7 Best Alternatives To Microsoft Office Suite — 2019 Edition

On 2019-12-10 11:32 p.m., Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 9:02 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-12-10 9:01 p.m., Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë.Â* Born in the USA.
:-)
|

Â*Â*Â* I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name. What do you
do? Use Charmap.exe? On XP that doesn't even include UTF-8.
I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

Â*Â*Â* But I also don't know anyone named Risë. My disregard
for foreign languages is only a theoretical slight in the minds
of the non-English speakers here. Fortunately, no one Chinese
or Japanese is filing a complaint with the PC police. Then
we'd all be in big trouble.



Does the Emoji map in windows 10 work in text only newsgroups?
That's the Windows key plus the dot key, I will try it.

🚑{}®℃℉â�‚$$à¸¿à¸¿â‚¤â‚¤à¯¹à¯¹â‚¬â‚¬Ê¤ÄŠÄ–Ä —ĚĚ↪↩⇈◉◒◶⨌⨶⪜⪙⪆🙂🙂🙂 .

Ok I typed in a random bunch, there are hundreds, Lets see what happens
when I send Them.

OK, how did you actually "type" these?Â* The only way I can seem to find
to get them into a document is to use the mouse and click on the one I
want.



Sorry, bad wording, Yes click on the one you want and it goes to the
insertion point in your document.

Rene

On 12/11/19 6:58 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| | I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë. Born in the USA.
:-)
| |
|
| I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
| I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name.
|
| In this case, I looked up umlaut in Wikipedia. The article included a
| bunch of letters with umlauts. So, I did what you did. Copy and paste.
| LOL
|

I hope she's worth it.

I haven't seen her for years. She was a friend of some roommates.


--
Ken
MacOS 10.14.6
Firefox 70.0.1
Thunderbird 60.9
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 10/12/2019 19.49, Ken Blake wrote:
On 12/10/2019 11:33 AM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 10 Dec 2019 09:45:03 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

I'm glad we agree, but the reason I was confused is that you first
said "But you can not write the euro symbol in here, it doesn't work"
and thenÂ* said "Here meant 'usenet.'" Put those two sentences
together and you said "you can not write the euro symbol in usenet,"
and that is *not* correct. You can, I can, we all can, as I
demonstrated.

That last sentence had me saying, internally, "We all scream for ice
cream!"


It was meant as a subtle reference to that. I guess I wasn't that
subtle. g

And it was lost on me, I do not have the same background :-)

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 10/12/2019 17.45, Ken Blake wrote:
On 12/10/2019 5:03 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/12/2019 23.33, Ken Blake wrote:
On 12/9/2019 3:04 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/12/2019 22.12, Ken Blake wrote:
On 12/9/2019 1:53 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:
On 09/12/2019 20.43, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote

| | Thar "basic English codepage" does not include the ? (euro)
symbol, for
| | instance.
| |
|
| Chr 128.
|
| You can see that it got back as a question mark. Problem proved
:-p
|

Â*Â* Works for me. I don't know what all this talk is about IBM.
I think I have code page 1252.

But you can not write the euro symbol in here, it doesn't work.


I'm not sure what you mean by "in here," but I can write it here in
this
message: €


Whether or not you can see it is another matter.

I can see yours perfectly "here" :-D

Here meant "usenet".


Sorry, I'm confused. What do you mean? I typed it in usenet and we can
both see it in usenet.

Of course I can see what you type correctly. But we can not see what
/he/ types correctly, because he insists on using an 8 bit codepage,
because it is good enough for English.

If you look above to the quotes, do you see "the ? (euro)" string? The
'?' was an € symbol I typed, his system changed it to '?'.



That has to do with what newsreader he uses and how it's set, not with
its being usenet.

Of course.


I'm glad we agree, but the reason I was confused is that you first said
"But you can not write the euro symbol in here, it doesn't work" and
thenÂ* said "Here meant 'usenet.'" Put those two sentences together and
you said "you can not write the euro symbol in usenet," and that is
*not* correct. You can, I can, we all can, as I demonstrated.

Except /he/" :-)
When he does, I see "?".


My first language is not English; my English is good, but sometimes it
plays tricks and confussion arrives.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 12/11/19 7:32 AM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-12-10 11:32 p.m., Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 9:02 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-12-10 9:01 p.m., Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë.Â* Born in the USA.
:-)
|

Â*Â*Â* I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name. What do you
do? Use Charmap.exe? On XP that doesn't even include UTF-8.
I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

Â*Â*Â* But I also don't know anyone named Risë. My disregard
for foreign languages is only a theoretical slight in the minds
of the non-English speakers here. Fortunately, no one Chinese
or Japanese is filing a complaint with the PC police. Then
we'd all be in big trouble.



Does the Emoji map in windows 10 work in text only newsgroups?
That's the Windows key plus the dot key, I will try it.

🚑{}®℃℉â�‚$$à¸¿à¸¿â‚¤â‚¤à¯¹à¯¹â‚¬â‚¬Ê¤ÄŠÄ–Ä —ĚĚ↪↩⇈◉◒◶⨌⨶⪜⪙⪆🙂🙂🙂 .

Ok I typed in a random bunch, there are hundreds, Lets see what happens
when I send Them.

OK, how did you actually "type" these?Â* The only way I can seem to find
to get them into a document is to use the mouse and click on the one I
want.



Sorry, bad wording, Yes click on the one you want and it goes to the
insertion point in your document.

Thanks. If you're just after typing the correct or desired character,
definitely more cumbersome in Windows than a Mac, IMO.


--
Ken
MacOS 10.14.6
Firefox 70.0.1
Thunderbird 60.9
"My brain is like lightning, a quick flash
and it's gone!"

On 10/12/2019 16.30, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 7:13 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Carlos E.R." wrote

| On the contrary. You refusing to use unicode
| is what is causing the problem.
|

Â*Â* Problem? I've never seen you get worked up
like this. You're usually so cool-headed.

Huh, I'm not worked out yet, sorry if I gave that impression :-)

But the fact is that many programmers and designers in the English world
are ignorant of internationalization (i18n), so that they design their
applications in manners that make later internationalization of that
software very difficult.

Having English users use utf8 or some other unicode from the start,
conducts to better results for all in the long run.

Â*Â* If I ever get appointed to an EU ambassadorship
then I'll certainly use UTF-8 as needed. I try to be
considerate and respectful with people I deal with.
But on my own machine? No.

Â*Â*Â*Â* It's not just a refusal to use UTF-8.
It's an avoidance of anything other than ASCII,
because none of that is necessary and only complicates
matters. There's no need to use long dashes

With all due respect, Mayayana, the long dash comment is incorrect.

In another message where you expressed a similar opinion, nospam replied
it was for correct typography.Â* And I agreed.Â* Technologically that may
be correct, but it doesn't explain the "why".

The reason for the 3 lengths of dashes in the English language is to
ensure *accurate* written communication.Â* Which, in turn, helps prevent
misunderstandings.

Here's some links you can read if you wish.

http://site.uit.no/english/punctuation/hyphen/
https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org...s/faq0002.html

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/dash/
https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tp...hyphens_dashes

I'll read those later, time permitting :-)

Yes, typewriters and computers reduced the variety of symbols we could
use. There are several lengths of the hyphen (I found that out when
using WordPerfect). In my keyboard I can produce the normal one '-' and
the long one '—', but the other one I don't know how. Are they "n-dash"
and "m-dash"?

In Spanish we have the tilde, supported by computers and typewriters,
but the tilde on uppercase was long forgotten even he �É�ÓÚ. We have
open exclamation and question marks (¿¡!?). But we have also other quote
«symbols» not seen in English. But English typography has “curled�
quotes, which often create havoc in email.

All that enriches the written language, and limiting oneself to ascii
does the reverse.


These are skills we no longer teach in school.Â* :-(

I learned about some of those late, maybe around 1990.


There are a lot of writing skills we no longer teach, and it's to our
detriment.Â* Over the years, I've read this has happened because the
early typewriters could not do things like things like this.Â* That's
true.Â* And early computers, when it came to these skills, are little
more than fancy typewriters.

But, with modern computers, there's no real excuse for it.Â* None,
whatsoever, other than a willingness to improve your work and do things
correctly. :-)

In fact, we fail to teach a lot of facts we probably should.Â* I think
most of us have seen this test:

https://newrepublic.com/article/7947...s-it-could-you


or
curly quotes in English.

I didn't dig into curly quotes, but I suspect I'd find similar information.

Â*Â*Â* I understand that you don't have that luxury
because you need tildes.

I know there are other situations besides tildes that Carlos has to deal
with for written Spanish.Â* Such as upside down question marks and upside
down exclamation marks.Â* :-)

But that's no excuse that
I should have to convert my files to UTF-8. That's like
the woman who complains that men should have to
put down the toilet seat after use, when she herself
never even closes the toilet cover.

How about common courtesy for the opposite sex?

I never thought much about men standing up to pee in the pot.Â* Until I
saw a video of how urine actually gets spread outside the pot due to
splashing in the water.Â* Then, I started noticing the mess on the floor
around urinals in public bathrooms.Â* And you end up carrying that out
the door when you walk. What are the health risks?

I didn't believe in
the idea of "penis envy" until I saw women obsessed
with that issue. So maybe there's also "ASCII-envy"?






--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 12/10/2019 9:02 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-12-10 9:01 p.m., Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë. Born in the USA. :-)
|

I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name. What do you
do? Use Charmap.exe? On XP that doesn't even include UTF-8.
I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

But I also don't know anyone named Risë. My disregard
for foreign languages is only a theoretical slight in the minds
of the non-English speakers here. Fortunately, no one Chinese
or Japanese is filing a complaint with the PC police. Then
we'd all be in big trouble.



Does the Emoji map in windows 10 work in text only newsgroups?
That's the Windows key plus the dot key, I will try it.

🚑{}®℃℉â�‚$$à¸¿à¸¿â‚¤â‚¤à¯¹à¯¹â‚¬â‚¬Ê¤ÄŠÄ–Ä —ĚĚ↪↩⇈◉◒◶⨌⨶⪜⪙⪆🙂🙂🙂 .

Ok I typed in a random bunch, there are hundreds, Lets see what happens
when I send Them.


What happens--whether the reader of your message can see them
properly--depends on what newsreader he uses. I use Thunderbird and they
look fine here.




--
Ken

On 12/10/2019 10:32 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 9:02 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2019-12-10 9:01 p.m., Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë. Born in the USA. :-)
|

I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name. What do you
do? Use Charmap.exe? On XP that doesn't even include UTF-8.
I've wondered how people use curly quotes and long dashes.
I don't know of any easy way to do it.

But I also don't know anyone named Risë. My disregard
for foreign languages is only a theoretical slight in the minds
of the non-English speakers here. Fortunately, no one Chinese
or Japanese is filing a complaint with the PC police. Then
we'd all be in big trouble.



Does the Emoji map in windows 10 work in text only newsgroups?
That's the Windows key plus the dot key, I will try it.

🚑{}®℃℉â�‚$$à¸¿à¸¿â‚¤â‚¤à¯¹à¯¹â‚¬â‚¬Ê¤ÄŠÄ–Ä —ĚĚ↪↩⇈◉◒◶⨌⨶⪜⪙⪆🙂🙂🙂 .

Ok I typed in a random bunch, there are hundreds, Lets see what happens
when I send Them.

OK, how did you actually "type" these? The only way I can seem to find
to get them into a document is to use the mouse and click on the one I want.


Some can be typed directly. For example many emojis can be typed by
typing thing like ; - ) (I put spaces between the characters so it
wouldn't turn into an emoji)

For most other special characters, I use the freeware program
Wincompose. So here are a few I typed using that: ü € ç




--
Ken

On 12/10/2019 10:24 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 12/10/19 8:01 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Springer" wrote

| I used to know a girl whose first name was Risë. Born in the USA. :-)
|

I don't even know how to enter that. If Risë wrote to me
I'd do what I just did: Copy and paste her name.

In this case, I looked up umlaut in Wikipedia. The article included a
bunch of letters with umlauts. So, I did what you did. Copy and paste.
LOL

What do you
do? Use Charmap.exe? On XP that doesn't even include UTF-8.

Since I'm using a Mac... ROFL

On the serious side, they say the Mac is much easier over all to do
that. I honestly don't know know. But for an é, it's extremely easy.
If I need to type résumé on the Mac and I come to the é, I first hold
down the Option key and press the "e" key at the same time. Release the
keys, press the "e" key, done. In Windows, the only way I know to type
é is to hold the Alt key and press numbers on the keypad, or use the
character chart.


é

Try Wincompose, which I just mentioned in another post on this thread.
It's very easy to use.

--
Ken

On 11/12/2019 12.29, nospam wrote:
In article , Ken Springer
wrote:



do not not have the QWERTY layout, even thought they were made after
1873. Obviously, there was no agreed upon layout.

Given that even now, with the optional keyboard layouts like DVORAK,
there is no "standard", just the most common.

you obviously don't understand what standard means.

qwerty is the standard in usa and has been for the past 125 years (your
link) with zero indication it's going to change.

keyboards outside the usa typically use the standard for whatever
country it is, but that does not affect the qwerty standard in the usa.
for example, france is azerty:
https://www.terena.org/activities/mu...bd-all.html#Fr
ench

France is peculiar :-)

Other countries, like Spain, follows qwerty with some variations to add
the local characters.

I remember, when I first saw a typewriter, that I noticed the strange
ordering of the keys — Why not alphabetical order? My father told me
that the ordering was chosen to have the most used keys on the strongest
fingers. But that failed, because I could not match the most used
letters in Spanish to the keyboard. I was baffled.


there have been some variants for specific purposes, such as the ones
in the link below, but they are extremely rare and do not in any way
invalidate the qwerty standard.
https://simplyian.com/2010/02/10/top-10-most-unique-keyboards/

dvorak is yet another standard, which very rarely seen and a complete
scam. the tests that showed it's faster were created and run by dvorak
himself. can you say 'conflict of interest'?

not surprisingly, objective controlled tests found little difference
between qwerty and dvorak, and in some cases, qwerty was *faster*.
imagine that.

Interesting!

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 12/11/2019 8:11 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

Yes, typewriters and computers reduced the variety of symbols we could
use. There are several lengths of the hyphen (I found that out when
using WordPerfect). In my keyboard I can produce the normal one '-' and
the long one '—', but the other one I don't know how. Are they "n-dash"
and "m-dash"?



Actually, no. There is only one length of the hyphen. The other
characters you mention are not hyphens; they are dashes. The n-dash is
longer than the hyphen, and the m-dash is longer than the n-dash.

M-dashes are one of the ways that are used to separate parenthetical
expressions from the text they are embedded in. The other two ways are
commas, and parentheses.

For those who want an m-dash and can't easily produce it on their
keyboard, it's customary to use two hyphens.



--
Ken

Mayayana wrote:

"Frank Slootweg" wrote

| You refer to your 'machine' and your 'files', but what about your
| *communication*?
|
It's mostly about my files. The people I email or
write letters to are almost exclusively English speaking.
The issue just doesn't come up very often. Paul was
talking about words like jalapeno. I spell it without the
tilde. People know. If, for some reason, I really needed
to enter a tilde I can. It's an ANSI file, after all. But
I don't think I've ever been in a situation where it seemed
worth the trouble to get out a program that can enter
a special character for me.

First of all, thanks for your response!

I can fully understand that you hardly ever to never need to use a
special character.

About "a program that can enter a special character for me": If you
ever need one, you could indeed use the 'Character Map' program, which
you mentioned in another response. You mentioned that the XP version
does not do UTF, but you can also use a character set which matches or
closely matches a ISO-8859/X character set, i.e. 'DOS: ...' (for example
'DOS: Western Europe') or 'Windows: ... (for example 'Windows: Western')
in the 'Character Map' program.

| And what about people's names, places, etc., etc. whose spelling
| contains local language characters? Do you refuse to spell those names
| correctly, just because you're "on my own machine"?

I don't know what names you're talking about. I don't
know anyone who has an accent or umlaut in their name.
You're making up problems that don't exist.

You do not have to know them. You might just want to refer to them,
talk about them, etc.. For example the author of my newsreader has a
German 'Sharp S' in his name (and no 'ss' is not an acceptable
substitute).

And with 'places', I meant towns, etc.. You never travel to, talk
about, whatever, such places?

The problem with switching to UTF-8 is that while it's
a better solution than unicode-16, it's still a problem.
It's not easy to sniff a file to tell UTF-8 from ANSI, yet
headers or BOMs are discouraged. So if I open a UTF-8
webpage in Notepad I see corrupted characters. If I
add a BOM for Notepad I have a corrupted ANSI file
in other programs. And since I'm not using unicode fonts,
I can't see the characters, anyway, except in a browser.

Yes, it's not an easy problem. That's why - if I need a non-ASCII
character - I try to stick with ISO 8859-1 ('Latin-1 Western European')
[1], which is identical to the first 256 characters in UTF-8.

[1] *Not* Windows-1252, which is not a dejure standard but a Microsoft
thing.

On 11/12/2019 01:34, Char Jackson wrote:
On Wed, 11 Dec 2019 00:11:02 +0000, David wrote:

On 10/12/2019 22:54, Paul wrote:
David wrote:

Why are you using such an out-of-date version of Thunderbird?

Paul rightfully ignores the obvious stalk/troll

So, why ARE you using such an out-of-date version of Thunderbird?

Does it bother you when people ignore your feeble stalking attempts?

Are you going to ask a third time? Would that tip your hand?

Paul is usually logical.

There is, to my mind, no logical reason for him failing to answer a
straight-forward question. I will NOT ask him again. It is his
prerogative not to answer questions.

He seems to think that Thunderbird 68.3.0 provides a 'bumpy ride'.
I do not find it so. shrug

On 10/12/2019 00:19, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David wrote:

[the same old lying innuendo-infested drivel]

Give it up. You've worn it to death.

Let's talk about THIS then:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

You use it on your website.

Why does Webby Enterprises use it too?

https://www.webbytech.net

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/2...402dca/details

On 11/12/2019 16:58, David wrote:
On 10/12/2019 00:19, Beauregard T. Shagnasty wrote:
David wrote:

[the same old lying innuendo-infested drivel]

Give it up. You've worn it to death.

Let's talk about THIS then:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

You use it on your website.

Why does Webby Enterprises use it too?

https://www.webbytech.net

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/2...402dca/details


Oops! I forgot to add the image!

I apologise for that.

https://i.imgur.com/bJLEuwP.png