Openoffice writer

Discussion in 'Writing Software and Hardware' started by OurJud, Sep 4, 2015.

  1. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    Bummer.

    I guess that leaves us with no universal file format. Such is corporate thinking. (sigh)

    And I sympathize with your feelings about LibreOffice although my complaint was different. I'd rather they didn't provide that 'desktop' start-up window and didn't make me dig into the installation folder to find icons for each individual programme.

    But this might actually change now. I read yesterday that OpenOffice (upon which LibreOffice is based) is suffering from a lack of developers which means LibreOffice (which doesn't have this problem) may take over as the front-runner in the FOSS office software niche. Perhaps they can be pursued to fix this nonsense.
     
  2. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    I just did a Google and found their home site. Having looked at that, I now remember this software. I considered it a while back, but because I already had Scrivener, I didn't wanna pay for a second software package to do (essentially) the same thing.

    Also, their color scheme in the screenshots sucks and I didn't wanna take the chance that it can't be easily changed. And of course, I'm not keen on software that isn't out-of-the-box sane.
     
  3. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Lord, you write in Latin???? You'll never get an agent. You'll never get published. :) It's so last couple of millenia....

    Anyway, what you're needing to look at is something called Styles in Pages, and maybe Styles in other programmes as well. There must be an equivalent in other wordprocessors that are reasonably advanced when it comes to formatting. This allows you to set the style you want your document to use, including not indenting the first paragraph, but indenting others. This is the place where you can set your opening line to begin with an enlarged first letter, etc.

    I've never really mucked around with Styles, but that's where you should maybe look?
     
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  4. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    @jannert - I even joined the OO forum to ask if they could offer a solution, but no one could suggest anything that did what I want.

    The main problem is when I add a blank line to indicate the passing of time. I do this a lot and as you'll know, the first line following one of these breaks should not be indented, but I've not been able to find a way for it to automatically remove the indent following a blank line, and then return to indents for subsequent lines.
     
  5. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    Just to clarify, that's Lorem Ipsum, a designers' fake Latin-ish tool used when presenting proofs of concept to clients. It's meant to keep the client from focusing on content so they'll see just the design. :)
     
  6. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    Well, it's true. It doesn't mean that the world hasn't embraced it, just that Microsoft had their own agenda when they developed it and part of that agenda was to force everyone to their standards which would, in turn, force everyone to buy their (often clunky) software.
     
  7. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    Spoil sport! @jannert had me down as intelligent for a while there!
     
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  8. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    I can't keep it straight which people on here self-publish and which are holding out for traditional publishing, but...

    I don't worry about this because I figure it's not a big deal when submitting.

    On the other hand, I've never tried to set up paragraph styles in OO (or LO) so I don't have any advice on that, but I would think that's the key to solving this conundrum. Have you tried Googling "paragraph styles in OpenOffice"? That might be your best bet.
     
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  9. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I'm disappointed, but I'll get over it.
     
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  10. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Some things were changeable, like the "desktop" within the software. If you look at a lot of the images online for it, you can get a feel for the when of LSB. It has that era of Myspace look to it with all the crazy backgrounds. ;)
     
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  11. Michael Pless

    Michael Pless Senior Member

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    It is the key, and once you learn how to do it, it's straightforward and very powerful as well as a great time-saver. There are multiple references on how to do it on the web. Here's one (although it goes on about things like page styles, the relevant info is there):

    There's bound to be YouTube videos on it too.

    Anyone publishing to Smashwords will have to learn how to use paragraph styles.
     
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  12. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    Yes. I wish these software developers would stop all this 'extras' nonsense and just concentrate on producing a solid product aimed at its core audience. (sigh) But what-cha gonna do? They believe they have to compete with flash-bam products and there seems to be no changing their minds.
     
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  13. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    Yes. And recognise that things as basic as wordprocessing don't need to be changed every 5 minutes. Fair enough if a developer wants to add extra bells and whistles, but they shouldn't mess with the core product. And my big gripe at the moment is how Pages hides the stuff you need to work with, and puts the stuff you won't need in a million years front and centre. I needed to change a font the other day, and you wouldn't believe the palaver I had to go through to get to the 'new and improved' font layout. It worked just fine up on the toolbar in previous versions. And the 'special characters' which I use a lot, are now hidden away as well. Why? Before, they were called 'special characters' and were instantly accessed from the main menu bar, under Edit. Now they are listed under emojis and symbols, and when accessed, aren't actually there. Until you visit the 'library' and find them, and add the ones you want to use to your 'frequently used' section. Grrrrrr....

    Seriously, wtf is this? Or, what the hell use is it to somebody who is a writer looking for a foreign accented letter to insert into a word or sentence? User friendly? I don't think so.
    symbols.png
     
    Last edited: Sep 6, 2016
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  14. Michael Pless

    Michael Pless Senior Member

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    Agreed and also with @Sack-a-Doo! One of the reasons I turned so gratefully from Scrivener (to WriteItNow) was the difficulty in actually doing things - I didn't like the Apple-ness of it, and got heartily tired of hunting for things that ought to be easy to find, and were in other software. My conviction that Scrivener's UI needs attention remains strong, but like all software, the people behind it want it to be used and the way software writers go about this can be very different, so maybe my difficulties lie in part with me. (3D modelling software is a great example of this, with no two applications possessing the same UI, or so it seems.)

    LibreOffice (particularly Writer) is in great need of a UI update - I was part of the mailing list for a new UI when it was OpenOffice. After years of discussion, there seemingly was zero progress, although the powers-that-be focused much energy on the presentation software, some of which is in use today, I think. But Writer is still in the Dark Ages and will probably remain so for some time.

    (My suggestion of putting essential commands in a context menu under the cursor was ignored, largely. Does anyone, with a 30", high-definition screen want to move their mouse from the lower right-hand corner to the top left, to insert a table, for example?)

    @Sack-a-Doo! On the issue of indents and paragraph styles this link: /home/michael/Dropbox/Public/exampleofstyles.odt - is to a document with some easy examples that I've set up. There's two series of paragraphs, the second of which you can apply styles to. Place the insertion pointin each paragraph in the first set, and note what style appears in the drop-down box/list on the formatting toolbar, below the "File" menu. (With the IP in the "Notable Title", the drop-down box will show "Title".) You can try different styles in the second series, but I suggest you keep the first for reference until you're used to things. The first unindented line has the "No Indent" style attached to it, and if you open the "Edit Styles" dialog, you'll see that the following paragraph is "Text Body" (use the Organizer tab) so once you hit return, the next paragraph is set for you. If you prefer the indent to be larger/smaller, just change the "First Line Indent" setting ("Indents and Spacing" tab). There are many settings to experiment with. If you have any problems, it might be easiest to PM me. All the best.
     
  15. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    So that's what it is. Having never really used an Apple product (except for a dubious flirtation with an iPod years ago) I didn't realize this.

    That was one of my complaints, too. Things were made worse when I realized the Mac-centric video tutorials often led me astray because they don't develop from a common code base for all platforms. I know Objective-C is a cross-platform language, so I'm not sure why that is. I was once told by someone at Scrivener that Windows and Mac users had different expectations as to where things should be found in the menu system, but I think uniformity across platforms is far more important... especially when tutorials are only made for one.

    Also, their choices for where to put options/preferences/config stuff seems really random, all over the map... in the Windows version, at least.

    Yes, you're right. I've had a few run-ins with the Blender folk who just don't get that their UI should be designed for the filmmakers and artists who use it, not computer programmers who know tons of math. But whaddaya do?

    Yup. Which is why I stick with MS Word as much as I dislike supporting giant corporations... not that I really do. I paid $35 for Word 2003 on eBay and no way am I updating until/unless I absolutely have to.

    Thanks! If ever I make the switch, I'll check that out.
     
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  16. Martin Beerbom

    Martin Beerbom Senior Member

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    I write a lot of less essential stuff with Pages (semi-official letters, or such, communicating with bureaucracies) and didn't even notice that they removed the .rtf compatibility. I'm about to abandon Pages, though I like the UI, simply because it appears to be fairly locked into proprietary file formats that very few, or only one, app could open. (I looked a bit on the inside, and the core format is a google developed binary format that's optimized for compression and easy and fast cloud transfer. So there's hope it's not completely locked down.)

    Re. .doc/.docx. A lot of professional publisher unfortunately take only .doc/.docx as their format to submit. So we need apps to produce this. I don't know how much leeway authors have to get rid of it, because from a strictly rational standpoint, it's one of the worst formats for exchanging that only somewhat reliably works if all parties involved settle on one particular app version from one vendor (one Word version from Microsoft). For the time being, we're stuck with it, and unfortunately are very likely to invest in Office 365 Business subscriptions if you want to submit to sell. .rtf is a better choice (still not ideal). .odf seems a tad better (it's open, but app vendors need to select it to support when they develop their apps). plaintext seems the most future-proof version, but it lacks a formatting standard. .html could provide that (which is still human readable), and there are tons of programs that can read it.

    Re. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice. There's been discussion who's the 'official' successor of OpenOffice.org (OOo) since the split (when OOo was donated by Oracle to the Apache foundation). From my POV, it became fairly early clear that LibreOffice has a better stand on being the 'official' successor (most developers switched to it, and they wanted to continue with the better licensing model that OOo had already switched to, but Apache would not or could not (per foundation statutes) support this licensing. And Apache very soon went into managing problems, a lack of developers, and a lack of update releases. However, since Apache continues with pretty much the same name, I am not surprised that people do not know this and continue with OpenOffice despite it's problems. But I try and explain it whenever I find that it appears to be unknown.
     
  17. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    If this happens, I don't know what I'll do. I'm not crazy about jumping onto that (obvious) cash cow.
     
  18. Wreybies

    Wreybies Thrice Retired Supporter Contributor

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    Aye, this be true. You know well how much I love Scrivener, but I admit - without any begrudging - that the software is unapologetically Macish. What I have seen of the Windows GUI tells me that the port to Windows in no way tries to hide its Mac origins unless forced to by internal Windows functions that just can't be gotten around. If one is not a fan of Mac, this can be off-putting when it comes to Scrivener. To be fair, though, most ports from Windows to Mac have the same dynamic. MS Word on my Mac looks like an alien invader with an insane number of doodads up in its multi-tier tool bar. To quote dear Jan, to a devout Mac person, it looks like a dog's breakfast.
     
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  19. Steerpike

    Steerpike Felis amatus Contributor

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    I'm not a Word fan, but I routinely switch documents between Word 2003, 2010, and 2016. It doesn't cause me problems, and these are more complicated than fiction manuscripts. For a traditional-style word processor I'd rather use Google Docs.
     
  20. Michael Pless

    Michael Pless Senior Member

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    The process is the same in Word. I believe later iterations of Word can open ODT files, so you could give it a fly. If not, sing out and I'll convert it. Word used to have a nifty "Outline Styles" feature (it may still have!) - you could create styles for say, a series of chapters (big headings) where you'd broadly define major content, then a lower-order style for scenes and what's to happen, then lower order again for brief indications of the action and so on. You could switch styles on and off too, allowing you to see the overall structure of the novel. I think that by using different font colors, you could tag the subplots. LO allows this, but their system is a little obtuse for me. (I loved Lotus WordPro - its outline styles were just brilliant. It also trounced Word for long documents features. But that was then...this is now... <sigh>)
     
  21. Sack-a-Doo!

    Sack-a-Doo! Contributor Contributor

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    I never get that fancy. I edited my 'normal' template so it's double-spaced, TNR 12 pt. and that's it. Anything else, IMHO, is typesetting and comes waaaaaay after I'm done and washed my hands of the whole thing.

    I suppose if I were self-publishing, I might feel differently, but then again, I'd likely switch to a FOSS epub/lit formatter... one job, one tool, but that's the UNIX user in me rearing its ugly head. :)
     
  22. Martin Beerbom

    Martin Beerbom Senior Member

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    I know it's just anecdotal, but...

    The worst incompatibility reading text files I have ever encountered was between an up-to-date Word:Mac (2011, ostensibly the same file format as Word:Win 2010, .doc chosen for backwards compatibility) and an slightly not fully updated Word:Win XP (2002). As in, the file produced no human readable content when opened in Word:Win XP (I had written 1997 originally, but that seem too old. I double-checked.) The same file opened perfectly in Pages, OpenOffice (on Win, Mac and Linux), and newer versions of Word (older versions than 2003 couldn't be tested by us due to lack of availability :)). Our team had exchanged numerous manuscripts this way, and never encountered problems. So far, the cause remains undiagnosed (a fresh start by exporting from either Pages or OpenOffice, NOT from any Word version :), achieved continued working with the manuscript). Since then, I'm wary of using Word, or more precisely any Word file format, as primary working format/app.
     

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