MS Word under wine/crossover office

[Tyler Smith <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca>]

Hi,

I am getting really frustrated with exchanging documents with
colleagues who only use Word. I am quite happy now working with LaTeX
and BibTex, but in the course of my work I have to deal with WYSIWYG
documents where formating is critical. latex2rtf is mostly adequate
for this purpose, but I run into problems when I check the document
over in OpenOffice only to find that when the same document is opened
in Word the formatting is screwed up.

I do support the Free Software ideal, and to this end I have started
applying my humble C coding skills to bug fixes and adding features to
latex2rtf, and I try and advocate for open formats whenever
appropriate. That doesn't address my immediate problem of annoying
people who I can't afford to annoy at this point in my career with
sloppily-formatted documents.

Which brings me to my question: do any of you have any experience
using wine or crossover office with MSWord? Does it work? If it is
possible to produce true, well-formatted .doc files this way then it
will definitely be an improvement over hunting down a computer running
Word under MSWindows to check my submissions. But it needs to be
completely identical to regular Word - if I have to check the
crossover/wine Word version with native Word I won't have saved any
time. Is this possible? Any other suggestions regarding producing true
.doc formats without resorting to installing Windows would be welcome,
but in this case OpenOffice is definitely not good enough. It's great,
of course, but not when it comes to exchanging .doc files with
critical formatting intact.

Thanks,

Tyler