[ale] SO vs OO

[Bjorn Dittmer-Roche]

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004, Dow Hurst wrote:

> The big warts are the font, styles, and template differences.  The import and
> export filters may be better in Staroffice than in OOo.  I would explain the
> freeness and open source differences to your friend/customer.  But, the main
> difference between MSOffice and OOo/SO is the price versus bloat.  I have
> found for complex documents/posters or documents with special fonts and
> formatting that OOo will not open or save as MSWord/Powerpoint correctly.
> Most of the time I can open up the document or poster to get the info I need,
> but if I have to modify and resend back, then I just revert to MSoffice under
> CXoffice.  I might use Win98/VMware/MSoffice if I have that.  Whatever works.

My fiance uses OO and has font problems all the time when converting from
MS word docs. The biggest problem seems to be that some fonts are missing
directional quotation marks. When she imports a word document, instead of
doing something sensible, like using non-directional quoatation marks, it
puts in question marks. I tell her to select all and change the font until
it goes away and that seems to work, but I don't think that would be
acceptable in practice in a production environment, and it just feels like
something is really wrong (even though it's probably just lousy fonts). I
should say we had the same problem with both Knoppix and Debian stable.
Maybe some other distro or newer versions of OO have fonts figured out
better, though.

	bjorn