[Eug-lug] Word processor choices, WAS Sanity check on system rebuild fantasy

[marbux]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cherba <mcherba at gmail.com> wrote:
Though to be honest, I've been Quite happy with
> OpenOffice the last few years.  As Are all of the History Grad students
> in my Wife's Dept who I have introduced to it.

Not to set off a holy war here ... :-)

I use OOo for a few things, e.g., reading DOC files and converting
HTML to ODT. But I've found it horribly frustrating to use. E.g., to
get footnotes formatted the way I wanted for a particular document was
a 15-hour ordeal, with three separate and interdependent styles that
had to be modified. The cross-dependencies were a nightmare.

One OOWriter stone wall I hit was producing documents in law office
pleading paper format. I spark-plugged a team of several OOo
sharpshooters to develop a document template for that format. We came
close but finally had to abandon the project because we simply could
not persuade OOWriter to do it. See project outline at
<http://evc-cit.info/pleadingpaper/>.

A lot of formatting for complex documents that is trivial in
WordPerfect -- usually with four or five ways to do it -- is highly
problematic in both Word and OOWriter. That kind of flexibility plus
being able to see tokenized streaming markup in Reveal Codes really
beats the "my way or the highway" style dependency approach of Word
and OOWriter.

On the plus side, I think OOWriter 3.0 is looking to be far more
useful for academics than 2.0 was. The RDF-based bibliographic support
looks very promising in the initial public beta. But on the other
hand, if I were engaged in primarily academic writing, I'd likely want
to use Nota Bene (formerly Xywrite), <http://www.notabene.com/>. It's
spendy and has a substantial learning curve, but that's dramatically
outweighed by the mid-term productivity gains.

My major gripes with OOo, however, are that: [i] it's sucked virtually
all of developer mindshare from the market for competing FOSS apps;
[ii] Microsoft claims to hold 45 patents reading on OOo
(<http://tinyurl.com/64t4od>); [iii] Sun signed a Patent Covenant with
Microsoft in 2004 that gave Microsoft a hunting license to go after
OOo licensees for patent infringement,
<http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/0001193125-04-155723-index.htm>;
and [iv] OOo is non-interoperable with other FOSS apps via the
OpenDocument formats bridge.

Hype aside, ODF is anything but open; e.g., the spec is awash with
optional "may" and "should" clauses that all mask hard-coded
programming decisions in implementing apps; in like kind, the spec is
largely written in passive voice sentences that establish no
requirements at all;  and app-specific extensions are deemed
conformant.

FOSS has put way too many eggs in the OOo basket for my comfort. But
the short story is that we're still stuck in the era of
non-interoperable word processors and there is no single word
processor that is best for all circumstances. What works for me may
not work for others and vice versa.

I want to see Microsoft lose its monopoly in word processors. But we
need to be careful about what we replace the monopoly with.

Best regards,

Paul














-- 
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>