[PLUG] Visio on Linux?

[John Jordan]

On 17 Jan 2006, at 16:07, Jason Van Cleve wrote:

> You can run Visio on Linux using XCrossover Office, I think it's
> called. I've done that, and it works pretty well.  Another app' that
> might suit your needs is PageMaker (used for typesetting), but I'm not
> sure that works on Linux at all.  There aren't many (any?) native
> Linux app's that really do this sort of work.

Yes, I already knew that Crossover Office would run Visio. I can 
even get the Pro version of Crossover Office for $56 academic price 
via download, although I'd also have to spring for a copy of Visio 
(ugh). I'd much rather not spend even the $56, plus I am trying to 
be as much a purist as I can. OK, I'm not particularly pure in any of 
the other aspects of my life, so I don't know why I want to be a 
Linux purist, but I do. Maybe because it's my only hope of ever 
being pure at anything. :)

And Crossover Office will also run InDesign 2.0, although not CS or 
CS2. Not sure about PageMaker, but who cares if it will run 
InDesign. Even InDesign 2.0 can run the pants off of any other 
layout app. However, I am pinning my hopes on Scribus in the 
page layout department. 

I spent some time today and finally got Kivio to launch. It did not 
install a launch item in the Gnome Applications menu, so I tried to 
run it from the command line. Kept getting errors and it wouldn't 
launch. After much googling I found a reference that suggested it 
was a permissions thing. Sure enough, "sudo kivio" did the trick. I'll 
figure out later how to fix it.

At least I got it running so I could explore it. And that is where I 
became disappointed. It handles text reasonably well as to the 
characters, but there is no paragraph formatting. Not even tabs. No 
indents either. How can I use a tool like that to write a report?

On the plus side, it has a customizable grid that should make 
object and text placement a piece of cake. However, there is 
another problem. All the "objects" you place on the page are called 
"templates" (yes, a template is a single object, e.g., a square box 
that you might enter text into like "CEO" or something flow-charty). 
Now, Kivio comes with 30-40 sets of templates, grouped according 
to typical usage. For example, one is called "Circuits" and has all 
those cool electrical diagrams (switch, transformer, earth, etc.). 

All that is very nice, but none of the existing ones are even close to 
suitable for me. "No problem," I thought. "I'll just create my own set 
of templates." Hah! Not so fast kiddo! The proggers left out the 
abillity to create your own set of templates. You can't even create a 
template and add it to an existing set.

I find that unbelievably limiting. So unbelievable that before giving 
up on it I'm going to find a Kivio forum somewhere and ask. After 
all, maybe in my haste I missed the button for "create template 
set." But at this point, it looks like I'm stuck with OO.o. Either that 
or abandon Linux for my linguistics work and just do everything on 
my Windows 2000 computer. That would suck.