Hello, Some of you will recall that I was writing a few short documents with OOo in the recent months. The docs were reports in the field of engineering. It was an experiment to see how OOo fares in this respect. OOo is, IMHO, more popular with non-technical writers in the sense that work on features that are most required by technical writers appear to be have low priority for the developers. Having said that, I have had positive feedback from developers on the few issues I have filed on OOo issues website. That was very encouraging.
Based on the experience of those few documents (in OOo 2.4, did not try 3.0, might do so when the final version is released), here are some of my observations (I have posted about these issues within the last few months in more detail, so you will have to hunt for them if you have any questions about them): 1. The feature to cross reference sections and subsections (called Headings in OOo) and list items is not satisfactory. At places it is just plain confusing and cryptic, if at all it is possible. 2. The bibliography feature requires tons of work. However, the free and open source Zotero bibliography manager seems to be a very nice substitute. It works as a plugin in OOo (and also in MS Word) and comes as a Firefox addon. In fact, I stopped using OOo's Biblio and switched to Zotero; main reason being Zotero understands many many more citation styles (including IEEE, which I use), and it is much more user friendly and actively developed than OOo Biblio. 3. There appears to be no easy method, or no method at all, to label subfigures within a figure. 4. Including eps files causes OOo to hang for a few seconds when it scrolls past the pages containing the graphic files. It appears to be a known issue (it has to render the eps figure using an external program each time is passes it!) and looks like it is not going to be solved anytime soon. Many researchers in engineering, maths and physics prefer to work with eps files. 5. Not very important for many people, and apparently not important to developers too, OOo does not support ligatures and glyphs in any easy manner. 6. This is more general. A grammar checker is really needed. It goes a long way in catching silly mistakes. The LanguageTool doesn't really cut it for this purpose in its present shape and form. Those are the most important observations I can recall at present. Some of these are apparently expected to be dealt with in the next version (cross references, for example). But most of these appear to be considered not important. Nevertheless, I am impatiently waiting for the next release to see how it fairs for technical writing again. After 3.0 comes out, I guess I will redo these experiemnts. Meanwhile, for any serious writing, nothing beats LaTeX and friends. :) BTW, I did not compare it with MS Word. Never really used MS Word for any serious document preparation. Warm regards. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
