Jerry Clancy wrote:
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.
I realize there are an enormous number of people who use Word Processors as if they were typewriters.
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.
Turning off typographical quotations in Word hardly makes the results look great in my eyes. It makes the author, however intelligent he may be in other ways, appear to be a typographical idiot. Which is normal enough unfortunately. People (including myself) are often very intelligent in some areas and very ignorant in others.
The bullets look uniform in Word. But something is causing Writer to misinterpret the size for the first two. I hope to find time in the next two days to go through the Word document in Word and see if I can determine what might be causing this.
That there are more than one way to do bullets in both Word and Writer doesn’t help. I suspect that the underlying structure between the two sections of the column is not the same. Note, this is not an attempt to excuse the incorrect translation into Writer, but to understand it.
What would be interesting to do would be to load this newsletter into other products that claim to interpret MS Word formats and compare the results. What does WordPerfect do, for example? Unfortunately I have no access to such products.
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.
Fair enough.
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.
Kerning in Writer is found in the character formatting window available, among other places, by clicking Format -> Character... -> Position. It is called “Pair kerning” in Writer. I notice that your friend doesn’t bother with kerning either.
I often want to tighten up a paragraph or character string and can't in Oo (unless I haven't found out how).
There are lots of other spacing goodies in that same window. As in Word you can modify word spacing or changed the proportions of characters to make them wider or narrower in respect to their height.
Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
