On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 19:42:50 -0500, KBenn777 wrote: > > I am a starving writer and professional poet and have recently discovered > the Open Source community and OOo and have been thrilled. I love the > spirit of it, the community aspect, and if I go Open Source I definitely > want to contribute (I have been a technical writer in the past, albeit > not a very good one). Not to mention that Microhard (as in "hard to deal > with") really pisses me off and I want to wean myself of MS altogether. I > am starting a two-year project on an unusual novel and am under intense > pressure to commit either to MS Word or OOo for the long term and to do > so very soon. I tried to do a disciplined comparison of the two programs. > And before I approached the OOo community for help I did my best to find > my answers in help documents so as not to burden you with trivial > questions. Unfortunately my comparisons got so Byzantine and confusing > that finally I wasn't sure if I was remembering something from MS help > or OOo documentation, so now I'm turning to you. The following > problem may seem trivial to most and something that definitely should > not prevent me from going OOo, but for me it feels like life or death. > Please allow me to explain. In the fantasy novel I am writing, I use > many shapes and a plethora of symbols/special characters to form what I > call "dream mathematics," which involves relationships between > symbols and text aligned on shapes (especially a diamond). This means I > make heavy use of drawing toolbars and trays of special characters. MS > Word has a fairly robust collection of basic shapes and I expected that > Writer would exceed that. But instead I found a very short and > impoverished drawing toolbar. While in MS Word I can just click on a > diamond shape, apparently in Writer I have to make a square and then > rotate it. And so this means that any text I have inside of it is > rotated too. So I have to put a text box on it for horizontal text.
Kevin Since you are thinking of the long term, it would be worth having a look at the forthcoming ooo2 snapshot - notice it's not recommended for production use. You can download from http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html There is a drawing toolbar with sets of shapes which are similar to the ones offered in Word, though they are organised differently BTW I noticed your message (written in Word I believe) was coded in ISO-8859-13, which on my system is Baltic. Could switching character sets be causing your other problems? -- John [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
