| Art Alexion on 5 Dec 2007 14:30:31 -0000 |
|
On Tuesday 04 December 2007 22:13:35 Aaron Mulder wrote: > On Dec 4, 2007 4:05 PM, K.S. Bhaskar <bhaskar@bhaskars.com> wrote: > > Over the years, its formatting compatibility with M$Office is comparable > > to that of one M$Office version with another. > > ... > > I use OOo on Linux in an S&:P 500 company (thousands of employees) that > > is officially M$Office on Windows, and almost all the time no one notices > > the difference. > > Really? I've noticed that the bullets are consistently wrong. As in, > you create a bullet list in OO and load it in Word and the bullet > icons are daggers or some other oddball character. If by some miracle > they appear as round dots, they're either larger or smaller than in > the original. It seems to happen both ways (created in Word and > opened in OO or created in OO and opened in Word). This has been a > problem forever -- I don't know why getting bullets right is so hard. > (I've never had a similar problem when going from one version of a > product to another version of the same product on either side.) This is most likely a character encoding issue. Also, both use a different font from the text to create the bullet, e.g. Wingdings. They may be using different symbol fonts. Look in the options dialog for both products. You can tweak this compatibility. > > Also, the page spacing is typically not the same between OO and Word. > That is, if the page ends on a certain line and word in one product, > there's no guarantee that the same page will end in the same place on > the other product. So if you massage the document to make the page > breaks look nice or just barely fit everything onto one page, it's all > lost in the conversion. I'll save the rant about avoiding manual page breaks and stuff in favor of paragraph styles with keep together and keep with next attributes. Some of the problem here is with leading, or the space between lines. Some has to do with font differences. The compatibility section in Word and corresponding Options section in Open Office help here. > > I use OO a lot, but I try to export to PDF wherever possible to avoid > crap like this. I also am a big fan of putting text in an e-mail or > wiki page instead of a casual word processing document. I'm actually > still fairly grumpy about the OO/Word compatibility, since I use about > 1% of the features and I still consistently notice these > discrepancies. Ironically, you may be seeing the discrepancies BECAUSE of the using only 1% of the features. There are settings and good practices that may not solve your issues completely, especially if you are using different a OS in each, and have no control over the Word configuration. In my experience, Word on different boxes with different compatibility tweaks and fonts has just as may incompatibilities with itself — a good reason in itself not to send word docs unless you are co-editing a document. There are a number of reasons, fidelity being only one, to send PDFs instead of word docs. > > However, for what it's worth, I've been using OO on Linux and Mac for > several years, and almost never had it crash (except when SuSE shipped > a pre-release version once). I'm not a big fan of the usability of > Impress, but I have used it a lot without crashing-type problems. On > the other hand, I hate the stupid right-side window that always comes > back from the dead, and I wish someone would explain how slide > templates can be made to work (versus always using "Duplicate Slide"). > I can't believe any of the OO developers actually give presentations! I used to be a big word processing user. My gripe with OOo is with the document object model. With Word, I knew where the formatting was stored and what a delete or backspace might do to formatting. I have yet to figure out how OOo handles this and the effect of editing on formatting was always a crap shoot. Attachment:
signature.asc ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
|
|