Best (Console Mode Only) Office Tools

[Ambidangerous]

Suppose you wanted all the functionality of an office suite, but wanted
nothing to do with a desktop or a graphical environment.

Related example: if I were asked for the the best console-mode method of accessing the web, I'd reply Lynx (and wget).

So what I want to do is be able to:

1. Create and print formatted text. I do not need a WYSIWYG editor like AbiWord; I need the equivalent that runs in console mode. I need to be able to create professional looking documents (not just stick with good old 'lp letter.txt').

2. Enter data in tables, as in a spreadsheet or database program. Also, provide some elementary printing options (in a pinch I'll just take the data, write a quick report / formatter in Perl, and stick it into #1 above for the correct output).

3. Print images, with preview capability and some elementary control over color, resizing, etc. If there were an image editor that was entirely command line, that would be even better (as in 'imgedit --resize-horizontal=400 --contrast=-20 example.png -o edited.png).

I am going for a minimalist Linux setup; I mainly want programs that can, will, and do work together, with minumum or zero GUI.

Thanks in advance.

[jeremy1701]

I think what you're looking for it called LaTeX. It's an excellent text based document creatation tool that comes standard with any Linux distro. You can create tables, format text, totally advanced mathematical equations, etc...

Here's more:

http://it.metr.ou.edu/latex/

Good Luck!
Jeremy

[bquark]

I have used convert from the Imagemaick suite to do command line manipulation of images. It does resizing, cropping, adding borders, changing contrast, and about 30 other operations.

$ man convert

to see all of the options. I use this to make thumbnails of my digital photos.

[Ambidangerous]

Thanks for the info --I've actually gotten GNOME up on Fedora, and KDE up on Debian now. Nevertheless, most of the time I'm actually in console mode Debian (and I even have my prompts color coded to be 'green' for regular user, 'yellow & red' for the occasional foray into root).

I wish Fedora gave you the option to chuck the GUI entirely and go console (maybe a button on the GNOME toolbar with a guy popping a parachute). Maybe its there and I just haven't found it (I'm only able to start in console mode in Debian because I loaded everything in such an order that it never got a chance to install kdm, xdm, or gdm).