30 Jun
2018
30 Jun
'18
6:47 p.m.
On Saturday 30 June 2018 11:12:24 dep wrote:
re. openoffice --
many thanks. i might take you up on it, though i remember a very unhappy
experience with an ibm compile of openoffice a couple of years ago.
at the moment i am on a photo assignment and i can say with unbounded
delight that though tiny the GPD is an excellent portable picture editor
when combined with the GIMP and gThumb (thugh the latter suffers from GTK
tiny font disease under TDE. (oh, for that 200 percent button in the
GTK-handling configuration tab in kcontrol!)
in a couple of hours i'll be seeing if it's useful for writing a 1100-word
story on deadline in, i guess, kword (or else a logout and login to gnome
to use abiword).
dep
They have deb packages, so you don't need to compile from source. True enough,
it's a little tricky to get it properly installed the first time; but now
that I have messed it up several times before you, I think I have got the
order of steps down to an almost surefire routine. Once installed, it's a
breeze.
By the way, I ran OpenOffice on an Android phone, as well, for a few months,
and occasionally run the Portable Apps version from my flash drive, too, when
I am forced to use a public computer.
What I like about OpenOffice is that it still does everything I want,
configures to match whatever desktop I'm using, and also, since it's
cross-platform, I don't have to switch between various formats. (When I open
up Abiword docs in OO or LO, I usually see formatting marks that need to be
cleaned up. KWord also did not perform too well.) With OO, I can use the same
documents on different systems, and they don't get messed up; only when I ran
the rotten Apple did I have some minor problems.
The most trouble I have with OpenOffice is whenever I need to convert from/to
Word doc or docx (but it still works!). The only other serious problem I've
had is in joining the parts of a dissertation for another person (where the
page numbers are changed from Roman numerals to Arabic, and change from
bottom footer to top footer, etc.). There is an extension that does this kind
of thing pretty well, sort of, but it still leaves a little to be desired.
But it doesn't sound like you are working with any documents with those
problems.
Anyway, let me know. Instructions are kept ready in a file, refined patiently
over several long dark system reinstallations of the soul.
Bill