[Courses] [Basics] Dear participants...

[Shuying]

On 6 Apr 2002, Beth Johnson wrote:

> Here's my pie-in-the-sky dream:  I'd like to have a decent desktop
> publishing program.  The one thing I find myself booting into Windows
> for is to use MS Publisher.  Once you give that annoying paperclip
> mascot the boot, it's a nice program for what I need to do.

I'm not sure I'd really call MS Publisher "decent". :)  The only thing
good about it is, afaik, is that it's really easy to use.

A  quick check with  freshmeat.net shows up a few publishing software for
linux, but I don't really know what you use Publisher for so I don't know
if they're of any use to you.

> Other than that, there's probably a bunch of little things I'd like to
> do, but I can't remember them right now!  I guess one of the things is
> that I'd like to start designing some themes and I'd like to be able to
> understand enough so that I'm not lost when I need to alter the behavior

If you're really interested in designing themes, you might want to have a
look at the kde project. There would be a number of examples you could
look at.

> of theme elements.  I'm also interested in how programs are ported from
> one OS to another.

I haven't ported very many programs (actually 1), but my understanding is
that you simply change the bits of code that rely on a particular OS. For
example, if you're porting a linux program to windows say, you're likely
to make use of some win32 library. And then sometimes you've to do some
really dirty hack because what works on one OS doesn't work on the other.
:) Hope that answers your question.

--Shuying