[cw-discuss] Miserable 6.0 experience...

[Bodvar Bjorgvinsson]

I understand, but if you have to revise such documents, I do not envy
you. I have had to revise a lot of Word docs and many times you have
to start from scratch and copy/paste the content or parts of it from
the old file to the new. You even have to copy it into a text editor
first to ensure that the text is clean.

My choice has been FrameMaker. Even though it does not by default
support things like form fields etc, you can add a lot of such things
into it by adding some minor PostScript code (which you can do from
within FM) and PDF it, which usually is the end format anyway.

Further, it is robust as steel, and the code is clearer than the
waters on the Bahama beaches. It is easily scriptable with
FrameScript, exportable/importable to/from SGML and XML, etc. HTML and
Help files can be easily made too.

You change layouts in minutes without fear of loosing information
etc., and, simply put, it is much faster in creating most new
documents and revising them than Word.

Most companies that start using FM on their manuals, do not go back.
Even MicroSoft uses FM to produce much of their documentation.

I am not writing this because of hate of M$ Word, only I hate to see
people struggling endlessly with the problems it cause, when they
could be mostly free of it.

CodeWeavers would IMHO do well to speed up the work on adapting
FrameMaker to the system.

Happy fighting with Word. ;-)

Bodvar

On 2/16/07, James E. LaBarre <jamesl at bestweb.net> wrote:
> Bodvar Bjorgvinsson wrote:
> > What I cannot for the life of me understand is why Linux users are
> > bothering trying to use M$ Word on their Linux installations. Why not
> > Open Office? The only thing I have found out to be "better" in the M$
> > Office are Excel and PowerPoint.
> >
> > M$ Word IS GENUINE JUNK and has been proven so by all too many. Basta.
> > My experience of M$ Word in publishing has at times been disastrous.
> >
> > If you are doing something really serous, you have Adobe FrameMaker
> > and the old-fashioned TeX/LaTex.
> >
> > With OOo you can save your work in M$ Word format and not loose a
> > thing, unless you are doing some very complex job.
>
>
> Well, you answer your question right there, "...unless you are doing
> some very complex job".  Unfortunately, "complex" doesn't necessarily
> mean the document *content* is complex, but that the formatting is.  And
> if that's the sort of documents you have to deal with on a daily basis,
> and have to do 2-way exchanges with MSWord users, then unfortunately
> MSWord is the only way to go.
>
> I can say I encountered one of those documents just last week.  I had a
> job application I needed to fill out, and the people in CTG's HR
> department made the document extremely complex, with check-boxes laid
> out in a complex order, and pop-up dialogues for filling out each text
> field (but no hint, I must say, of what each field was when it popped
> up).  In OpenOffice (2.0.4), the checkboxes were scattered all across
> the document, nowhere near where they should be.  Of course, since the
> newest version of MSWord I have is MSOffice95, OOo was my only option
> anyway (tried it in AbiWord and KWord, it was *worse* there)
>
> That being said, you are right that the MAJORITY of documents for MSWord
> could readily be done in OOo, KWord, etc.  Just as how I find OOo Calc &
> Gnumeric do everything I have ever needed to do with MSExcel
> spreadsheets.  As for that application document I had so much trouble
> with, I should see if I could get permission to send it to the OOo
> developers as a test document for future versions.
>
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