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Most comparisons I see relate to versions at least a couple of years old. Of concern to me are primarily comments I've seen about the inferior spell checker in OO vs SO (especially as it concerns French) and perhaps inferior font anti-aliasing in SO and OO versus Word (specifically Times New Roman, which is the only one I care about in this context, though ultimately I'm more concerned with print quality so I'm not sure I care much about the anti-aliasing issue).
On the other hand, I believe that the OO code base is newer and, therefore, may have more bug fixes into it.
Any experiences or good resources? I've been trying to make the switch from WordPerfect to Word, because WP kept corrupting our documents. Unfortunately, Word is far inferior to WP for most things I do and I find it just annoys me too much.
By the way, my "free to me" options are
- Word 2000
- Star Office 7
- Open Office 1.1
I can probably also finagle anything else free to me if I can make a good case that it would be worth the expenditure, but it doesn't seem like any of the Word or WordPerfect upgrades are worth the expenditure.
Thanks,
Tom
The trouble with OpenOffice is the level of integration, as well as speed issues. On the first point, you are getting a monolithic block with all the apps - you can't just install the word processing component. On the second point, although there have been some improvements since version 1.0, OO is still very slow to start - although if you have a reasonably powerful machine, once the program is running the speed is very acceptable.
On using the programs, I prefer OO to Word, because it better suits the kind of tasks I want to do. OO, for example, has a one-click "Save as PDF" function, whereas in Word, you have to shell out $500+ for Adobe Acrobat for the same functionality. Basic formatting is much the same in both programs. Word is certainly more advanced, and it has a massive clip-art repository to forever cheapen the look of your office documents! However, for everyday use, OO does the job just fine. Spell-checking? I've not noticed any particular failings with the OO spell-checker either in English or French. Word's implementation is again more advanced, but rather overbearing - it's grammar checker is frustrating, and it's over-eager tendancy for auto-correction and especially auto-formatting makes you have to battle against the program to get the layout you want. OO is far less intrusive in this regard.
Finally: file formats. Whilst OO is an open standard - .sxw files are simply zip-compressed XML documents - .doc Word format documents are, unfortunately, the de-facto standard for document exchange. OO reads and writes the .doc format incredibly well, but it's implementation is always going to be a little behind that of Word.
I run Linux, so when a .doc file comes in from a client, OO does the job just fine for me. However, I prefer simplicity and speed over advanced (and for me unused) features, so I prefer Abiword for my own documents.
Words spell checker is really really good, oo doesn't even come remotely close last I checked, but this may have improved. I'm happy to criticise MS for their failures, but word isn't one of them. The problems encyclo mentions are simple settings, the first thing you do is turn off grammar checking, that was put in place, sad a comment as it is, because currently in many cases it does a better job than the user, so MS went with the lowest common denominator default, turn it off, turn off the autocomplete, these are all simple options, leave on spellchecker.
Before giving up on word, make sure you have the latest service packs installed, there was a new patch released for importing wordperfect files recently, some of the import things might have been fixed.
Sidenote: oo writer on yoper opens fast, about the same speed as word on windows, that's one of the main things those guys are doing, radically optimizing the link system, cutting out all the unnecessary material from the source code, it cuts the overally package size down significantly. Unfortunately the recent slashdotting of yoper resulted in a huge increase in downloads, forcing them to find a new server, I'm hoping these guys get some high end mirrors soon, they deserve it.
A little more background. We had to dump WP because it was occasionally ending up corrupting files that then could not be opened, so lots of work was lost. We were happy with its feature set. Part of the appeal of SO/OO is the XML file format, which I suspect is very unlikely to become unsalvageably corrupt.
For me, Word's shortcomings are
- terrible handling of footnotes. For example, you don't seem to be able to set how big the footnote window will be in draft view. You can adjust it, but you lose the adjustment when you close. Also, it constantly messes up styling in footnotes and I need to delete the note, recreate it and paste the text back in so as to avoid certain strange behaviors (essentially it gets the spacing between footnotes wrong sometimes). Just to get footnote styles to default to my publisher's requirement (which, BTW is a standard, common footnote form, more so than the Word default) requires VB programming to override Word's native footnote function. Compared to WP, Word is simply not designed with a scholarly audience in mind.
- terrible spell-as-you-go feature. Once it reaches a certain number of "errors", it shuts off. I don't want it to shut off and, because of the nature of the document, there will simply be tons of "errors". WP and SO/OO handle this without a hiccup.
- far less precise page layout tools. The kerning, leading, word spacing and letter spacing functions in WP are precise enough that we are able to create camera-reday copy from within WP. I can see already that this won't work in Word and we will eventually have to put our documents into InDesign or something like that, which will create tons more work. It appears to me that SO/OO offer capabilities more similar to WP, though not quite as precise.
The features that Word has that I find superior to WP are
- indexing. Since with SO/OO I can directly process the XML files, I can have much the same functionality (basically search and replace capabilities for index marks).
- grammar checker, which I find useful when not writing in my native language (and I spend about 90% of my word processing time writing in a foreign tongue, so that's quite important).
-VB scripting, which makes it relatively easy to compensate for many of Word's shortcomings. I've done some scripting for WP, but never really "got it". I don't know what the scripting capabilities of OO are, but it looks like you can do pretty much anything via UNO and OO Baisc if you try hard enough at it.
As for conversion from WP to Word to SO, I'm not really worried about that and my gripes about Word have nothing to do with file conversion. I wrote a VBA script that went through and automatically takes sorts out all issues we had in WP-Word conversion. It's a 30-second process to convert a 100-page document (now that the script is written).
As for the Word->SO conversion, I tested a 400-page document that I'm working on and everything converted without a hitch (this is scholarly writing so we don't have sidebars and text boxes and stuff like that - if we did, we'd be using Pagemaker or InDesign anyway I think). Much less painful than the conversions from Word->WP->Word.
What matters to me is simply how Word is at creating originals and I find that if you are trying to use it as an end-to-end solution for a scholarly book, you will be annoyed from end-to-end (i.e. from creating/editing footnotes to working with kerning and word spacing to tweak page layout).
Not to discount isitreal's negative comments, but I don't think they really speak to my concerns with Word except, perhaps, the spelling/grammar checking.
I suspect that in those terms encyclo's situation is similar to mine though - AFAIK he's a native English speaker who works in French, which is exactly my situation.
Tom
I've had similar issues when using word for other purposes, once it leaves the realm it's master of, creating MS Word documents that will live in an MS world, it definitely begins to drop in quality, this is sympomatic of the entire MS method, hardly surprising to me. I had a similar problem recently importing a 3700 item, 15 field excel spreadsheet, generated as Excel, and excel wouldn't open it at all, so I tried the oo spreadsheet and it opened perfectly... stuff's getting better all the time.
Isn't there some professional software that actually does what you want it to do? MS Word tries to be many things, and generally really is bad at everything other than its main office/corporate type wordprocessing function, which it is very good at.
Oh, when I was using word a lot more than I'm doing now, there is a way to change the user.dat file, I can't remember exactly how to do it, but that's supposed to be how you change the real default settings for things like footnote sizes, but it may not be possible, your requirements definitely are far beyond secretary type stuff, which is the part it's good at.
Too bad OO 2 isn't close, my suspicion is that it's going to be very close to what you want, a lot more academically inclined, for fairly obvious reasons.
a client document which had all the changes in those text boxes, oo couldn't handle that at all, and changed them into images
I did some testing there. OO handles "frames" just fine. It does not handle "text boxes" because these are really bitmapped graphics. I guess Word stores a text that links to the bitmap so that you can reopen and edit in Word, but yes, OO won't handle it. If someone is creating a text box with text flowing around it (i.e. sidebar or something), that's a "frame" in Word parlance and OO handles it just great.
Isn't there some professional software that actually does what you want it to do?
Yes and no. I've experimented with PageMaker and InDesign and they allow pixel-precise layout, of course, but all positioning of footnotes and so forth is manual and a considerable investment in marking up the texts for indexing is lost. We could switch over for a reasonable investment in software, but a relatively large investment in labor. If we were preparing slick publications for coffee tables, it would be worth it, but we're preparing pages and pages of text and notes for an academic audience so the benefit of professional page-layout software is just not worth the cost in training, labor and software. By the way, when investigating possible solutions I tried MS Publisher, thinking it might be a halfway stop between InDesign and Word and have excellent Word import filters. What a joke. If you have abbreviations like "R.C. 42" or "R.Consist. 12" (of which we have several thousand in a given document), it will create the non-breaking space where expected, but it will break on the period, so "R." goes on one line and "C. 42" goes on the next line. No way to stop it as near as I can tell (I asked on MS newsgroups and everything).
there is a way to change the user.dat file
There's a fair bit that you simply can't control in that way. Things that WP (which has always catered more to the academic/legal audience than MS) does with incredible facility and things that Word can perhaps do with a couple hundred lines of VBA! Fortunately, since some of these things are so obvious (formatting of numbering and indenting in footnotes), you can often Google and find the VBA to fix it (just a couple of lines in that case).
Anyway, the more I look at SO7, the more I like it. I checked out the roadmap for OO 2 and have to say that it looks great. They are promising even more improvements in text layout and other features that interest me.
I believe that full unicode support in OO would also allow for things like non-breaking thin spaces (used in French punctuation), something that I just can't seem to make Word do for the life of me. Of course, you know you're a geek when you get excited about non-breaking thin spaces!
Tom
I think you've identified one of the most useful aspects of OpenOffice in that you can work with the raw XML files that OO produces with the .sxw format. For example, you can use OO to produce Docbook [xml.openoffice.org] compatible files, and more generally, as the file format is completely open and well-documented, you can do all sorts of XSLT transformations on the documents. If you are a programmer with experience with XML, it is a great choice. Word, on the other hand, is a closed file format which only works in OO because of reverse-engineering.
non-breaking thin spaces
Ah, the holy grail of French-language typesetting. If only you could reliably get them in HTML...
I just decided to to give SO7 (because I already have it installed, not because I think it's superior to OO 1.1) for the document I'm working on. It shouldn't need to be converted back to Word prior to publication, so why not? One great benefit - file size is as follows:
Word - 1071KB
Word in .zip format - 624KB
Staroffice - 248KB
Staroffice in .zip format - 246KB
Staroffice document reconverted and saved as Word: 1400KB
No surprise that you get no added benefit by zipping the Staroffice file, since it is already compressed. I'm surprised, though, that in it's native format, it's still only about 40% as big as a zipped Word file. I suspect that if the doc in question had started as Star Office and hadn't been converted from Word, it would be smaller still.
The difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice is in the support, and I think that SO includes a simple database program
According to a Sun comparison matrix somewhere (slightly outdated as the comparison was, I believe Staroffice 6.1 to Openoffice 1.0), SO also has a better, "professional level", third party, commercial spell checker integrated. I don't know how much better. Obviously, I have a native French copy editor, but I still like to have it as correct as possible before handing it on.
Tom
StarOffice includes licensed, third-party technology such as:* Spellchecker and thesaurus
* Database component (Software AG Adabas D).
* Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
* Select filters, including WordPerfect filters and Asian word processor filters
* Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
It looks like StarOffice is going to be a better bet for your needs if OO doesn't include the WordPerfect filters. And you get the cheesy clipart too!
And you get the cheesy clipart too!
Are you saying I should take that rotating donut gif off my home page?
Tom
Are you saying I should take that rotating donut gif off my home page?
Certainly not! Is adds a certain ethereal charm when strategically placed in conjunction with the spinning globe and the fluorescent hit counter. ;)
<added>There's no point zipping an .sxw file, because the compression used is standard zip compression already. Grab your .sxw and open it up with WinZip - the only difference between .zip and .sxw is the file extension.</added>
<added>There's no point zipping an .sxw file...
I only zipped if for rhetorical reasons to make the parallel comparison with zipped/unzipped Word files. I didn't actually expect any change in file size.
BTW, one thing OO does not seem to do which I use a lot in Word is the CTRL+char+char to get accented characters while on a US keyboard.
I discovered that you can change the input locale to "United States-International" and get the accents via dead keys, but it's a bit annoying (since you can accidentally fail to insert spaces as expected after quotes since the space merely cancels the deadkey). Better still is a small free app called AllChars. That tool just removed so much hassle from typing in forms and emails on a US keyboard.
Tom
My keyboard is only printed with the US layout, though, so you have to get used to knowing where the accents are - but you could easily order a keyboard with the proper layout.
I also use it for newsletters, inserting text boxes, graphic boxes, columns, and so on; and occasionally use it to produce decent if not perfect html....
1. Way back, version 4.1 or so, working on my MA thesis. I noticed a gap, something deleted, ten pages missing. Fortunately I had been backing up regularly and went back through versin after version and found that there was a "hole" in the document that grew every time I saved the document. Since it wasn't the part I was working on, I didn't notice until it got pretty large.
2. Beginning with version 6, I had files where the computer would just crash if you advanced the cursor past a certain very defined point. When I was printing the last draft of my first book (440 pages, 1800 notes) it took me a month to just get one full draft on paper. The computer would crash at various points. I was going around to computer labs all over trying to get a computer to not crash, but every one would die at the same corrupt spot in the file.
3. Most recently, using version 10, it crashed the program every time the file was loaded. This happened only on my colleague's computer, but we just got tired of losing work because of these corrupt files, so we finally decided to jetison WP, but I've been relatively unhappy with Word.
I've had to have relatively frequent recourse to something called Doctor6 or something like that, which lets you basically do "surgery" on WP files.
So far there are a few minor things about SO that are less than great (or I just don't understand). I wish I could do like Word and create templates that would define not only styles, but which buttons were available on the toolbars, so that different templates would yield different feature sets, but that's relatively minor.
Tom
I sincerely hope my WP never gets that gremlin!
Gosh. That's just plain WEIRD....
It can't be that weird, otherwise programs like Doctor6 would never have had to be written. I always prefered WP's functionality to Word, but it's quality control has been horrible. WP6 was one of the worst programs ever written. Then Novel came out with WP7. When Corel bought WP, they came out with a service pack to upgrade to 7.1, but it really wasn't a service pack, it was actually a complete rewrite of the terrible Novel code. Still, it was turned out pretty quickly by Corel. I think from about WP 4.2 until WP 9, the program was plagued by bad underlying code. They finally got it more or less back together with WP9, but it was WP 10 (aka 2000?) that was still corrupting files and rendering them unreadable. The only improvement is that these corrupt files no longer crashed the whole computer, but I suspect that's because of the greater stability of Windows, not because WP was any better.
The more I play with Staroffice the better
Reveal Codes - there is a plugin (macro actually) that's available that gives you this feature (not quite as advanced as WP, but pretty darned good). I had to learn a wee bit fo StarBasic and modify it to get it to show index marks correctly, which is one of the main things I use it for. This is a major missing feature from Word in my opinion.
Foreign characters. Frankly, I am comfortable with the US keyboard layout and always hated this about WP. I wrote various deadkey macros for WP to get similar functionality to what Word has, but they were always just a bit dissatisfying. Now with the AllChars plugin I mentioned, I have this in SO.
Also, I think that StarBasic and the Staroffice API are advanced enough that there isn't a whole lot you can't do in terms of customization given enough time and effort.
I'll have to try it for a few more months, but I may soon be dumping my last critical windows-only application...
Tom
