OpenOffice.org — Still Waiting
OpenOffice.org Writer (OOW) is a decent piece of software, in terms of usability and features. One of its best assets is the ability to apply styles to any part or portion of the document, such as a page or paragraph. A ‘Heading’ style can be applied to all the headings, for instance, and a ‘Text Body’ style can be applied to the body of the paragraph. As long as styles are applied consistently across the document, the entire document can be updated in terms of fonts, indentation, spacing and alignment simply by modifying the original style.
When it comes to efficiency and speed, however, OpenOffice.org is floundering in the deep sea. The main program takes ages to load, and once it does, its menus and dialogs are still slow (even with 512MB RAM on an AMD64 3200+). Loading a text document shouldn’t be this hard. At the very least, backend editing features should be separated from the frontend document-viewing features so that viewing (as opposed to editing) documents is quick and easy.
OpenOffice.org has some level of dependency on Sun Microsystem’s Java. Java makes programming much easier than with C or C++, but it is way too slow for a desktop GUI-application, not inherently perhaps, but slow, all the same. I’m not sure if it is Java that is slowing down OOW, but I’m pretty certain it isn’t helping to speed it up.
If the next version of OOW does improve things to the point of not having to dread opening documents with it, then we can have some really useful comparisons between Microsoft Word, AbiWord, KWord and OpenOffice.org. Until then…
January 30th, 2006 at 06:47
If, as it seems, you like to change the overall look of a document easily, you seem like an ideal potential user of the non-wysiwig, markup-based approaches to typesetting, most notably groff and TeX. Unlike HTML, these markup languages are programmable, so you can physically separate the concerns of typesetting (for which you can use the work of others) and content pretty cleanly.
I find TeX pretty convenient: I write documents using a regular text editor such as vi, which is rather convenient, since I am so used to a text editor for writing other stuff (programs, email, notes) anyway. Also, since a document’s source is just plain ascii, it survives the various format metamorphoses that plague wysiwig systems, and is easily searchable and processable.
For ordinary text, TeX is just fine, but it shines for math. The TeX programming language can be a bit obtuse sometimes, but one can always rely on the fruits of other’s labors, because of the separation of macros and content. Graphics have to be embedded, but there are standard ways of doing it — indeed, you could plausibly create graphics using OOo’s Draw and embed the results in a TeX document.
TeX is quick too (and just as free and widely available as OOo — it’s a standard package, as teTeX, in Linux distros). Of course, speed doesn’t matter as much for TeX as for OOo, because the process of writing doesn’t require TeX to be up — you only need your favorite text editor for that. It’s only when you create the PDF or PostScript or DVI output that you call the TeX program. You can use third-party free programs (e.g., tex2page) to convert your document source to HTML too. That’s what I do for my Web documents.
January 30th, 2006 at 06:49
Ah, you need to let your commenters know how to separate paragraphs in our comments. My previous comment had about four paragraphs, which I separated using blank lines, but they all got eaten up on submit…
January 30th, 2006 at 07:11
Serendipity has a plugin called nl2br (newline-to-line-break) that I had disabled because it interfered with some tasks; I didn’t realize that was going to mess up the comments too. You see, the line-breaks weren’t really eaten up.
January 30th, 2006 at 07:19
TeX seem to be quite popular for publishing scientific and mathematical documents, and I’m currently in the process of cautiously prodding it with a long stick. I know what it’s like, but I haven’t yet mastered the syntax. I hope to do that soon.
January 30th, 2006 at 11:47
A good introductory (but hard to outgrow) reference for TeX is *TeX for the Impatient*, whose authors have made it available online as http://www.tug.org/ftp/tex/impatient/book.pdf . It is a much easier read than *The TeXbook*, the definitive TeX manual.
January 31st, 2006 at 05:40
Hi,
Nice to see you two figuring out the plug-in’s diet .……hmmm, line breaks– any idea if they are tasty?
just kidding
October 4th, 2008 at 14:46
[…] The Forgotten Future is a rather short story with a handful of sci-fi ingredients. The link is to a PDF file, created using LaTeX. For a previous discussion on TeX, check out the comments attached to this post. […]