Jim,
Good idea. The author is a good friend and wouldn't mind the doc being
posted for this purpose. Download it here:
http://www.billtrak.net/temp/EP_May_19_2008.doc.
He uses AGaramond for the logo, a non-std. font, so that may normally look
odd. In general the conversion isn't bad but a lot of extra spacing seems to
be added.
Look at the main box to the right ("NJ Politics").
* There may be as many as three font shifts in each bulleted paragraph
(headline, body, link).
* Too much space is added in the box so that part of the penultimate story
and the last one are lost, requiring elongation of the frame of reduction of
font size. Doing the former results is all sorts of frame repositionings.
* The bullets are rendered in varying sizes.
* Tabs are set where there are none in the substories (e.g., "> Pennachio
didn't report...".
* The page 1 footer has rolled to the top of page 2, again the result of all
the extra spacing during the conversion, and this has a ripple effect as
well on the next page.
I mitigate some of this by changing Default to 8 or 9pt. and Heading 1 to
10pt but it often isn't enough.
Actually, I am impressed with what does get converted but this spacing issue
is apparent in almost any Word file I import (and I set off all the "add
space" options in Writer) and were it solved the document would render
almost perfectly.
Excepting the AGaramond font, all renders well in Word 2000 on another of
our boxes (but not the one with mail).
Not a top priority at the moment so don't spend a lot of time at this. It
would be nice, though, to get a solution to this even if it's simply changes
to the default template.
Jerry
"Jim Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Jerry Clancy wrote:
>> Oo can't even save to an old Office 2000-compatible format or read them
>> well. I also receive an important newsletter created by the author in
>> Word 2002 every day and Oo almost makes it unreadable because of the way
>> it doesn't handle boxed text, spacing (adds a lot) and mixed fonts in the
>> same paragraph. Making the adjustments to make the daily document
>> readable just sucks up too much time.
>>
>> I went with Oo on my new box in lieu of handing MS yet more money but the
>> reality is that we must deal with a world that demands we pretty
>> seamlessly move between Oo and ALL versions of Word, like it or not.
>
> I dont dispute what you say.
>
> However Ive been working with OpenOffice Writer at work for about 5 years
> now and part of my work involves converting letter copy sent to us by
> clients to put into mail-merge print programs. We have a large number of
> clients and the letter copy often comes in Microsoft .doc format and some
> clients are very fussy about formatting.
>
> But the only problem Ive encountered is the occasional graphic not
> appearing in exactly the correct position.
>
> In short, we are constantly converting from .doc to .odf without any
> difficulty.
>
> You might post a copy of this newsletter to some place we can copy it
> down, if this is allowable. The difficulty might be ... and I'm only
> guessing here ... that the editor of the newsletter is using a feature or
> features in Microsoft Office that most people dont use, for example
> setting word spacing to WordPerfect standard (which is actually much
> better than default MS standard and is narrower); but OpenOffice doesn't
> support WordPefect character spacing.
>
> > This two-way
> > conversion should be a top priority for the Oo team, IMHO, because
> > lacking it severely inhibits its adoption.
>
> You may not realize how often people claim that some feature that they
> want should be top priority for the Oo team. The trouble is that there are
> so many such top priority features requested.
>
> But you should be able to use MS Word Viewer to read your newsletter. That
> is a free product.
>
> See
> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3657CE88-7CFA-457A-9AEC-F4F827F20CAC&DisplayLang=en
>
> for the viewer.
>
> Jim Allan
>
> Jim Allan
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