Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
My Mileage Does Vary - I'm a member of a group of over a dozen contributors who have collaborated to create and publish in excess of 150 long form journal articles over the past several years using MS Word and/or Writer on Windows, MacOS and several Linuxes using DOCX exclusively.
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The things that go wrong editing the same document in docx multiple times on LO Writer rarely affect appearance or print. The changes are more subtle.
Going between widely different versions of Word that support docx can make subtle changes as much as Word <-> LO Writer round trips.
It very much depends on what features are used and if end result is PDF, print or import to something else (like Calibre). There is also more than one version of odt and MS "doc" is a minefield of versions, several of which can't even be opened in current MS Word.
I have various versions of Word for Windows, Wordpad and even MS Works on different VMs and actual HW. And historically Wordstar 2000 (long before year 2000) was actually completely different DOS format and DOS program to earlier CP/M and DOS Wordstar.
This is a problem as old as computers. At least I've not had to deal with EBCDIC for many decades, but even up to 2003 I was using some email that was 7 bit ASCII and no Unicode etc and many older wordprocessors were 7bit and used 8bit ASCII code space for various formatting. The only Perl script I ever wrote and debugged removed all soft returns and generated 7bit ASCII paragraphs from one version of Wordstar format. The files came from 3" and a 3.5" Amstrad floppies mounted using the last mobo I have that has a floppy port and can run a current Linux (USB floppy drives only read FAT12 MSDOS format). That machine also has a Z80 emulator, vanilla CP/M on that and a "Joyce" PCW emulator that works with real boot disks. All of that came as "compile it yourself" C source and a nightmare getting all the dependency libraries. I won't build that again ever. Makes installing Win 3.0 on DOS Box seem simple.