Re: why ABIWORD?
On Sat, 30 Jun 2012 11:16:04 +0200
Francesco Pietra <chiendarret@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello:
> With my i386 wheezy, a today update/upgrade led to libreoffice (text)
> not launching. I resorted to abiword, new in my experience. I found
> abiword in great troubles with tables made by libreoffice odt.
> Suddendly, abiword was able to destroy nearly completely the content
> of the big table.
>
> Should my experience be representative, it would be better not to
> propose text editors that are unable to do what they should.
>
I'm happy to keep both. I find Abiword able to display some Word
documents which LibreOffice cannot, and vice versa. I'd have to be
fairly desperate to actually create a Word document with either, or
even edit one.
Don't forget, Word itself is extremely poor at maintaining document
formatting across versions or even with a different printer selected.
Word has never been a DTP application, despite large numbers of people
thinking that it is. It is a document processor, designed to maintain
the flow and order of large volumes of text with embedded tables and
graphics, without much attention to layout. I'd use it to write a book,
but not a CV.
If someone demands a Word document, I would normally send an RTF file,
which is somewhat more predictable and will open in any Word, and even
then I'd use quite large margins. I do actually have a full Office 2007
on Windows 7, but there has to be money involved before I'll use it. I
hate Word more than possibly any other piece of MS software, except
perhaps Edlin (which is still part of Windows 7).
--
Joe
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