Poor timekeeping on a RasPi-5/4GB after Bookworm OS update....

Of course, groff descends from a long line of typesetting tools designed for publication by professionals in the field. In the mid 1980s I was using sqtroff to typeset reference books out of databases. The postscript it generated would be proof printed on an inkjet and set on a linotron at Cambridge University Press.

My favourite editor for HTML is currently gedit, simply because it does what I want. This is followed by running 'tidy' to pick out the HTML errors and omissions, then back to gedit to fix the mistakes, followed by using Firefox to check its appearance. Lastly, GIMP to tweak any images in the HTML page to adjust size and/or colour/contrast/brightness... .

I use Evolution for general email and tracking appointments and Libre Office Writer for text files and (when I must) Libre Office Calc for spreadsheets.

I do quite a lot of stuff using very large CSV files because its a generally known way of structuring data files of all sizes, but,since experience shows that a spreadsheet is not usually the best way to edit such file, I wrote my own CVS editor. This written in Java to take advantage of both its dynamically resizeable array structures and id its excellent SWING graphics library.

Yes: a text editor and the 'tidy' utility work welll together.

IME vi is very good for file/system recovery but currently my favorite for almost everything else is gedit

I really can't get on with nano.My favourite used to be microemacs but I have the impression that it's no longer maintained.

I never write it with anything else, unless you count PHP.

IIRC the late David Mackays book, without hot air,m was I think written in LaTex

Anyone who has used a real typesetting program like Quark knows that what it needs is plain raw text.

Any layout, fonts and page styles are imposed completely separately.

Thanks a lot - it is much more than i expected.

Same here:

- 'gedit' to write the page and spell check it

- 'tidy' to check for HTML markup mistakes

- 'firefox' to inspect the page for layout stupidities.

Geany here, ususally, as its (HTML) normally cut in with PHP.

Dont bother. Geany 'understands' HTML and php - and javascript - and highlights the grosser sorts of errors.

More than that. firefox has a pretty good javascript debugger as well.

Also I use the apache error logs to monitor php syntax errors.

I like firefox a lot, though Brave is my usual browser, as much for its built-in ad-killers and website blockers an anything else.

I don't use php much: so far its only been when I've needed to grab user- supplied content from a set of related boxes on one of my web-pages and add the set to a queue for overnight processing before e-mailing the result back to the OP.

Whether or not you use it depends on how much interfacing you need to do with the server side OS and other apps. Likewise Javascript, which gives you an actively responsive interface in the browser itself, and via AJAX calls, fast access to changes server side without refreshing the whole screen.

Example: My heating controller main panel accessed via a bowser needs to reflect in almost real time what the server side is doing. So it contains several timed javascript loops that interrogate the local system time, for a clock display, the server side state machine that controls the heating zones, and the server side record of the room thermostats. What the AJAX calls summon depends, but its usually a short PHP script. The same goes for the configuration screen where times and temperatures are setup. I need to do AJAX calls to a system to write config files and read them back to display on screen.

Other applications I have use mysql databases at the back end and its pretty hard to access those direct from HTML!

But that is because my bent is towards simulating industrial machine control panels in a browser. PHP, Javascript. HTML, C and mysql are the tools that provided the shortest route to that objective.

YMMV.

-=> On Wed Dec 6 21:00:00 2023, 56g.1173 wrote to The Natural Philosopher <=-

Also, the Pi 400 is just about the perfect little word processing/email/internet machine. I love mine for lots of reasons, but when it's hooked up to the TV even my mom (64 years old) uses it and finds it very easy to use! So it gets points there too, if you want to share it.

There's SQL injection via CGI query parameters if you're careless about SQL query construction based on user input - always remember little Bobby Tables.

Which is precisely why one uses PHP to receive user supplied data and never be so lazy as to send a full sql update statement - just the data to be updated.

If a user calls themself 'drop table;' the database will then dutifully create such a user.

I would have been tempted to use Server Sent Events rather than a tight polling loop.

I hadn't known of their existence, I just looked at that and frankly its barely any different. But they might be a cleaner solution, I agree.