Karl Sinn said the following on 03/05/2012 08:32 AM:
did you try Scribus?
Good point. Sometimes we get too focused on the mechanisms and forget the objectives. Perhaps the objective isn't MS-Office/Word compatibility, not least of all since different versions of MS-Word show incompatibilities (??bug fixes??) with themselves. I've seen/heard many complaints that documents produced in one version don't print out exactly the same using another ... different page breaks, automatic spacing and things like that. Perhaps the problem is that MS-Word tries to be all things; not just a 'front office typists word processor' but a desktop publishing system. I've seen people use Word and Powerpoint to do graphics design when they should have been using a graphics tool instead. Why? Because they were familiar with it, I suppose. There are tools and templates from Avery that let you make up things like business cards using MS-Word. That's OK if you just want something very simple and basic. But when I tried to do something more sophisticated - but still "just text" - word-as-desktop-publishing (and OOo) couldn't cut it. I used scribus instead. In due course I used the results of scribus to order cards from Staples - they had a special on and it worked out cheaper than buying Avery stock and inkjet ink. Was the quality better? I'm not enough of an artist to tell. But after a couple of hours learning curve with scibus I felt it was easier to put things exactly where I wanted them and make things look like I wanted. Scribus has templates for newsletters and stuff and stuff. But lets face it, there's also HTML and PDF. How do you want to present things? Yes, I expect business cards to be printed out, but precious little else. Most of the physical mail I get is flyers and adverts. I read the news on the 'Net. I pay bills on the net. Do you expect people to print out the newsletters you send them? Did you print out the Suse newsletters that Sascha Manns sent each month? They were PDF and HTML, I don't recall what tool he used to produce them. The bottom line is this: There are better 'desktop publishing' tools available than MS-Word. For most values of "better". -- The biggest problem a security consultant has is getting managers to perform regular risk assessments. They don't want to hear that it's an on going process. The attitude was "why bother if I can't just check it once and be done with it". -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org