[vox-tech] Anyone mess with Open Office out there?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Richard Burkhart (richard@khanfusion.net):

> I've tried a LITTLE of open office (mostly on Dick Ely's machine when
> I'm over there) ... it seems to work ok for translation of basic word
> documents.  Haven't tried it with the documents I have to do at work
> -- heavy-formatting/table of contents & figures & tables fields,
> footnotes, etc.

There are ways to optimise performance:  You can enable TrueType
byte-hinting to benefit certain early typefaces such as Arial (the
Helvetica knock-off) that use Apple-patented hinting algorithms -- if
you're paying patent royalties to Apple.  You can configure the program
to use MySQL or PostgreSQL for the database features.  You can retrofit 
typefaces from some source that has a good set of licensed ones, e.g.,
any copy of SO 5.2 you might still have.

Please see, in http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ :
openoffice.org-fonts   
openoffice.org-mysql.pdf  
openoffice.org-postgresql 
(etc.)

When you consider that Microsoft Corporation's MS-Word/MS-Excel document
formats (and probably others) are essentially just the applications' RAM
state written out to disk, and given tricks like embedded OLE calls,
it's a wonder that their own applications can parse them -- and, indeed,
often they have problems.  

-- 
Cheers,                   I once successfully declined a departmental retreat,
Rick Moen                 saying that on that day I planned instead to advance.
rick@linuxmafia.com                  -- Alan J. Rosenthal, in the Monastery