On Linux platform, anyone here have a comparison between Writer and
Textmaker 2006, purely (and purely - please do not mention non Microsoft
Office features that I know OO.o is superior on, such as pdf export) on
basis of compatibility with Microsoft Word 2003 (or XP) for complex
documents (I mean figures, tables, cross-references, etc. - the works) ?

I wish to know about how well does two way exchange between Word and either
of these two products compare in terms of retention of precise formatting
etc. I am not looking for merely a rudimentary ability to read and write
Word files or to generate approximately the same result. I imagine perfect
compatibility is too much to ask for but something very close would be a
major improvement on what I have now.

The reason I ask is because I am quite dissatisfied with the way
Openoffice.org Writer is unable to enforce formatting for complex
documents - I work in a place where everyone else is a Windows user and
uses Word and when I exchange documents with other people, the formatting
is often all askew (the two products here are OO.o 2.0.4 and Microsoft Word
2003), with figures often thrown out of place and more importantly, their
captions completely mangled. The cross-references are also messed up. The
upshot is that I then need to fire up a virtual machine, run windows XP and
use Microsoft Word 2003 to fix these things. The two step process works,
but it is needlessly time and effort consuming (and I always have a lot of
figures and captions in my documents - 2 to 3 to a page sometimes). Not to
mention irritating, considering how slow virtual machines are. I do not
wish to use Xen or some other hypervisor and mess up my otherwise
beautifully configured Debian install and cross over office does not do a
good job with Microsoft Office 2003.

Left to myself, I would prefer to use LaTeX and give people nice looking
pdfs that WYSIWYG editors (Word, Writer, etc.) can only dream of, but that
is not an option here. TeXmacs is also not an option as it does not o/p doc
files (or at least I have not heard of such a thing).

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