[ale] Anybody writing chemical equations in OpenOffice?

[Brian Pitts]

Paul Cartwright wrote:
> found this:
> http://www.linux.com/feature/118986
> 
>  OO Writer is useless for scientific writing as it lacks important plug-ins!
> Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 132.187.161.101] on October 13, 2007 02:47 PM
> Absulute majority of scientific writing in biomedical, chemical and
> social sciences (which together constitute for absolute majority of all
> scientific papers published today) is done using your hated M$ Word.
> Why? Because managing of citation databases required for any scientific
> paper depends on EndNote or ReferenceManager - these are plugins for MS
> Word, both Windows and Mac versions. No any such plugin for OO. Untill
> that OO Writer, AbiWord etc are USELESS for scientific writing! Yes, I
> know that LatEX has something for managing references... which will take
> me a LOT of time to learn (I have my scientific objectives to
> concentrate on....), and the data (working citation databases) will be
> not shearable within scientific community. Yes, I know that LaTEX is
> used widely within engineering community, but that's completely
> different story.

Just as there are free software alternatives to Microsoft Word, there
are free software alternatives to EndNote and ReferenceManager. Some of
them even plug in to OpenOffice. Exchanging citation databases is not a
problem; almost any software can handle RIS or bibtex.

There's a good list of options on the OOo wiki:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Bibliographic_Software_and_Standards_Information

-Brian