[PLUG] More OO.o Writer Faults

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Fri Sep 4 04:32:43 UTC 2009


On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Michael
Robinson<plug_1 at robinson-west.com> wrote:
>
> I find that crossover Linux standard runs MS Office 2003
> student teacher edition nicely on CentOS 5.  Apparently,
> the current version of Quicken works with the latest
> version of crossover Linux standard as well.

That's a great suggestion, and I actually own a copy of crossover
office specifically for that purpose, but unfortunately it just hasn't
worked very well when it comes to actually running office under Linux.

I think older versions of Office may have worked well, but a couple
things make the VM solution work better for me:

Crossover office, as of late 2008, needed a fairly select subset of MS
Office installation media.  There are a *lot* of different
distributions of Office, and each CD / DVD seems to have the relevant
bits in a different location, so of the 3-4 different versions /
distributions I had access to, only one actually bothered to install.
(I don't recall which at this point).

It played havoc with my windowmanager -- graphical glitches, issues
with resizing windows, full-screen problems, etc... generally
speaking, office apps just didn't "play nice" with the rest of my
desktop.

Win32 widget rendering has always been a bit off, in my wine-like
experiences, and...I'm absurdly picky about things like that.  I guess
I'm somewhat of a slave to the aesthetic usability effect ;)

There are a couple other things that make VMware a reasonable solution
-- VMWare Unity integrates nicely with a number of desktop
environments (unfortunatle, dr17 isn't yet one of them..) and once in
a rare while, I need to do something else in Windows, like verify a
build system is cross-platform, a bit of web testing in chrome / IE,
or design a UI in Visio.

> Another approach, if you can do this, is to give your
> customer the word processed document in openoffice format
> with printed instructions on where to get openoffice.

When possible, I send LaTeX-generated pdf.  The clients I work with
often don't have the freedom to choose their software--there are many
places that take software installation very, very seriously, so
getting access to something new could take years.

It's significantly harder to do that than it is to hire someone who
produces nice looking .doc files ;)

--Rogan

>
> It is discouraging that documents produced using OO
> render differently under MS Word, but I guess it
> should be no surprise that this is the case.
>
> Just thought I'd point out that crossover Linux is a
> potentially cheaper route to go than running XP under
> emulation and it is faster to boot.
>
> Another approach, if you can do this, is to give your
> customer the word processed document in openoffice format
> with printed instructions on where to get openoffice.  Of
> course you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make
> it drink ;-)  I tried this in college and didn't get
> anywhere.
>
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