Easing Compatibility Between OpenOffice, MS Office 186
Jane Walker writes "An office suite expert describes how to format documents in OpenOffice and Microsoft office using program features that will make ease compatibility headaches." From the article: "No two office suites are alike, and the more manual, highly controlled items you have in your document, the more likely the formatting will get messy when you go from one office suite to another. But if you use the formatting capabilities to indent and add spacing--well, that's more like just labeling a box Kitchen and putting the box somewhere that makes sense. The formatting tips in this article will also give you more professional-looking documents that are easier to update when the content or formatting rules change."
Cripes (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cripes (Score:5, Insightful)
Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.
It would be nice if we were all using CSS/html - but for knocking out quick documents word processors are far easier (even doing things the laborious way this guy suggests)
Re:Cripes (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's not laborious. What he's doing, though he doesn't explain it, is building a style sheet. (Or perhaps "document template" as I think Word calls it now.) Once you've done that, you just tag a paragraph with the appropriate style (one click) and you're done. Most paragraphs keep the default ("Normal" usually) style. Word, and I assume OOo, come with a large gallery of pr
Re:Cripes (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish.
I'm afraid that while this does work for very simplistic documents, as soon as you start going anywhere near structured text it all breaks down. The problem is that there's no containment model on OpenOffice; you represent a sectio
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
I've wondered the same thing for a while. As a programmer, it doesn't strike me as particularly hard to represent some sort of structured/nested style information, but it certainly is different to how all WP/DTP software works today AFAIK.
I find it a great irony that HTML/CSS is pretty poor as far as decen
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
I'm not really sure what you're trying to do. Perhaps you want an outlining tool? MSWord does have a mode to do that, but it's famously buggy and unstable. I suspect that some coding environments might have a lot of the structure, but not the typographic features. There were some tools back in the DOS era tha
Re:Cripes (Score:4, Informative)
What about Lyx? Simpler than a word-processor, near enough WYSIWIG, nice clean pdf, html, plain text or postscript output.
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
The value of trained adminstrative staff... (Score:2)
Find me a wysiwyg html/css editor (that outputs nice clean css/html after being edited by 5 people) that my secretary can use (he's a liquid-paper on the screen type) and I'll support that.
It's weird. When I first came to work for my current employer we used to have something called an "editorial staff". That was back in the day when we were able to afford secretaries. (i.e Un the dark ages when document preparation was considered a skill requi
Document processors, not word processors (Score:2)
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cripes (Score:2)
Many publishing houses produce all their output with LaTeX, so saying it's useful just for math doesn't reflect its actual usage.
I'm trying to find some kind of latex front end that I can give to the people who make the manuals here... We've gone from Word to Ventura and dabbled a little in FrameMaker... nothing seems to do quite what we want, so I'm looking at latex. Lyx is a little weak here, and the other products I've found are either quite old (TrueTex) or geared heavily toward mathematical public
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Yes. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have advanced knowlege of LaTeX and Word. Just for fun, I've created documents in both that when you print them, it is virtually impossible to distinguish what was the program used to ceate them. I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department. The only thing that remains is to find which one is easier to use for a specific task. Recently I've seen a 150+ pages novel, written entirely in word. This document was only text, with just four or five chapter headings. Honestly I didn't see why the author should have used TeX or LaTeX for this job. In fact, with Word he could concentrate only on typing with some small but usefull features that Word offers for easing typing.
Some of my friends prepare their thesis in LaTeX. When you have lots and lots of inline formulas, LaTeX can potentially produce a better quality output. My own PhD thesis however, did not contain many formulas but instead there was lots of complex tables. I used Word to do it (together with MathType and EndNote). I tried one chapter with LaTeX and foud out that actually I spend more time in LaTeX preparing my tables that doing the same thing in Word. Preparing my template with just a dozen of sytles and some useful VB macros took me round half a day and for the rest of the time I could just concentrate on writing.
I continue to use both LaTeX and Word and decide between them based the job at hand. To me, only the outcome counts not the tool.
Re:Yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe you don't care about things like proper typesetting and ligatures but for some people these things matter. Even for plain printed text. This falls squarely in the quality department for me.
In French it's even more obvious. For example before a colon or a semicolon you insert a thin space. in addition to the ASCII character set there are numerous accented characters in use, including capitals (which the braindead French keyboard makes difficult to enter, moreso in Windows where apparently you're supposed to memorize character codes). Actually English uses a lot of accented characters as well via the import of foreign colloquialisms although omitting them doesn't seem to matter much (déjà-vu vs. deja-vu). All of this is handled gracefully by TeX and is apparently made difficult on purpose by most word processors.
Anyway there *is* quite a bit of diference in output quality between a random wordprocessor (Word, OOWrite, etc.) and *TeX. You presumably just don't have the eye for it.
Re:Yes. (Score:2)
That simply isn't true, as readily verified on my WinXP SP2 system with several professional-grade fonts installed.
Right now, pretty much the only Windows-based applications that make a serious attempt to support the power of OpenType are the major design/graphi
Re:Yes. (Score:2, Informative)
I don't believe any of them is any better in the quality department.
I'm with Fred_A above on this one. If you can't tell the difference between (La)TeX output and Word, you're not looking. The output from LaTeX, typesetting wise, is top notch--ligatures are used, interword spacing is precisely controlled, the whole thing is polished. In Word, attempting to do full justification results in huge interword gaps, making the page harder to read and visually distracting. Even with OpenType fonts, Word (at leas
Re:Yes. (Score:2)
I have to disagree here. I have done the same thing; when I was in college I typed all of my humanities and english papers in LaTex, because I was trying to get comfortable with it for scientific use, and the difference in output quality was night and day from the ClarisWorks/MS-Word stuf
Re:Yes. (Score:2)
Mind you, plaintext has its pitfalls too - I'd hate for the people to discard it on grounds of "it looks like a mess!" because they opened it in Notepad...
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, it's a non-choice. PDF! It doesn't matter what program you use to create the content, and it'll look practically the same in any viewer on any OS. As you note, "plain text" is vague and open to inter
Re:Yes. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:LaTeX forces correct usage (Score:3, Informative)
First, Latex makes it super easy to break your document into small pieces. Each can be edited separately but the style is applied to the whole. Figures, references, etc. automatically span smaller files.
Second, Latex is text which
Re:LaTeX forces correct usage (Score:2)
A simpler way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A simpler way (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A simpler way (Score:2)
Stuff åäö
yes, but (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst example of this I ever saw was a document where the page numbers were typed, by hand, aligned using spaces, within the page themselves {not in the footer}; and there were no page breaks, just loads of hard returns. I was tasked with fixing a minor spelling mistake. This should have been an easy job; but the correctly-spelt word was one letter longer, which caused the line to wrap -- thus making an utter arse of the formatting.
I fixed it, but I got a bollocking for taking too long. I suppose I would have got just as big a bollocking for messing up the formatting.
I think a great service would be done if word processing software could detect attempts at such manual formatting, warn the user there is a better way to do it; and then do it properly, automagically. It can't be that hard. I'll concede that spaces and hard returns do have a place, but that place is far away from proportionally-spaced fonts.
Oh yes, one more thing. Bring back Wordstar/Protext-style rulers which can be inserted into the document anywhere, not just one ruler at the top of the screen which changes as you move from one paragraph to another. It's as confusing as fuck and it's probably half the reason why people use spaces for formatting in the first place.
Re:yes, but (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess the worst is people who do both such as a title page that has linebreak characters and spaces to center the title on the otherwise blank page.
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
Many? I would say most.
And this includes many geeks who never bother to read a manual and are therefore completely unaware of even the most basic formatting principles of WYSIWYG-type word processors. Believe me, I know a couple of these guys, who staunchly maintain that WYSIWYG is completely unpredictable. Yet most of this supposedly unpredictable behaviour stems from the fact that they are using Word oder Openoffice like a text editor
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
Re:yes, but (Score:2, Informative)
More seriously, you can start at http://www.latex-project.org/ [latex-project.org] and start following links. Take a look at their intro [latex-project.org] page, then maybe start reading the usual The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e [tug.org]. Be careful not to give up — when something gets overwhelming, skip it and move on.
Try LyX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
Suggestion (Score:2)
Instead of writing mind-reading software and popping up a paper clip, they could just make the default document come with page numbers in a footer. This would clue people in that these capabilities exist. Those that just want a simple text document won't mind, or can use notepad, or figure out how to remove the footer. Removing something is usually simpler than figuring out how to add it. Now
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
Just break out a thesaurus, and start replacing words with shorter or longer synonyms until the formatting stops being an utter arse. You might lose your job, but many documents like that and you might want to lose your job.
Re:yes, but (Score:3, Interesting)
My biggest problem in Word is that sometimes the sections get messed up. Particularly if you have a list of subsubsub-sections. All of a sudden Word decides that "no, those subsections are unreleated". And when that happens you are *so* screwed.
Basically you have something like
1. Blah
1.1 BB
1.2 BA
1.4 WTF
1.5 Yadda
And so on. Trying to get them into order again is extremely frustrating and using
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
Re:from a designers point of view (Score:2, Funny)
Re:from a designers point of view (Score:2)
Re:from a designers point of view (Score:2)
<resist urge="mock person who understands correct punctuation and typography, yet doesn't use capital letters"/> :-)
Re:from a designers point of view (Score:2)
Re:from a designers point of view (Score:2)
Only joking! :-)
(BTW, the space is advisory in some contexts - e.g., when serving XHTML as HTML - but not required for XML in general.)
Re:yes, but (Score:2)
As you imply, the problem with Word is that it's a bit too clever for its own good. I can live without autocorrecting (c) in mid-sentence to a copyright symbol, and not knowing the difference between typographer's dashes, thank you. Compare and contrast with something like (La)TeX or something (X)HTML-based, where it's still trivial to use these characters, but they only change when you explicitly ask for it.
Good tips (Score:5, Funny)
ME: "Please don't use enter for spacing between paragraphs, it's wrong"
CO: "You pedantic freak! It's exactly the same on the screen, and when I print it it won't even be there, who cares?"
CO: "Shit Word is retarded, the tab ends on different places each line, what the HELL is that?"
ME: "Use indenting, it's more predictable"
CO: "Indenting? Why do you never explain what I wanna know, I don't care what indenting is, I wanna fix the damn tabs"
CO: "Oh great, perfect, I wanna make all headlines gray, this means whole hour hunting them down and reformatting it. THANK YOU WORD, BUT NO THANK YOU."
ME: "Man.. this is why I told you to use Headings 1, 2, 3... It's easy to format at once from the styles palette, and you also get automatic Outline view and Table of Contents..."
CO: "Oh shut up, geek..."
Re:Good tips (Score:3, Funny)
CO: "OMG, Word is, like, total crap!"
Me: "I can advise LaTeX."
CO: "Great! Can you get me a Linux shell?"
Re:Good tips (Score:4, Interesting)
It takes forever to fully install but works decently fine.
Tom
Re:Good tips (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good tips (Score:2)
A lot of the styles/classes are not part of the base install.
Tom
Re:Good tips (Score:2)
Although to be fair, recent editions of MikTeX have a good system for automatically detecting missing packages and the like, and then tracking them down at your local CTAN site, downloading them, and installing them automatically. I don't know how clever it is, but it's certainly helped me out several times (not that the MikTeX Package Manager is particularly difficult to use manually, anyway).
Re:Good tips (Score:2)
Re:Good tips (Score:2)
If they don't want to learn: Ignore them
I've noticed there's a certain class of people that'll much rather bitch and moan than learn a better way. Those are the same kind of people that complain about spy/ad/malware but clicked "ok" to five of them in the last hour. It's a waste of breath.
Not so easy (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft Office for Mac and Windows dont handle "Styles and Formatting" in completely consistent ways... not to talk about what happens when you mix older versions of Word on PC with newer.
I'd say: formatting is ALWAYS a mess in MS Word, REGARDLESS how you do it.
My tip: invest some time in a template with just a few styles. Stick to those styles - dont improvise and be creative.
I like to write in HTML, just using P,B,U,I,TT,H1,H2,H3,TABLE (with friends), UL, OL... however, it is hard to print it in a nice way... Anyone has any ideas about how to make really nice printouts from HTML (that look as nice as a LaTeX report) without writing my own XSLT-tranform and make an XSL-FO of everything?
Re:Not so easy (Score:3, Interesting)
The only solution to ma
Re:Not so easy (Score:3, Informative)
OOo Writer has DocBook filters as well (bit of a work in progress apparently).
In other words... (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as word processors won't erase superfluous spaces, doubled returns, and start of line tabs, I see no hope of a global users' skills rising.
Re:In other words... (Score:2)
Re:In other words... (Score:2)
I'm less concerned about "highlights" like drop caps than I am about the basics: choosing co-ordinating fonts; choosing the spacing for things like margins, leading, and associating headings with the following text; using correct punctuation; and other design decisions that directly affect the entire text of a document.
This sort of detail isn't just important because it can make a document look pretty, though of course that has its advantages. A well-typeset document will also be be read significantly fas
I wrote my doctorate thesis this way (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started work a little later I had to prepare reports that then went to a secretary 'for final formatting' before publication. This was presumably to ensure that they followed the house style.
In fact, the first few came back completely garbled. (This was despite the fact that they were already - visually at least - in the house style when I submitted them.) Not long after, an edict came down that we were not to use 'automatic formatting'. When I queried this, it meant no styles, no automatic header numbering, no changing the paragraph spacing with the Format command, etc.
No one ever admitted it, but we all suspected the reason was that the secretaries did not understand enough about Word to realise why they couldn't manually change the heading numbers, why hitting return was inserting a double line space, or whatever.
Even now that we are all using Office 2003, all of our company templates are still set up using direct (manual) formatting.
It's even worse though, because Word 2003 is set up to automatically define a new style every time you manually apply direct formatting to a paragraph. If you look in the styles list for these templates, there are literally hundreds of styles defined there, all with meaningless names.
If only the templates were defined using proper styles and users were educated not to use the buttons on the toolbar but to select a style from the Styles and Formatting sidebar instead, all of this mess could be avoided, and all documents would 'automagically' come out with the house style with no effort at all.
(I'd even like to see Microsoft add some 'policies' to Word so that it can be set up on users' machines to enforce this way of working.)
Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe this [mvps.org] and other articles here [addbalance.com] might help.
MS has just so totally fucked up its implementation of styles. I do DTP, and get files from all kinds of people. Not a single one in the last 10 years has been set up using style
Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way (Score:2, Informative)
Anyhow, going into it, I got put onto LaTeX by my mate, and used that. Apart from doing math equations better & prettier, the mark-up of the final document was great, and intellegent (ensuring that there's not too much white space on pages, that images could be grouped onto an images pages if it looked st
Re:I wrote my doctorate thesis this way (Score:3, Informative)
Word 2003 also has a feature by which you can lock the available formatting styles to the ones you have defined. If you go to Tools > Protect, and elect to protect the styles, it will disallow any manual formatting: the user must pick from one of the available, defined styles.
But of course, I switched to LaTeX: TeXShop [uoregon.edu] and BibDesk [sourceforge.net] make it a joy to use on the Mac.
Nightmare ahead (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nightmare ahead (Score:2)
I had a similar experience years ago (originals typed into a proprietary mainframe based program). I learned to _always_ save a plaintext version a formatted copy of any document I think will ever be read again. Since I learned it long ago, I've seen that I tend to keep the plaintext versions and the formatted versions get discarded. Thanks to this, documents that are over 10 years old are a double-click away and perfectly readable (ok, two i
Re:Nightmare ahead (Score:2)
but saving as plain text will not just destroy formatting. it will destroy diagrams, graphs, mathematical formulae, probablly tables and any other non-textual content.
maybe not a problem if your a programmer type that doesn't belive in flowcharts, uml or anything similar but a major issue if you are an electronics guy or a software engineering guy that uses tools like uml.
finally there is the issue
Re:Nightmare ahead (Score:2)
Use LyX if you want the gains of LaTeX with a GUI (Score:2, Interesting)
Since converting to LyX all our documents come out with consistently high quality. Best of all, from LyX you can convert to almost any other format as you need.
Warning: expert at work (Score:2)
Users are going to do what they do regardless. So I guess the answer is to write much better import/export filters for when files are going to be used in more than one program. It's no good going on about typography eith
Re:Warning: expert at work (Score:2)
Re:Warning: expert at work (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, so lets look at this from the point of view of a developer trying to build a system that serves the user's needs. The users treat the wordprocessor as a typewriter with fonts, but they want it to magically update properly when they move stuff around and change options. So
Well, for a start we could give them controls that let them specify how far into the page the paragraph is without resorting to tabs that can get messed up. Let's call that the "indentation". Also, we could let the user tell the software "this is my heading" and it should know how what font to use. We could call them "styles". Hey, and how about if people want a gap under the paragraphs without having to remember to press enter every time? We could have a setting that tells it how big the gap could be!
Of course, this has all been done already. The problem is that the constant bleating of "the software should do what the user wants" is the basic assumption that the software can figure out what the hell the user wants, without even being told! Easy to use software does not mean 'software that needs no manual'. Creating a document that can be properly updated without the leg work of manually reformatting every bit of it, even within the same word processor, requires a slight shift in thinking from 'purely presentation' to 'structure and style'.
The exact same shift in thinking is what causes some HTML pages to resemble a mass of <br> tags and non-breaking spaces, and some to resemble just a handful of <p> tags and let the CSS do the rest. If you are determined that you are going to use <br> and regardless of what is available to you, on the grounds that you don't already know how to do it and shouldn't have to learn, then you deserve everything you get.
Re:Warning: expert at work (Score:2)
* OpenOffice.org's GUI is better in some respects
- text layouts in spreadsheet cells for example
- Conditional styling is slightly more intuitive in OOo
- Named styles is a beautiful thing
- Cropping is different than MS office's, but in some ways easier for novices to master
I've said it before.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember, Microsoft has filed and received a patent for the Microsoft Office file formats in XML.
All it takes is for Microsoft to take their ball & bat to go home via some trojan in the guise of a special security alert, (Patches O'Houlihan appearing to make the official announcements on Patch Tuesday...between teaching rounds of the ADAA -American Dodgeball Association of America ). Tada! MS Office only writes to XML format and Microsoft has an enforceable patent in place. This puts a fence between two companies or even two departments. It's all or nothing. And if you (corporation) attempt to migrate (not all at once), writing is a one-way street. Anyone can read. But that's passive.
The only way to get around it would be a widespread migration away from MS Office in a very, very short period of time.
Realistically, how fast do you think that will happen? Don't use your office by saying, "We can do it!" Look at how many Fortune 100 or 500 or 1000 companies which would have to jump into the fray during a long weekend.
(Microsoft is still waiting on a substantial number of corporations to migrate from Windows 2000, MS Office 2000, and VS6. And they're chasing their tails trying to find out how to convince businesses to migrate by paying lots of money for new software, new hardware, increased TCO. What makes you think they're going to switch to non-MS Office? Seriously. Even the storytellers Huey, Dewey, and Louie, er, Microsoft's vast Sales, Marketing, and PR departments are pounding their heads. They've never faced a defeat like this -- and it's their own damn fault!)
You've said it before.... (Score:2)
That's funny. The company is too smart to buy a new copy of M$ Office and you don't think they will take a free version instead? You need to look at GM, Lowes, IBM and
You've got to think... like a machine... (Score:5, Informative)
My small crystallization of the whole word processing: You write text. Computer formats it.
If you want the computer to not mess up your formatting, you've got to think like a machine and understand the structure of the formatting. Humans, by default, only care about superficial formatting: "this is in wrong place, let's move it a bit." Computer sees a bunch of formatting instructions.
The biggest problem with WYSIWYG word processing is... well, basically the exact same problem with WYSIWYG HTML editors: You think you have the utter and ultimate control over the presentation, while you actually don't have that luxury. You merely have real-time response to the formatting decisions. Some other day (and in some other version of the program), the formatting decisions the program makes will be different. When using word processor, you have to stop thinking about the formatting and just let it do the thing for you.
Word processing and typesetting are separate tasks. If you don't understand that, and do typesetting decisions while you're doing word processing, you end up in a completely wrong place.
You have to assume your tab key doesn't know damn where to align the text - if you're submitting text for publication somewhere, it's likely to go completely wrong anyway. You have to not rely on spaces being always "space" width at all. (I export my OO.o docs to HTML which gets converted to LaTeX for PDF generation. HTML doesn't care damn about extraneous whitespace. Neither really does LaTeX.)
If you want to preserve formatting instructions at all, OpenOffice.org's style system is your bestest friend ever. You can't produce robust formatting without that thing, so learn it and learn it well.
In closing, two words: Reveal Codes.
Re:You've got to think... like a machine... (Score:2)
Jeez, dude. You sound just like the LaTeX manual.
Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Office (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic (Score:2)
One thing that worries me about that is that it sends your file off on the internet (or to your server, if you have one you bothered to set up like that). Can't it just convert it right there on your machine?
Re:Open Docuemtn Format Plugin for Microsoft Offic (Score:2)
I'm sure there'll be something eventually.
Word processors are overthought (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules (Score:2)
Re:Therefore, LaTeX rules (Score:3)
Perhaps that's OK if you're the only one who's going to edit the document and you stick to one editor and platform, but the problem is that the "rest of the world" inconsistently implements Unicode (without even getting into the horrible default handling of advanced math Unicode characters in Internet Explorer, that
Re:You'd be doing well... (Score:2)
Re:You'd be doing well... (Score:2)
No, like what LaTeX would be if we did it again today, learning from what worked and what didn't for the past few years.
LaTeX redux (Score:2)
Re:LaTeX redux (Score:3, Informative)
Among the major differences are that:
Re:writing robust documents (Score:2)
No. The secretaries need to spend as little time as possible formatting a document and so they're told to hit the fat G (my localization's "bold") and the slanted I and hit return freely. So the document is ready in 5 minutes. Then when the time comes to move a single word around and it blows up in their face, their boss is not smart enough to realize this is due to the s
Re:default "save as..." (Score:2)
Tools > Options > Load/Save > General. Near the bottom of the dialog, select each Standard File Format and set Always save as to the relevant OpenOffice.org document.
Easy. Maybe shoud be called easyOffice
Re:default "save as..." (Score:2)
Maybe I can't follow your argument, first she uses Linux, then she can't click on a Menu called Tools, then select Options?
Well why don`t you change it for her... I am sure she will not notice. I do this trick with my Mother all the time. (ssh into her box and do proactive changes that she does not notice)
Re:default "save as..." (Score:2)
As I "have" to do IT service for more than one person in my family, so I don't rely on any "default" way of doing things. oOO configurations are saved in the home directory, making a backup/restore very easy, even over dialup.
My advice is to set up your mothers box during your next visit to be able to do remote admin tasks. It save
Re:default "save as..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Dude, you installed an operating system on her computer that she doesn't know how to configure and appearently does not have the skills to learn, and you didn't take the time to set it up for her needs nor are you willing to help her when she has problems? You're the ass here, not the OOo and Ubuntu teams that aren't psychic enough to know exactly which defaults she in particular would like to have (and then force them on everyone else). She's your mother, dude, go teach her how to use this operating system and office suite that you dumped on her.
Re:default "save as..." ... Kword!? (Score:2)
Re:default "save as..." (Score:2)
It's not because RTF isn't up to the job. If it was, that's what everyone would be using.
The PDF button (Score:2)
We really all have to get out of the habit of sending bloated editable electronic documents out by default. The PDF button is there in OOO for making something fit to send out just as the print button is there for making things fit to print. The only reason to send someone an editable document that is not just plain text is if you want them to alter it. I'm amazed by the number of contracts, quotes and invoices th
Re:default "save as..." (Score:2)
Yeah, abiword is a little behind in implementing open document format. I used to use abi and my husband used OO, and it was so frustrating. Now he uses OO and I use KOffice, and we're both happy.
As far as whether they should use
OpenOffice PDF export: useful but not great (Score:2)
It's nice that OpenOffice 2 has a PDF export function, but that's a different statement entirely. Alas, the function itself is limited and buggy when put to serious use. For example, it chokes on some professional-grade OpenType fonts, resulting in incorrect fonts being used in the output PDF. It also has very limited control if you're creating documents in OpenOffice that are then sent to a professional print shop. In other words, as a tool for outputt