DPReviews is not a site I would give any amount of trust to. The following is a sad tale of why. Periodically I get an update/message about Libre Office bug #37134. This is the long requested, two ancestors had it before, tabbed document interface request. I’ve written about Lotus WordPro and the Lotus SmartSuite many times before. I’ve written about Libre Office too. Being both a software developer and an author gives me a somewhat unique perspective on these things.
It never fails, every time I get an email about that or the other tabbed document bug in Libre Office I go searching for “Linux word processor tabbed documents” or something close to that. The most recent search landed me here.
Original Question
Hi All
I ‘d like to ask about suggestions for a TABBED word processor.
I am currently using SmartEdit Writer ( https://www.smart-edit.com/Writer/ ) – which does it, is nimble and free (god bless the author), however I might be missing some other good editors ?
The key thing is to have TABS (like M$ Excel has for example, to make it clear what I need) to structure editing within a single instance (otherwise I ‘d be just using M$ Word as I have M$ Office and be done) + text editor, that supports having tables with text inside cells (no math !) + functionality not more than WordPad has
Thank you !
The original question
I had never heard of SmartEdit, but it works only on Windows so it really doesn’t matter. It does have some of the capabilities I would like so I skimmed through the responses.
Had to Reply to It
This response required a reply.
I’m having a hard time understanding the use case for tabs in a word processor.
Spreadsheets don’t lend themselves well to having pages, sections, chapters, etc. So they need tabs to organize them.
But text documents and books certainly do lend themselves to sections, chapters, and multiple pages. If I was writing a document and wanted some separation, I’d start a new chapter or appendix.
I could understand them for things like programming, but many IDE will have functions to separate code into sections.
Obviously OP has thought of a use case, but perhaps it is not common in word editors because it is a very niche request.
the response
I sat there and typed an original response. To the best of my memory it went like this. (We will get to why I’m writing from memory in a bit.)
My Response
It is not a niche request. I’m an author who writes a technical book series so I can shed some light on this.
Many popular word processors have had this in the past. It is an indispensable feature for authors and professional writers. Lotus WordPro has the ability back in the days of OS/2 and GUI-DOS (Windows.) Every document could have different tabs that were different document sections. You could control which tabs were included in what order when you printed. If you used chapter names instead of numbers you could re-order your chapters by dragging the tabs around. All of your research could go in one tab and not be accidentally printed. Likewise those big sections of text you deleted but didn’t want to lose could go in a “scraps” tab. All of this was contained in a single LWP file. Yes you can try and do it with multiple files in a single directory, but when you are moving between multiple machines things get lost. Everything was in one file.
Forgot to mention, you could have multiple tabs within a section and multiple sections within each division all within the same document.
A predecessor of Libre Office, IBM’s Lotus Symphony (not to be confused with Lotus Symphony of DOS days) also had a multi-tabbed interface.
It was just one tab per document, but still it had the groundwork. It also had a Navigator which let you jump to every section in your document.
The definitive predecessor to Libre Office, Star Office, also had a tabbed document interface.
Sadly it was also one tab per document rather than what Lotus WordPro had. The software mentioned by the original poster is the only free product I’ve heard of coming even close to Lotus WordPro. The commercial product Scrivener is supposedly very good but it only runs on Windows and Mac so I have no further knowledge.
A Little Bit Later
I asked them to send me the original content because I wanted to post it here. Got no response. Asked how it could possibly be considered “commercial” since the original poster was looking for software recommendations. To top it all off I pointed out the overwhelming amount of advertising on their site.
When you are generating “most popular” and “best” clickbait content on your site, you are advertising.
Let’s Look at a Few Things
Lotus WordPro and Star Office are long since gone. Libre Office is free to download. I pointed out Scrivener was commercial and that I hadn’t used it. The original poster wanted software recommendations. Yet the “powers that be” at DPReviews branded the post commercial/spam.
If that is the level of critical thinking DPReviews is capable of you really cannot trust any review they publish.
