[PLUG] More OO.o Writer Faults

[Matt McKenzie]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>wrote:

>   When I need to send a draft document to someone else for review and
> comments
> I save it as a Word97 .doc file. When comments come back, I'll sometimes
> reconvert the document to .odt. Doing this with OO.o-3.x causes all sorts
> of
> formatting changes that did not occur with earlier versions.
>
>   When I use my OO.o letter template the document has the letterhead first
> page and continuation pages with a different header after that. What OO.o
> now does in the translation to .doc is put the letterhead on each page; it
> totally looses the different page styles.
>
>   Also, it now inserts random spaces between words and, in a couple of
> cases, within a word.
>
>   This is retrogressive behavior. It's time wasting and a PITA to have to
> go
> through each line to look for random changes. What a shame that it's
> becoming less of a collaborative writing tool than it used to be.
>
> Rich
>
> --
> Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |  Integrity            Credibility
> Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |            Innovation
> <http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax:
> 503-667-8863
> _______________________________________________
>


While I agree these kind of problems can be a PITA, and OO.o is not perfect,
it is still a good program.

My wife is using OO.o on a G4 Mac running OSX 10.5, and has some problems,
but overall it works.
I think part of the problem (slow, occasional crashes) can be due to running
Leopard on a G4 Powerbook instead of an Intel MacBook/MBPro, and the fact
that OO.o on OSX is not a native GUI app, but there is a port (Neo Office),
which uses X11 instead of Carbon/Cocoa.

What purpose is it to convert between .odt and .doc?  IMHO, if you are
working with people in the M$ world, just keep it as .doc, and if you are
working with people who use OO.o, keep .odt.
Converting between them has never been a slam dunk, and that only
exacerbates the problem.  This is not entirely the fault of OO.o, we can
blame the ever changing .doc standard for part of it.

YMMV

----------
Matt M.
LinuxKnight