Jim,
Your criticisms of the author are in the abstract, so I have no problem with
them. However, we're talking about a life-long journalist (they like
typewriters) whose interest is getting his message out. His goal, like most
Word users, is not to learn and do perfect desktop publishing but rather to
get their product out. He has a good sense of composition, has learned what
he needed to and, actually, the newsletter looks great IMHO in the MS Word
Viewer and all the bullets are uniform. The problem is the Oo filter, not
the author.
We have, in fact, talked about alternative forms/exports for the newsletter
but there are other very valid business considerations that constrain this
and which are unrelated to this issue. Ironically, we also put out several
newsletters but use either HTML or PDFs for distribution.
I, on the other hand, did do a lot of desktop publishing in the past and one
thing I find missing in Oo that is in Word is kerning. I often want to
tighten up a paragraph or character string and can't in Oo (unless I haven't
found out how). Most of our stuff is code-generated with tags in RTF (or
styles in HTML) and I find that Oo does a pretty good job of eating the RTF.
It made my transition pretty seamless.
The Viewer solves my immediate problem very nicely.
Jerry
"Jim Allan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jerry Clancy wrote:
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.
Yes, especially in the first two paragraphs in the main column where the
bullets are far too large. This area is mainly what is pushing the lower
paragraphs down the page. The left column isn’t bad at all in OOo on my
system.
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.
Of course I imagine that now the emphasis among OOo programmers is on
attempting to deal with the MS Office 2007 files, which I presume have a
documented structure. (Whether Microsoft actually works to that structure
is perhaps another matter.)
But basically, the newsletter seems to me to come out about as well as I
would expect one word processor’s document to come when converted to
another word processor.
And it certainly does not help that he seems to have no knowledge at all
about styles, just sticking in blank paragraph for spaces. He uses Word
like a typewriter. Doesn’t even bother with proper quotation marks.
I also very much wonder why your friend would not translate this
newsletter to PDF or even HTML. Publishing anything in a format only
perfectly viewable in a single product should obviously be a very bad
idea.
But I believe I've noticed a trend for Ecologically concerned people on
the web to be almost oblivious to the fact that anything exists for
putting out data except for MS Word.
So, again, I suggest you download the free MS Word viewer.
Jim Allan
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