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MS Thinks OOo is 10 Years Behind
greengrass writes "In a recent interview with IT Wire, general manager of business strategy for the Information Worker Group at Microsoft, Alan Yates expressed the opinion that Open Office is at the same level that MS office was around 10 years ago. Supposedly only suitable for the single desktop, isolated user. After all, it doesn't even have an e-mail client!"
As is Mozilla Thunderbird.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Maybe you should try Abiword. www.abisource.com It's an open source and simple word processor. I have three office products installed on this computer. Word Perfect came with it when I got it, I downloaded Open Office, and I bought Microsoft Office 2003. Still whenever I just need a word processor I pop open abiword. It works great.
Its international support (for East Asian languages, at least, which I use heavily) really doesn't seem to be up to snuff. It's better than Office 97, by far, and probably better than Office 2000, but not as good as Office 2003 with the Proofing Tools pack installed (adds fonts and utilities for a variety of language needs). OOo basically cloned some of the Chinese/Japanese formatting from MS Office, but not all of it and not well enough. There are lots of very specific things it's nice to be able to do with East Asian text (notably vertical text and interlinear/supralinear comments) that OOo doesn't do very well.
Not a big thing for everyone, but essential for some.
.sig withheld by request
I mean, M$ has pleasing to look at icons, whereas OO has old Windows 3.1 looking icons.
I think Jakub Steiner would probably take offense at this statement. I mean, the dude spent all this time designing a huge set of icons for OpenOffice. Now, why OpenOffice doesn't actually uses them, that's another story.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
*sigh* For the mods who don't get the joke, the site linked is satire. Surely the poll at the side saying "Should Mac/Linux/Windows users intermarry?" might have tweaked a few neurons.
Pretty easily.
LaTeX is hopeless for anything that doesn't use a Latin character set. I've been trying on and off to get it to display Japanese for years, with no success. A couple of months ago I finally got pLaTeX to output a Japanese DVI that I could preview in a special Japanese-enabled DVI viewer, but I'm buggered if I can get it to print.
Quite simply, the TeX system was designed to typeset scientific papers written in English, which it does brilliantly. But for other tasks, it simply hasn't kept up with technology - as soon as you leave the core areas, it rapidly degenerates into layer upon layer of flaky hacks. The existence of LaTeX-generated Japanese PDFs proves that it's possible to get it to do what I want... but life's too short, and OpenOffice.org just works out of the box.
I now generally use Abiword as my main WP on Linux, at least for first drafts.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That's crazy talk. I've used XeTeX to write Chinese for years.
Screenshot of Chinese/Japanese Unicode support.
All the beauty of TeX, all the ease of unicode.
I don't know about Japanese, but I never had any problem whatsoever with Chinese in LaTeX, and since the name of the package I use is CJK, which stands for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, I don't see why Japanese would be any more difficult than Chinese. For me, it just worked straight out of the box, with TeTeX on Debian system, and both MikTeX and TeXLive on Windows.
AccountKiller
I used to use LyX a lot, I think it has the only usable equation editor I have ever seen, but ever since I started using Vim with LaTeX-suite, I completely abandoned LyX, because I can type so much faster in Vim. Maybe if LyX had vi keybindings, I would give it a try again.
AccountKiller
One of the few things I can think of that I like about MS Word over OpenOffice Writer is that MS Word's word count feature understands the difference between space-separated, word-counted Western languages and non-spaced, character-counted CJK languages. In a mixed-language document, MS Word's word count function will tell you how many Western words there are and how many Eastern characters there are, whereas OpenOffice Writer will return what are effectively garbage values, a total count of all characters (Western and Eastern together) and total count of all "words" as it tries to count blocks of CJK text as single words.
1 7964
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=
This is the sort of thing that one could write a macro to accomplish, though.