Jonathon Coombes wrote:
On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 02:37 -0400, H.S. wrote:
Hello,
I am writing a technical report using Ooo 2.4.1 on Debian Linux. It is
an experiment to see how OOo performs for an engineering report or paper
writing.
Sounds like an interesting project.
In my experience, OOo has most of the features covered as far as text
body, headings and lists are concerned. Figure and table captions have
still somethings to be desired for but they work for most purposes.
Export to PDF is good, but hyperlinking in the produced PDF is not up to
the mark. Equations and math are also coming along great, though they do
not compare with LaTeX yet.
Maybe you could give some details as to the problems you have
experienced? Did you file a bug report or feature request to get
improvements into OOo?
As far as technical writing is concerned, the bibliography feature sucks
big time. Without this feature working intuitively and conveniently, OOo
will not be adopted by the technical writing community.
How do you define "working intuitively and conveniently"? Will your
definition also be applicable for say a doctor doing research using
OOo's bibliography? Does the technical writing community see the
bibliography tool in OOo as the biggest hurdle or is there some other
reason? How does the tool "suck" and can you describe your needs in a
more technical manner so that maybe some help could be offered?
I hope that this features is being worked on in the newer features. Any
news how it is coming along?
There are a number of different methods that allow OOo to be extended or
improved. One such way is via plugins. Have you seen the Zotero tool and
the plugin that provides intergration into OOo, as well as many other
useful packages and Internet sites? I would recommend trying this out
and see if that is more to your needs.
http://www.zotero.org/documentation/plugins
On the other hand, if this features is of low priority, then I will have
to conclude that OOo is not for serious technical report and paper
writing in its present shape.
Low priority for who?! It is of limited use to somebody who does
computer programming, maybe of some importance to secretarial workers
and it seems to be of major importance to technical writers. The
features however are rated and developed based on the needs of all users
and this feature may take back seat to something more important such as
database reporting or integrating draw capabilities better with Writer,
for example.
Regards
Jonathon
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I agree that the Zotero addon for both Firefox (and some other browsers)
and OpenOffice is definitely the way to go
Rob
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