[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[martin yazdzik]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 10:57 -0400, Henning Follmann wrote:


> And most important most users  
> have no idea about typography and how to create a document with  the  
> right layout, font, etc. for the right job. And some try to make up  
> for this shortcoming by using color, which actually make things worse.
> 



> There must be a better way of creating documents.
> 



> 
> Henning
> 
> 


As a non-programmer, who had to ask about a dozen times how to do
something in oo only to find that it is not necessarily possible, I have
to agree.

Here I am trying to write ten algebra problems, a few latin sentences,
and a short story edit for a twelve year old, and have to use three
different programmes?

And the bulleting cannot really be turned off in oo, even if one so
specify in the template?

Office xp, when I had a windows box simply told me what to do, without
taking at all into account that I might not want to do it, then, as soon
as  I got the doc to look the way I wanted it crashed, losing about the
last four minutes of work, because it saves every five minutes.....

abiword makes .docs that look majorly wierd when opened in an ms
environemtn, and so on.

what is needed is a wysiwyg that emulates, god forbid, an old fashioned
typewriter, so I can choose where to put numbers, like

1.

2.

2.a.

and format when I want to, and not have to take fingers off the keyboard
to enter something called "character"  just to change an font colour,
and so on.


The oo writer is probably great for a professional, latex is overkill,
and there is nothing between plain text and frames for a poor bloke like
me.

Sorry for the rant, but Henning is right.

Now, my docs look great, because I can do primitive typesetting, but why
should I?

In the old days, a laywer may have typed more slowly than a secretary,
but there was no need to sub-specialise the way we do now.  There are
people who only type letters and those who only type briefs, and some
who onyl fill in pdfs.  Seriously.

We need a back to basics program that also looks great, is flexible, and
does not require more than a trip to help to do what needs to be done
for everything from typing a math quiz to writing a doctoral thesis with
slides and footnotes, and that does what the e u wants, rather than what
the programmers think would be cool.

Thanks for listening.

-m