[ale] OpenOffice Draw for Site Maps?

[Michael H. Warfield]

On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 09:49 -0500, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On Fri January 30 2009, Scott Castaline wrote:
> > > how do you do 2 & 3 in linux.. my tax lady does Quickbooks..
> >
> > 1. You just admitted that you can do that in Ubuntu so that's one less
> > fer winders.
> 
> right, I run thunderbird on windows/ubuntu on my laptop, so no matter what OS 
> I am in, it looks the same..
> 
> 
> > 2. Not a perfect fix but check this out; http://www.linux.com/feature/41026
> > Also have a look at this, it's for the Enterprise Edition, I would
> > imagine that the lesser versions would eventually follow since M$ is
> > trying to kick Intuit's A$$ with Magellan;
> > http://about.intuit.com/about_intuit/press_room/press_release/2007/06-13.js
> >p So possibly this may soon be one less reason to keep winders
> 
> The software starts as low as $3,000,
> ah, NO.
> 
> > 3. xsane will scan to a PDF, there is an option to save directly to PDF.
> > I have the HP Officejet Pro L7780 which uses the same drivers, at least
> > for scanning. I'm not sure off hand what the CLI command is to do it
> > though I remember running into it, just never really had a need for it.
> 
> I seem to recall fighting xsane before on this scanner, or maybe it was my 
> Epson Perfection I tried.. didn't work. Right now I have my workhorse Epson 
> R380 plugged into my Debian Desktop, shared so my wife can print docs from 
> her Vi$ta laptop. my HP5610 cable sits next to where I plug in my laptop when 
> I get home, so I can scan docs & print.. I kinda like that setup. Of course, 
> if I could hook the HP to Debian, and get printing AND scanning working, that 
> would be fine also. Nothing like trying to print something, the cartridge 
> goes empty, and yo have to shuffle things around to print something, while 
> you go online to order another cart:)

> > 4. OOo's native world is Linux, so, bye bye winders.

	Really?  I know a number of people using OO on Windows, though I
recommend Go-oo rather than OpenOffice.org.  Ubuntu has Go-oo as default
and that, more or less, is the Novell fork / varient of OpenOffice.org.
Another enhanced OpenOffice.org varient is Oxygen Office and Lotus
Symphony is yet another.  I've replaced OpenOffice.org on my Fedora
system with Go-oo 3.0 from the Go-oo site.  I don't care about the
political bickering between the two camps.

> I keep pushing this to people, but I've gotten bad reviews from some that the 
> formats don't translate well back & forth. Both spreadsheets & word DOCs 
> loose formatting when going back & forth from home to office.

	Formats have generally been a matter of fonts more often than not.
Virtually all of my formatting issues evaporated when I installed the MS
foundation fonts ages ago on my Linux system.  OTOH, macros and VB can
be a real problem.  But that can be dealt with through go-oo as well.  A
large part of my work is technical writing and reviewing and we're
exchanging marked up documents, including graphics and charts, between
Word and OO all the time with no significant problems (color changes on
the marked up change tracking is about it).  Within IBM itself, we have
several areas where they are not even allowed to use MS formatted
documents and the internal authoritative standard is odf.  AFAICT,
interoperability has not been a major problem.

	The one real pain I've run into is when June (my wife) switched to
Ubuntu just before sending out our Christmas letters last year.  She had
to figure out how to do a mail merge onto label sheets.  THAT was
PAINFUL.  Most of the documentation is wrong, to put it mildly, and it's
counter-intuitive to say the least.  She did eventually find
instructions out on the web that helped her figure that out.  Now she's
quite happy and exchanges Office docs with others all the time.


	Mike
-- 
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
   /\/\|=mhw=|\/\/          | (678) 463-0932 |  http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
   NIC whois: MHW9          | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
 PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471        | possible worlds.  A pessimist is sure of it!

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