On Monday 20 November 2023 11:49:34 jacobheinrich--- via tde-users wrote:
I know its a bit off topic but why OpenOffice instead
of LibreOffice? Open
Office seems to have commits done just for the fun of it with no new
features. There has been some tension in the two communities because
OpenOffice holds the name/brand power knowing full well all active
development is done on the LibreOffice fork, yet refuses to even
acknowledge that.
Yeah, I know that OpenOffice *seems* to be stuck and going nowhere fast. But
for me, it's practical.
When I have LibreOffice open, first of all, I cannot see well enough any more
to make out the text in the GUI. I have taken other people's suggestions, and
made a dark theme, then forced it to fit, but I still am unable to make it
out, and must get my nose right up to the screen to make out anything.
Second, I tend to be one of those people with a lot of documents open,
sometimes really big documents. I can't help it; it's just how I have to work
a lot of the time. With LibreOffice, if I go away from that screen to do
something (whether related or not), then come back to the LibreOffice screen,
I sometimes must wait five minutes or more for the LibreOffice interface to
appear. It takes literally five minutes, or more, before I can do anything.
By that time, I often forget what it is I was going to do (revision, adding
new text, whatever).
Much of my work involves moving between plain text documents, an office
program, KPDF (because I make pdfs on-the-fly for proofreading, in lieu of
having a printer ready to print out drafts. (I am trying not only to write a
book, but to create a print-ready pdf; if not for actual publication and/or
distribution, then at least to use as a mock-up, to show a printer -- or
publisher, editor, whoever -- how I want it to look; only, of course, with
their help, I hope, even better.)
Also I am making song charts for myself and fellow musicians with whom I play.
This is very tedious work to make out arrangements. But the process is mostly
the same, except at the end I take a snapshot from the pdf to create a jpg
(something smaller that can be viewed on, say, a smartphone screen).
Again, LibreOffice is ungodly slow when I have more than a few documents open.
It doesn't do what I want or need much of the time, and it annoys me that
Debian and Devuan install it (and keep installing it) by default, and it's
hard to get rid off all the bits of cruft left over when I uninstall and
purge it from my system. (There's one way that AntiX, and maybe MX, is
better, because the versions I try don't install LibreOffice by default.)
When I install OpenOffice, *poof!* all these problems are gone. OpenOffice is
fast, and it uses my system fonts, colors, etc., so I can see it. It does
what I want.
I hope that this rant is enough to answer your question.
;-)
Bill
P.S. But I am still interested in looking at your bash script, to see if I
could use it as a template for myself, then modify the script to suit my own
needs. I hope that the above rant does not put you off from generosity
towards your fellow TDE users.