Too glitched, too broken, have had to give up
Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2014 9:36 am
I am working on a relatively complicated project of reformatting a fairly large plain text document back into a "properly" formatted one. The original document was an old technical reference document which was scanned and converted to ASCII text via OCR and manual corrections some years ago. Since I make regular use of the document, I am reformatting it to make use of bookmarks/contents, indexes and styles etc as well as rebuilding the diagrams and tables.
I was hoping to use OpenOffice for the task since I find the proprietary nature of the Microsoft Office formats to be essentially evil and of no use to a preservation project.
Unfortunately, OpenOffice currently does not support font embedding which is also a significant issue so I switched to LibreOffice.
I have made a fair amount of use of OpenOffice in the past however, it has always been in a "controlled environment" and I have found it to be acceptable. For this project, I am having to make multiple passes though the document in order to "massage" it through various incremental changes. LibreOffice Writer is in no way up to the task.
I have had numerous crashes, even when trying to export to PDF.
The display is continuously glitched, images and text do not render correctly. Editing a footer will almost always end up with a screen full of footer divider markings from the different the page styles. I cannot get a table to use double line borders. It is beyond belief.
Trying to edit styles and many other routine operations will result in the view changing to some other page at random meaning I have to reposition the view continuously. This is really so incredibly annoying.
Draw object handling is bizarre with random losses of area gradient information and they aren't handled properly or in a "smart" way for export to PDF/A-1a. How difficult would it be to flatten an embedded object to an image before export, anyway? Images anchored to a page disappear every time there is a change in the page count. They either get relocated to some other random page and are no longer visible or get transferred into the footer and are no longer visible. I have to use the navigator to track them down then try to select them, cut them to the clipboard and paste them back where they should be. It would be a lot easier if the images in a page style area could be positioned to an arbitrary area, outside the margins.
The spell checker and grammar checker do not function in a way I find appropriate. "Recognize" is _not_ a word in my dictionary but no matter how many times I tell the program to use English (UK), it seems to only use English (US). The grammar checker is incapable of requiring two spaces after a sentence (one space or more than two is _incorrect_ but it can only be configured to accept one and any more as incorrect).
The overall performance is ridiculously sluggish.
I cannot stand struggling with these issues and fighting against the program to try to do what should be simple word processing tasks any longer and have given up on using it. I will be trying Adobe products and will have to convert the document to ODT format via Microsoft Word format which is ludicrous. I am incredibly disappointed.
Daniel.
I was hoping to use OpenOffice for the task since I find the proprietary nature of the Microsoft Office formats to be essentially evil and of no use to a preservation project.
Unfortunately, OpenOffice currently does not support font embedding which is also a significant issue so I switched to LibreOffice.
I have made a fair amount of use of OpenOffice in the past however, it has always been in a "controlled environment" and I have found it to be acceptable. For this project, I am having to make multiple passes though the document in order to "massage" it through various incremental changes. LibreOffice Writer is in no way up to the task.
I have had numerous crashes, even when trying to export to PDF.
The display is continuously glitched, images and text do not render correctly. Editing a footer will almost always end up with a screen full of footer divider markings from the different the page styles. I cannot get a table to use double line borders. It is beyond belief.
Trying to edit styles and many other routine operations will result in the view changing to some other page at random meaning I have to reposition the view continuously. This is really so incredibly annoying.
Draw object handling is bizarre with random losses of area gradient information and they aren't handled properly or in a "smart" way for export to PDF/A-1a. How difficult would it be to flatten an embedded object to an image before export, anyway? Images anchored to a page disappear every time there is a change in the page count. They either get relocated to some other random page and are no longer visible or get transferred into the footer and are no longer visible. I have to use the navigator to track them down then try to select them, cut them to the clipboard and paste them back where they should be. It would be a lot easier if the images in a page style area could be positioned to an arbitrary area, outside the margins.
The spell checker and grammar checker do not function in a way I find appropriate. "Recognize" is _not_ a word in my dictionary but no matter how many times I tell the program to use English (UK), it seems to only use English (US). The grammar checker is incapable of requiring two spaces after a sentence (one space or more than two is _incorrect_ but it can only be configured to accept one and any more as incorrect).
The overall performance is ridiculously sluggish.
I cannot stand struggling with these issues and fighting against the program to try to do what should be simple word processing tasks any longer and have given up on using it. I will be trying Adobe products and will have to convert the document to ODT format via Microsoft Word format which is ludicrous. I am incredibly disappointed.
Daniel.