Re: Open Office 1.0.2 formats differently on different OSes
Dragan Cvetkovic <d1r2a3g4a5n.NOSPAM@SPAM.t6h7t.net> writes:
> Gianfranco Berardi <linuxmail@gbgames.com> writes:
>> Basic problem: The formatting of the page is different in Open Office for
>> Windows than from Open Office for Linux.
>
> It's probably the same behaviour as it is in MS Word: your formating
> depends on a lot of factors such as default printer, fonts installed, paper
> size configured etc etc. Check yours and friend's configuration.
As OOo does not save the exact formatting (i.e. line breaks and such)
but only the actual text and formatting instructions (such as
paragraph breaks etc.) it is quite normal that the resulting layout is
not exactly the same on systems using e.g. different fonts. Although
this may be unpleasant in some cases I think this cannot really be
solved and is most certainly not a bug.
The situation with M$ Word is far worse (and I don't think this
happens with OOo) because formatting depends partly on the printer
installed. This behaviour is truly annoying (and unpredictable) and
could therefore be considered to be buggy.
The only way around the problem with OOo is to make sure you have
exactly the same font with the exact same metrics on all your
systems. If you then still have problems you may have found a bug and
should talk to the OOo people about it. Earlier StarOffice versions
sometimes had problems with non-ascii characters not being mapped
correctly between different charsets but I would suppose that the
current OOo file format takes care of that.
> If you want the same formating everywhere, use TeX :-)
You would get the exact same problems with TeX or LaTeX if your fonts
had different metrics on different systems. The reason this does not
happen is that LaTeX usually uses fonts provided with the LaTeX-
distribution which are the same everywhere.
To really solve the problem (at least for printing) you need to use a
file format that is not centered around the document structure (as are
LaTeX and the OOo format) but is layout oriented like Postscript or
PDF with embedded fonts.
Ciao,
Jens
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