>>>>> "jam" == jam <[email protected]> writes:
jam> On Tuesday 01 December 2009 09:00:04 [email protected] jam> wrote: >> Every now and then I get sent a Word document that I can't just >> ignore, or ask the sender to resend as plain text or PDF or >> something. >> >> Most of the time wvMime can translate the doc so I can read it and >> convert to LaTeX or something sensible. /usr/bin/strings doesa a >> reasonable job where formatting isn't important. >> >> Sometimes however, I get sent documents (usually full of tables) >> that purport to be in portrait orientation, but are actually >> Landscape --- wvMime (and abiWord on my one box with Gnome on it) >> attempt to display the doc on a portrait oriented a4 page, with all >> the text truncated at the right margin. >> >> How do other people deal with these weird documents? Is there an >> easy way to view or convert them (NOT using Gnome or OpenOffice or >> other heavyweight GUI tools)? jam> Although the borg is utterly evil and to be shunned, he does jam> produce some good software. crossover office and office 2007 work jam> so nicely that she-who-must- be-obeyed uses it for her committee jam> work every day with nary a glitch of any sort. Well... I find the user interface completely arcane, both in OpenOffice and in Word on a real windows box. jam> And, as emotionally challanged as I am to say it, (thinks of jam> Cleese, the window and a Fish Called Wanda) as she was an utter jam> neophyte (with office tools) who has never used winders in any jam> shape or form (so much hand holding was needed) it has been very jam> much easier to teach her word than OO. (I too have never neen a jam> winders user and have used OO since it was li'l) Hmmmm. Hmmm. I used to teach vi and troff+mm to neophytes. They got the hang fairly quickly in general. jam> The problem with OO is that it often screwed doc or docx jam> documents so they look nothing like the orriginal. Not good when jam> you're doing the minutes or agenda from templates. the problem with Oo is it ooms on my laptop (128M ram), and has a really weird structure to its menus and incomprehensible icons on my desktop (plus pulling in half a gig of libraries, etc.) # sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-writer ... Need to get 576.1MB of archives. After this operation, 1.2GB of additional disk space will be used. Is there a lighter-weight way to view word documents? Peter C -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
