RE: [SLE] help with battle to switch to SuSE
-----Original Message----- From: Anders Johansson [mailto:andjoh@rydsbo.net] Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 9:52 AM [...]
On Friday 15 November 2002 15.44, KMcLauchlan@chrysalis-its.com wrote:
I've been trying to work around OOo's lack of capability (compared to FrameMaker)
I've seen you mention this a couple of times, and I have to say I'm a bit befuddled about it. I freely admit I've never used FrameMaker, but from what I've read on the net it's more a Desktop Publishing program than straight word processor. MS Word doesn't compete with FrameMaker, and OO Writer is a Word competitor.
for desktop publishing you should probably look at TeX, LaTeX and the various tools associated with it
Couple of things: 1) OOo does use the "frame" model and is potentially more useful as a FrameMaker substitute than Word. That is, OOo was designed by people who have used FM and other tools and who recognized what's good about FM...even if they couldn't incorporate it all... 2) I'm the only FM user at our company -- everybody else uses Word, and they are annoyed that my docs are not readable/editable in the "standard" tool. 3) If/when we switch to Linux, I'd love to keep FM, but Adobe has said that there's no business case for porting it. So, given that I would need to switch to something, and that the rest of the company would need to switch to something, then it would be best if we all switched to the same app -- if it'll do the job. FM is actually a strange bird. It is DTP, but not in the usual flashy, fine-typographical-control mode of Quark and other programs that you'd use for magazines and marketing literature. Rather, it could be considered a word processor for people who are serious about doing documents. It's more stable and solid than Word. It has better features for doing the kinds of things that you do in long, complex documents with lots of cross-references, variables, conditions, etc. My point was that OOo has a great deal of the potential for being a "FrameMaker-Lite", and I could probably get it to do what I need, even if I had to bend it a bit to get some of the stuff that FM does more naturally... but I keep wasting so much of my Linux time on broken stuff that I never get to spend concentrated time with OOo. I suppose that I *could* just switch to Red Hat and then I could get to the tool, rather than endlessly futzing with the infrastructure... It might make my IT people happier, too. I just really, really hate to admit defeat. :-) /kevin
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KMcLauchlan@chrysalis-its.com