MS Word vs Open Office Word

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

Hitch, the multi-spacebar reminds me of an incident long past, back in good ol' DOS days. Our office (US base here in Japan) purchased a Zenith computer with TWO floppy drives. (Such swank!) Our software was "Peachtext" Office Suite (similar to version of MS Works /MS Office, they later became Peachtree accounting software).

They decided the secretary needed to learn to use it, and sent her to Korea for a 2-week school. After she had all the special skills, she was tasked to type up all the military-type regulations that applied to our operation. Skip forward 3 years, she has departed, I am delegated to edit the Operating Instructions. Each of these is multi-page, sometimes 15 to 20 pages each. Plain vanilla text, with footers for page numbers.

She made a separate file for EACH PAGE because she did not know how to add a page break.

So, about 1200 files...

Holy Mother of G-d. I mean...we get manuscripts all the time with each chapter in a separate file (I'm sure that somewhere in time, there was a reason for this, but with today's computers, for basic text?????), but that one...that takes the cake.

I will say that the blinding ignorance of copy centers boggles me. I see scan after scan after scan here, of existing books that are imaged, not searchable, pdfs. What the holy hell???? I mean. WHO does that and why?

Hitch

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Holy Mother of G-d. I mean...we get manuscripts all the time with each chapter in a separate file (I'm sure that somewhere in time, there was a reason for this, but with today's computers, for basic text?????),
Hitch

For epub I thought doing that was a good thing because it ensured that you got a page break at the end of each chapter?

[Tarana]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I would recommend LibreOffice over Open Office:
.....

LibreOffice is actively developed, while Open Office has pretty much been abandonware for years.

Not disagreeing with your recommendations, but OpenOffice was updated last year.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by lumpynose

For epub I thought doing that was a good thing because it ensured that you got a page break at the end of each chapter?

Yes, it's best if each chapter gets its own HTML file.

Also, there's a ~300 KB filesize limit you should keep in mind. Many older ereaders with low RAM wouldn't be able to handle it.

Originally Posted by Hitch

I mean...we get manuscripts all the time with each chapter in a separate file (I'm sure that somewhere in time, there was a reason for this, but with today's computers, for basic text?????), but that one...that takes the cake.

Master Documents... but yes, probably 99.9% of the people doing separate documents aren't doing it for those reasons. :P

From what I gather, Google Docs also chugs if you have very large amounts of text in a single doc. Can't say I've seen the sluggishness with my own eyes, but maybe these people are working on very low-powered laptops/netbooks.

Side Note: In the LaTeX community, there's also a big push for separate files per chapter. Makes Version Control so much easier, and allows you to easily include/move/remove chapters.

Again, probably not the types of customers you're very likely to see. :P

Originally Posted by Tarana

Not disagreeing with your recommendations, but OpenOffice was updated last year.

Apache OpenOffice is on extreme life support (and has been for years).

From the Apache OpenOffice Wikipedia article:

In September 2016, OpenOffice's project management committee chair Dennis Hamilton began a discussion of possibly discontinuing the project, after the Apache board had put them on monthly reporting due to the project's ongoing problems handling security issues.

There are only a handful of developers left (less than a dozen).

And Bug Fixes are extremely small. If you look at the amount fixed between 2017-2019 (4.1.4-4.1.6), it's... pathetic:

OpenOffice 4.1.5 Changelog
OpenOffice 4.1.6 Changelog

Compare this with one release of LibreOffice:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.2

LibreOffice went from 5.4-6.2 in that same amount of time. It's also been releasing and patching consistently for years, and has dozens of active developers + hundreds of contributors.

Quick Political History: On the OpenOffice Wikipedia page above, you can see a map of the split:

2011. Oracle purchased OpenOffice. Huge rift caused, and LibreOffice (and nearly all the developers) split. Oracle drove OpenOffice into the ground.

2012. Sold to Apache. They tried to salvage what was there.

2013. Apache OpenOffice 4.0 incorporated a lot of the LibreOffice 4.1 fixes.

2014+. More and more stagnation. Extreme life support.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by lumpynose

For epub I thought doing that was a good thing because it ensured that you got a page break at the end of each chapter?

Not for a word-processor. And not for cleaning the things. We prefer a SINGLE file and WE will do the breaking up of the master document. I mean...think of it this way, I can clean one file, or 80 files? Which would you rather do?

:-)

And in response to Tex's post--yes, that's my understanding. OO is definitely on the last hairy leg of life.

Hitch

[Notjohn]

There are other and perhaps better ways, but I use Word2CleanHtml dot com to scrub all the garbage out of Word 2007 for an ebook. I open the clean html in Sigil and massage it there.

But for a print edition, while I do much preliminary work in Word, I switch to OpenOffice Writer to finalize the book. The menus are much simpler (I only do this once or at most twice a year) and the PDF Export more robust. (I've tried LibreOffice but didn't see the value added sufficient to master a new interface. I'm sure it's just as good, but for my purpose it's no better.)

I do have a reason for favoring Word for active writing and editing. I am an unreconstructed WordStar user (I use it every day, in "document" and "non-document" mode). A compassionate Englishman named Mike Petrie created a Word add-in that replicates most WordStar editing commands. This doubles my typing/editing speed once I have committed myself to the Microsoft option.