread do not seem to imply whether such a
convergence is possible or not.

Haines Brown




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