Mohsen Banan
Neda Communications, Inc.
17005 SE 31st Place
Bellevue, WA 98008
April 1, 1991
Typically, an application programmer, a system manager, and a casual end user will require access to different subsets of this collection. Where appropriate, reference to other sections of this publication or other related publications will be made.
Say what is each chapter and who should read what.
This manual has gone through a few drafts. It is nearly complete but not flawless. There are some sections that are not complete. They are yet to be written.
This manual should, however, be fully correct in what it does say; and it is therefore open to criticism on anything it does include -- from specific examples and descriptive text, to the ordering of chapters and sections. If something is confusing or incorrect, then perhaps the manual should be fixed. Please let me know.
As you use the manual, please mark pages with corrections so you can later look them up and send them in. Please reference any comments to the chapter name and section name, since page numbers and chapter and section numbers will change.
Pean Lim. Derrell Lipman. Michael Gates.
Comments concerning this document should be addressed to:
Postal Address:
Mohsen Banan
17005 SE 31st Place
Bellevue, WA 98008
E-Mail: mohsen@neda.com
Electronic copies of this manual may be obtained in the following four formats:
To obtain an electronic copy of this manual in the format that you want contact the author.
This publication applies to E-O-E - Emacs Office Environment as implemented for UNIX systems equiped with GNU-Emacs.
E-O-E is a collection of generalized commands, programming tools, software libraries, and related publications. Typically, an application programmer, a system manager, and a casual end user will require access to different subsets of this collection.
This manual is expected to function as a Roadmap. It enumerates the collection and the integration facilities that make the collection a cohesive environment. Each element of E-O-E is described in some detail. Where appropriate, reference to other sections of this publication or other related publications will be made.
Typically, an application programmer, a system manager, and a casual end user will require access to different subsets of this collection. Where appropriate, reference to other sections of this publication or other related publications will be made.
Anyone coming to E-O-E for the first time will find it useful to read through an overview of concepts and facilities.
Section 3, provides such an overview.
Say what is each chapter and who should read what.
This manual is written in LATEXinfo. LATEXinfo is a documentation system that uses a single source file for both on-line documentation and a printed manual. See the LATEXinfo Manual for more details [].
The on-line documentation is in the form of an Info file. An on-line Info file is a file formatted so that the Info documentation reading program can operate on it. Info files are divided into pieces called nodes, each of which contains the discussion of one topic. M-x info in emacs and xinfo under X11 are two Info documentation reading programs that can be used for on-line manipulation of this manual.
All office workers independent of their specific disciplines need a set of "Basic Office Services". Electronic Mail, Time Management, On-Line Dictioanry, Thesaurus, Personal Phone Book and Corporate Phone Book are examples of such Basic Office Services.
These generic office services are independent of the specific nature of the discipline (Accounting, Programming, Engineering, Legal, ...) that office worker is associated with.
These basic services are often provided at the workgroup level. In large organizations, many soultions to address these basic office requirements co-exists.
IBM's Office Vision and DEC's ALL-IN-1 are examples of this. Technical Environment is much richer but is not as well integrated. Virtual Terminal capability into these corporate services.
Typical attributes of "Managed Office Environments" are:
GNU Emacs is an advanced, self-documenting, customizable, extensible, real-time display editor. The underlying part of GNU Emacs is written in C and includes a Lisp interpreter. Most of editing commands in Emacs are written in Emacs Lisp (elisp). Elisp provides for practically unlimited extension of GNU Emacs.
GNU Emacs runs on 100s of hardware/software platforms. Emacs runs on almost all flavors of UNIX. VMS, TOPS-20, ... are among other operating systems that Emacs has been ported to. GNU Emacs provides a unified level of service adequate for providing most basic office services on many hardware/software platforms.
What is needed to augment standard distribution of GNU-Emacs to a complete office environment is a set of co-operating pieces of software that are available on various ftp sites on the internet. Difficulty of locating the right version. Porting and configuring it your target environment. The importance of matching set.
There are many strategic advantages in using emacs as your "Office Environment". Here is a partial list of some of the advantages.
E-O-E is a very rich environment and is targeted to sophisticated users.
Solving the problem once inside emacs and then using other programs from within it.
The E-O-E is installed on your disk using the sysadm utility.
Follow these instructions.
Insert the removable medium for the package you want to install into the diskette drive. Press <RETURN> when ready. Type q to quit.
cd /usr/public
cpio -icBdumv < device
where device is your raw map tape device or raw floppy device, depending on your media.
./install
Through out this manual we categorize the Basic Office Services into three categories.
Figure 3.1 illustrates the Network Model for EOE.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.
NNTP.
Finger Protocol.
Webster Protocol.