Very Computer

Because of my lack of time (full time job + nearly full time student) I
haven't had a chance to try out StarOffice. Many people (including
myself) are forced to use ms office at work and noticing the bloat and
reliability problems I can't believe what they payed for it... I have
heard star office is just as bad... Whats it like on FreeBSD and
Windows?

I'm currently using Wordperfect 8 at home and overall I'm pretty happy
with it except for the Word translater. Is StarOffice better? I still
need to write to word files well enough so that anyone using word can
still see 95% of the formating.

Thanks in advance for any comments...

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Before you buy.

Star Office on FreeBSD works, but is much bloated! However it converts
Word documents pretty well. I have rarely seen Word documents that i cannot
edit. This being said, i think it is much better to dual boot you machine with
Windows and use Microsoft Office directly if needed.

Quote:> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.

--
Michel Talon

I've used it a reasonable amount on FreeBSD and it does crash more than
I like.  The MS Office-like interface is a little annoying too. Hopefully
the new version, OpenOffice, with the separated apps will be nicer. And
the source will help eliminate the crashes eventually.  I far prefer FrameMaker
though and wish Adobe would hurry up and mention their Linux plans before
the beta license expires in two and a half months.

Agree. I also need MS Word compatibility now and then, and my experience with
converting them is:

1) use the 'strings' command on the real simple docs, i.e. the docs that should
have been written in plain ASCII.
2) WordPerfect is relatively fast, but StarOffice converts docs with complicated
layout better.
3) If the document really should be printed the way it is intended to be, I
only found MS Office to do the job correctly. This is often the case with
documents that contain a lot of formulas with aligned numbering. Since I
don't like rebooting I installed Win'98 and MS Office within VMware. It's
also very slow, but much more stable than StarOffice.
(I heard that Win NT would be a better choice to install in VMware than
Win'98, considering speed).

Karel.

Quote:> 3) If the document really should be printed the way it is intended to be, I
> only found MS Office to do the job correctly. This is often the case with

Only TeX does the job correctly.

I had a situation once where I was forced to use Word (at school; a
document was due in 15 minutes).  It was a fairly simple document, but
it had a large title in one of those floating text whatzits (frame?
text box? whatever...).  I set it up so it all fit on one line and my
document was just the way I wanted it.  Everything used TrueType fonts
and I did a "Print Preview" first.

Then I printed it, and it had wrapped, badly, destroying the layout of
my entire document.  I went back to fix it, but Word had crashed.

Quote:> documents that contain a lot of formulas with aligned numbering. Since I

Trying to input formulas into Word was one of the most painful
experiences of my life.

--
vsync
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There IS a better way.  See /usr/ports/textproc/catdoc.  It can
output in ASCII or TeX.   Beats 'strings' and day of the week and
on holidays.

Nice tool to have around.

--

Ah sure, I can't agree more to it :-). But the situation here at work
is that, roughly, the PhD students (I'm one of them) and the scientific staff
use LaTeX, and the undergraduate students use Word. Sometimes students send
us stuff in Word and we need to read it and/or print it. Unfortunately, Word
is proclaimed the 'standard' here, so we can't force them to use software
that is well suited for the job. Besides, we think they should make the
decision for themselves; and some of them do use LaTeX.

Quote:>I had a situation once where I was forced to use Word (at school; a
>document was due in 15 minutes).  It was a fairly simple document, but

Yes, me too... for a conference it was required to send in an abstract in
Word. Horrible. Two pictures included. PostScript is our standard here
because it is so easy to scale without loss of quality. "We can't see your
pictures. Can you please convert them?" "If you have a PostScript printer,
you don't need to worry, it will be printed even if you don't see them
on screen" "We don't know what PostScript is" "Ah, well, OK, I'll convert
them to gifs". So I spent some hours converting Postscript pictures into
reasonable gifs, and put them correctly in the document, which became x times
larger and the quality was much worse... I learned that I should have sent in
hardcopies...

Quote:>Trying to input formulas into Word was one of the most painful
>experiences of my life.

I never dared too, and hear the most scaring stories about it...
like numbering would be not automatically... one of my colleagues even
changed mathematical symbols in a manuscript because some journal had
rewritten his paper in Word, which cannot do all fancy math stuff that was
used in the manuscript.

Karel.

Thanks! I'm going to try it :-)

Karel.

Quote:> Word. Horrible. Two pictures included. PostScript is our standard here
> because it is so easy to scale without loss of quality. "We can't see your
> pictures. Can you please convert them?" "If you have a PostScript printer,
> you don't need to worry, it will be printed even if you don't see them
> on screen" "We don't know what PostScript is" "Ah, well, OK, I'll convert
> them to gifs". So I spent some hours converting Postscript pictures into

ps2pdf/pdflatex is your friend...

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The problem is mostly with those people that request me to send something
in a brain-damaged format (like Word with gif included). I would choose
ps or pdf as a standard to send documents, for obvious reasons. But no,
they want Word. Otherwise they can't read it. And "can't read it" should
be translated to: Windows asks me what program it should use to open the
document... once I even had to convert PostScript to pdf for some people
that could read pdf, but not PostScript. It doesn't make sense to them when
you say "Install GhostView, so you'll be able to view ps now and in future".

Those who know about software and formats always have to adapt to those that
are ignorant and simply do what their OS encourages them to do. If the OS
does not automatically launch the appropriate program whenever they double
click it, the sender should send something else. So it's not surprising
actually that Word becomes the "standard" this way...

I've never done it yet, but sometimes I'm considering making a ps document
with*and include it as a picture (page by page) in a Word doc. And say:
hey, it's a legal Word doc, now it's your problem if you can't view it...

Karel.