[PLUG] More OO.o Writer Faults

[Fred James]

Matt McKenzie wrote:
> 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
>>     
> 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
>   
Rich Shepard
I am not into blaming, so I shall stay out of that, but I should like to 
add my vote to that of Matt McKenzie, as my experience would seem to 
collaborate his - and I run Linux only - no dual boot or VM.

To avoid MSW making hash of an OO.o file, or the other way around, I 
often passed it on as a PDF - possibly not a productive suggestion in 
your case?  However, my daughter (and MS user, and college professor of 
Math) uses LaTex/Tex, and I have found LyX is available on a number of 
platforms including MS - possibly also not a productive suggestion in 
your case, as it might imply a learning curve for your reviewer(s).  Sigh.

That does seem to leave keeping it in MSW format for simplicity - hope 
some of this helps, or at least does no harm
Regards
Fred James

PS:  Even HTML doesn't always help as MS slipped off on their own there too.