Sorry. I had to resend because an extra space at the end of the text
line ruined the table layout when reading from Thunderbird.
From [email protected] Sun Sep 27 20:32:40 2009
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:32:50 +0800 (CST)
From: Zhang Weiwu <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Market OpenOffice Draw towards "prosumer" DTP?
Hello.
I have been using OpenOffice Draw for five years for desktop publishing
purpose as a replacement of Microsoft Publisher 2000 (part of MS
Office), back in the year 2003 when I decide to switch away from
Microsoft Office. At current stage Draw is just one-step away from a DTP
software for "prosumer" market, which in my understanding is the biggest
DTP market segment now in China and probably also the world. By
"prosumer" I refer to those who have DTP requirement beyond word
processing software can offer yet are not usually DTP professionals.
Before going on the discussion please download these example
publications created using OpenOffice Draw to have an impression how the
result looks like when OpenOffice Draw is used for publication purpose.
Mind the 16MB size! with about 10 samples in it:
http://www.yuliansu.com/cc_works/publications_odg.tar
You can see most of these examples are difficult to do in Writer but
easier in Draw, and Draw provided all features necessary to make them.
I recommend to market openoffice Draw to this market segment as well as
improve software to suit this need. Reasons:
1. OpenOffice Draw can do prosumer DTP.
2. Office users need prosumer DTP products.
I recommend only a few (I guess less than 10% of the effort of making
Draw itself) improvement that can make it adapt to DTP needs. If your
email client software tabstop is set to eight spaces, you should see the
following table in the way I created them:
Feature COMPARISON table:
DTP requirements and how much OpenOffice Draw & MS Publisher
satisfy these requirements.
MS Publisher 2000
| "Must" for prosumer DTP
| | OpenOffice Draw 3.0 (2009)
| | | Prosumer Features
| | | |
[The "MS did it better 9 years ago than we are doing now" group]
Yes Yes No Even/odd page can use different page setting
Yes Yes No Text frame linking
Yes Yes No Rich template + meta data management (e.g. phone number)
Yes Yes No Fast loading
Yes Yes No Justified alignment in text frame
Yes Yes No Wrap text around object
Yes Yes No Bleeding and corner mark
Yes Yes No Booklet layout
Yes No No CMYK color space
Yes No No More colors to choose from
Yes No No Color-set management for each publication
Yes No No Color-to-alpha for raster images
Yes No No On WYSIWYG show only preview but not load image
Yes No No Outline finder for raster images
Yes No No Repeatitive line pattern or its pattern clipart
Yes No No Page background pattern into page margin
[The "Now we are doing better than MS 9 years ago" group]
No No Yes Editable document should be in a standard format
No No Yes Any object can hold text
[The "We now don't have them, neither MS Publisher in 2000" group]
No Yes No Multi-column text frame
No Yes No Perfect vector image import for various formats
No No Yes Multi-layer
[The "Even MS didn't do them in 2000" feature group]
No No No Objects on non-current layer not selectable
No No No Text along curves
? No No Smooth shades for objects with parameters
Note that I left out all the "prosumer features" that is
available now in OpenOffice Draw. If I enclude them, this list's
length is trippled with "Yes Yes Yes" features. Haven't used MS
Publisher for 6 years I also could not compare OpenOffice Draw
to the latest MS Publisher.
Best regards
Zhang Weiwu
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