Shyam Mael wrote as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shyam Mael
I got on alright with Word and could roll with its foibles until I came to preparing a print-ready source file and a source file for eformatting. Kludgey is a good description, and many a frustrating hour has been wasted wrestling with what I came to consider a beast. I did find, however, that Mark Coker's Style Guide was a big help in both understanding the beast and actually getting it to do what I wanted, or more to the point, to stop doing what I didn't want it to do. My difficulties with Word didn't end with the reading of the Style Guide though, which eventually forced me back into the open arms of Open Office.
Rather than wax on about Open Office I'll just recommend that folk reading this give it a try. We all have different needs and preferences, which in themselves can shift according to circumstance. Ethics and economics aside, Open Office is another spanner in the toolbox. We indies should be packing a range of tools and strategies. From a practical Smashwords point of view, .doc files can be made in Open Office, and in my recent experience are as acceptable to Smashwords as files made in Word.
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This reminded me of the following article concerning StarOffice (the commercial version of OpenOffice.org) filters that I read a long time ago:
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/3857/1/.
The article covers some of the difficulties when using StarOffice to save documents in the MS Word format. It also covers some of the ways that StarOffice deals with the problems (such as saving the entire file in 16-bit Unicode mode).