Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!think.com!sdd.hp.com!cs.utexas.edu!rice!brazos.rice.edu!dboyes From: dboyes@brazos.rice.edu (David Boyes) Newsgroups: comp.mail.multi-media Subject: Re: BBN/Slate users? Message-ID: <1991May8.041420.17615@rice.edu> Date: 8 May 91 04:14:20 GMT References: <37910@ditka.Chicago.COM> <725@rufus.UUCP> Sender: news@rice.edu (News) Organization: Rice University, Houston, Texas Lines: 55 In article rsw@cs.brown.EDU (Bob Weiner) writes: >So why doesn't someone tell us about the system and how good/bad they think it >is, what it can do, who it can help, etc. This group carries very little >information, though I'm sure there are many people who could provide some. >Bob Weiner rsw@cs.brown.edu BBN/Slate provides sound, images, text, spreadsheet and graphics objects for multimedia mail. Good point: 1) Low cost (for educational sites). It's cheap enough to have on several different platforms. I don't know what it costs for commercial users. 2) Good text editor. Rodent support for the interaction-impaired, Emacs bindings for the rest of us, remappable keys. 3) Good fonts. (minor gripe: I wish they'd ship BDF files for their fonts in the X distributions. I occasionally use workstations that Slate doesn't work on, but that have OK X installations. Slate insists on it's custom fonts to work.) 4) The object oriented graphics tool is nice. Has a minimum of restrictions on what can be done, and handles display of color images on B/W or less nifty color screens pretty well. 5) Bitmap editor is included. Combined with the PBM/PPM/Utah RLE tools, you can get pretty nice scanned images into documents. 6) Multi-lingual text support: Hangul, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew properly written (Hebrew is right to left!) Gripes: 1) Custom fonts. It don't work without them. Even for English text. 2) You can't ever completely exit from it w/o killing off the initial window via your window manager. 3) Formatting is very style-sheet oriented. It's possible to override on a local basis, but it's not straightforward. 4) The conferencing features are a little confusing on X terminals. On the whole, it's a nice setup. It works pretty well on X terminals. -- David Boyes |The three most dangerous things in the world: dboyes@rice.edu | 1) a programmer with a soldering iron, | 2) a hardware type with a program patch, and "Delays, delays!" | 3) a user with an idea.