Re: [libreoffice-users] Book-writing with Writer

> For example, several years ago, my 14 year old son challenged himself
> to type a 50,000 word novel in November, which is National Novel
> Writers Month. He met his goal, and quickly dropped the project.
>
> As a proud papa, I wanted to put his document to paper. He wrote the 
> original in WordPerfect, and it was a formatting mess, with stray
> tabs, carriage returns, and inconsistent formatting across chapter
> and section headings. I began the task of reformatting his 127 page
> novel using WordPerfect, the original program. It didn't take long
> for me to realize it would take days and days to wade through all of
> the formatting codes inserted by WP.

I have to say that unlike MS Word and its clones OO and LO, Wordperfect
*does* allow proper use of styles for "structure markup". Among the
dozens of different document processing applications I have used over
the past 25 years, Wordperfect was one of the best for authoring
strongly structured documents, at par with Framemaker. Unfortunately it
fell into the hands of an incompentent company (at Corel).

Obivously, nothing (besides Indesign with a *competent* typographer
in front of it) beats the typographic output of LyX/LaTeX, so if you
want to produce a PDF ready for print, there's no other choice. I even
use it for letters.
 
Until they get redesigned to implement a proper "structure markup"
style concept and correct typographic features (all line- and
page-breaking algorithms from LaTeX are open-source), LO and OO have
their value mostly for "generating" documents from databases.

Sincerely,

Wolfgang

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