Re: [libreoffice-users] Question about LO Writer and "complex documents"

Hi there!
I've had experience working with LibreOffice and "complex documents". Back
in the days of Libre/OpenOffice 3.x and Office 2003, Writer was much better
than Word in handling large documents with complex formatting and a large
number of included objects (say, around 100 pages, with around 150
equations, plenty of figures as included graphics and diagrams and
book-like formatting using custom style sheets).
I understand this has changed somewhat now, with newer versions of Word
being increasingly capable of dealing with such documents.
LO Writer for me has been a solid performer in this area with each upgrade,
no big changes in functionality. I've written a book lenght technical
manual in it, and it performed superbly.
What I've never managed to achieve was good interoperatibility between
pepople using Word and LO Writer. Once an ODF, doc or docx file pases back
and forth, format details are always altered somehow, sometimes to the
point of ruining the work. It would be great if there was a format that was
really *lingua franca* between the two applications, but I do not think
that is viable.
The main complaint I've observed regarding different capabilities in MS
Office and LO comes from people that expect both products to work exactly
the same. Commonality exist between them, but each one is it's own product,
with different design, coding and debugging standards.
For large documents involving small contributions from lots of people, I've
successfully used a manual "patch" approach: I kept the "master" copy of
the document, with page and line numbering on published as PDF for
download, and accepted corrections from contributors in pure text, doc, or
odt format, and then merged them manually in my master document and
republish. It's labor intensive, and I do not think it scales well, but it
saved me a lot of time and arguments. When writing these kind of documents,
I really miss being able to have the same facilities that are available
while coding (version control with automated patch/merge funcitonality and
conflict resolution)
I hope this helps.

Pablo Dotro

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Dan Lewis <elderdanlewis@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 07/24/2015 09:31 AM, Tom Williams wrote:
>
> > Greetings!  With all of the recent discussion about Linux being a viable
> > alternative to Windows, in today's computing world, I've read many
> > comments about whether or not LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS
> > Office.  Some say yes, others say no.   One common comment made by those
> > who say no is Writer isn't good for "complex documents".  For "basic"
> > word processing, it's fine.
> >
> > Question:  in what ways does LO Writer "fail" at editing or creating
> > "complex documents"?
> >
> > Does anyone here have any experience with LO Writer and "complex
> > documents"?  If so, what has your experience been (either good or bad)?
> >
> > I know I haven't actually defined "complex documents" but I haven't seen
> > any definition of that in any of the comments I've read either.  So,
> > I'll leave the definition up to whatever you would consider a "complex
> > document".  :)
> >
> > I've submitted on LO Writer bug where Writer didn't handle Word
> > documents with pages with different page orientations well.  I was
> > helping a friend with a term paper and most of the paper was in portrait
> > orientation, but a few pages were in landscape.  LO Writer treated the
> > entire document as either portrait or landscape but couldn't handle the
> > mixture of both. I think that's been fixed, since I reported the bug.
> > That's been about my only experience with a "complex document".
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Peace...
> >
> > "The other" Tom
>      Is the problem with Complex documents really about the complexity, or
> is it about using LO and?Word on a complex document?
>      I have been working with ODF Authors to create documentation for
> OpenOffice.org and then LibreOffice. I consider these document to be
> complex.
>
> Dan
>
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-- 
Pablo M. Dotro, The Mage of the Many shadows
wizard@elysium.com.ar    pdotro@df.uba.ar
pdotro@gmail.com Twitter: @Pablo_El_Mago
http://www.blog.elysium.com.ar

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