Re: Tool for document management
* Steve Lamb <grey@dmiyu.org> [070924 23:21]:
> First off Word suffers from the same problem. I found out the hard
> way on one of my scripting projects. So there's precedent. The
> second reason is that OOo developers have stated, many times, that
> the format's not designed to be manipulated by anything other than
> OOo so no consideration is given to either human readability or to
> the usefulness of other tools. That, too, I found in reading up on
> putting ODTs in some sort of repository.
As a writer and programmer, it appears to me that it is OpenOffice --
rather than SVN -- which is unsuited for the application which is the
basis for this thread.
I use XEMacs daily to produce LaTeX documents. I have frequent need
to search my archives of material I have written in the past, and I
use grep for this purpose. It is difficult for me to imagine an
advantage offered by OpenOffice which would compensate for the
inability to make use of grep in searching my archives.
Moreover, I learned the hard way the potential cost of a proprietary
file system for document storage, when, as the calendar rolled over
from A.D 1999 to A.D. 2000, M$ Word 5.0 for DOS began writing garbage
to document files (one of the few genuine Y2K bugs). It was that
experience which prompted my rapid migration to GNU/Linux and EMacs.
RLH
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