On 12/11/2008 03:43 PM, VLM TechSubs wrote: > > > -----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.
Interesting statement. > > 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. Publishing what? Are you comparing OOo writer with a desktop publishing application? If so I think you need to realize that OOo can indeed be a desktop publishing suite if all of the modules are utilized and understood (Draw, Writer, Calc, etc). > > 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. You must be joking. How long did it take you to set up a valid and working document template in FrameMaker? My bet is that you have old templates that you "just use" and forget. Some years ago I was assigned a tech document assignment to convert tech documents writen in MS Word to FrameMaker; $50,000 (1990 era dollers mind you) and untold man/women hours later we finally were able to standardize on a set of styles, templates and other document definitions so that we could convert the documents and continue to create new FM documents from those templates. If FrameMaker suits you well, and if you can afford it, then by all means have at it. It's about $899: http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/ Of course don't forget to add in the cost of requiring Microsoft on each and every machine that will use the document: - Operating system - FrameMaker - Adobe Acrobat - don't forget that you need to distribute those FM documents via PDF to those that don't have FM (cost is around $299). > > 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. No, it doesn't. Your "intent" seems to be to compare OOo (free) with over $1,200 in applications from Adobe (not counting the costs of the MS operating system, costs of hardware to run those systems, etc.). If your "community" is interested in how to make a conversion to OOo and other opensource software then I think that you'll find help here. But only as long as you take the time to vist, review, and apply the OOo documentation and support information from http://support.openoffice.org/index.html However, if your objective is to continually compare OOo against FM and desktop publishing applications in general, then you've not provided any convincing arguments. Yes, there are issues for searching for '^p' - it's a regex issue that others have told you how to overcome. But there is the same issue in FrameMaker (unless they've modified FM since my 5 year old installs). Explain how you do the same in FM - I certainly can't seem to find a way in my version. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
