Marcelo Acuña wrote:
hello,
a question rised in a free soft forum. I
propposed latex/lyx and another person question:
Why lyx/latex and not open office with styles?
What I said about it?
Well, test both! Are they equally capable?
I use LyX out of habit - openoffice did not exist when
I first needed a word processor on linux.
I haven't used openoffice that much, it is mostly a reader
for the word & openoffice files I get in the mail.
Still, I know that the typesetting capability of latex is tremendous.
I wrote a book in LyX, and the publisher printed it the way
latex laid it out.
I sort of doubt that openoffice is _that_ good. It is word-compatible,
and word isn't. Also, openoffice tries to break lines on screen the
same way it does when printing. That means it has to use
fast algorithms for line breaking, and it is hard to get those
good enough for properly justified text. No surprise that
openoffice defaults to ragged right then.
But I see no reason to use lower quality in other writing, than
I use for published books. LyX manages this, after all.
Justified text is default, like it is in any book or newspaper.
And the justification is good - there is not excessive white
space between words, and not too many hyphens either. And the
hyphens we get are correct for the language in use. Can openoffice
do this? I don't know. If you want to know, render a few pages of
justified text with openoffice and LyX. Then look at the results.
Is the automatic hyphenation ok? Is the spacing between words
ok in every line?
Then make up your mind.
Helge Hafting
