-----Original Message----- From: Brian Barker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 5:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [users] WRITER: Search for [...] Invisible Characters, ...
>Other products provide searching for para ends and other "special >characters". But I am realizing that Open Office is tied to MS Office >to an extent that a great myopia exists, all the way down at the >paradigm level. This is an odd statement. Are you saying that you think that OpenOffice chooses to decline to allow you to see the paragraph break as a character because it apes Microsoft Office in this respect? I believe that is not true: that Microsoft Word, on the other hand, does allow you to search for paragraph breaks (as ^p, I think). I think OpenOffice's choice is to be different here, not the same. Brian Barker --------------------------------------------------------------------- Yes, WRT this specific detail, I agree. I mean my comment in a larger sense, that OO Writer follows an overall approach to authoring and publishing laid down during the 1980s by Microsoft (and others). None of these products seems to me well-designed to support any sort of organizational standardization, nor to publish long documents consistently and _with ease_. Within the scope of this comment, I incorporate the entire approach to numbering, extremely cumbersome and with little benefit (and even deficit) over other approaches I've experienced, the entire approach to placement and management of graphics, and much more. All these are inheritances from Microsoft (and others), in the general sense, and all are therefore limited in the same paradigmatic ways. In my own opinion, OO Writer offers a very nice alternative to MS Word, a word processor. But it does not make the leap forward, or upward, or whatever direction one wishes, into structured, standardized, template-based, consistency-driven publishing. Again, that is my opinion only. I do think it's a great product within a certain range of use. My present project simply happens to fall outside that range of use. Our community is committed to using free and open source software wherever we reasonably can, and that commitment has not changed in the least. But the cost of design, training, and the like must be considered in the equation, and for one specific area of our work, a product like Adobe FrameMaker or even Adobe InDesign serves us better. Scribus is a possibility, over time, but not yet sufficiently mature. I mean no offense here whatsoever, I'm only interested in finding a solution that serves our community well for what we are doing now. We definitely intend to use OO for many publishing purposes, both now and in the future. Just not for this particular set of projects. I hope this clarifies my intent. Best regards to all, Elchanan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
