[vox] Reasons for caution when promoting FLOSS

Alex Mandel tech_dev at wildintellect.com
Sat Jan 2 18:01:15 PST 2010


Brian Lavender wrote:
> Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)
> 
> So, it seems that I see a lot of this.  "See, OpenOffice (OO) does all you
> need. You don't need MS Word, WordPerfect, or whatever." But in the end,
> OpenOffice can be a real pain. My recent experience with OpenOffice and
> using its bibliography feature has been a real pain. The cost is that
> I invested time into learning OpenOffice because I believed it could do
> what I needed it to do. In the end, I am burdened with a tool that does
> a poor job for the task.
> 
> I believe we should keep this in mind when promoting FLOSS.
> 
> brian
> --
> Brian Lavender
> http://www.brie.com/brian/

Ah but MS Office can't necessarily do bibliographies well either,
reviews of the recent tool for it in the new version is laughable.
Even Endnote the best paid product is a royal pain.

I suggest you give zotero plugin a try to see if that helps you (Not the
main zotero app is a firefox plugin for cataloging your bibliography as
you find them online).

Otherwise my fallback is to use bibtex, write my own style sheet, spit
out an export and paste it into my final doc.

These all assume of course that I'm not writing a particular document in
latex.

Alex



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