Question about LO Writer and "complex documents"

users
#1

Greetings! With all of the recent discussion about Linux being a viable
alternative to Windows, in today's computing world, I've read many
comments about whether or not LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS
Office. Some say yes, others say no. One common comment made by those
who say no is Writer isn't good for "complex documents". For "basic"
word processing, it's fine.

Question: in what ways does LO Writer "fail" at editing or creating
"complex documents"?

Does anyone here have any experience with LO Writer and "complex
documents"? If so, what has your experience been (either good or bad)?

I know I haven't actually defined "complex documents" but I haven't seen
any definition of that in any of the comments I've read either. So,
I'll leave the definition up to whatever you would consider a "complex
document". :slight_smile:

I've submitted on LO Writer bug where Writer didn't handle Word
documents with pages with different page orientations well. I was
helping a friend with a term paper and most of the paper was in portrait
orientation, but a few pages were in landscape. LO Writer treated the
entire document as either portrait or landscape but couldn't handle the
mixture of both. I think that's been fixed, since I reported the bug.
That's been about my only experience with a "complex document".

Thanks!

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#2

Is the problem with Complex documents really about the complexity, or is it about using LO and?Word on a complex document?
      I have been working with ODF Authors to create documentation for OpenOffice.org and then LibreOffice. I consider these document to be complex.

Dan

#3

I've had no problem using Writer to create 200+ page documents with over a hundred illustrations, annotated screen shots and drawings, imported from Microsoft's Visio or LO Draw (LO Draw works best) and JPEG photos. Also frequently use tables to show information. The documents have many, many cross references embedded in them and four level table of contents at the beginning.

My only gripe is when you close a document and then reopen it, it opens at the beginning, not the point where you were working on it.

Best wishes,

Stephen Harding

Freelance author
Telephone desk 01256 781557
Telephone mobile 07969 469543
www.shirste.org.uk
Skype Shirley_and_Stephen_Harding

#4

Hi there!
I've had experience working with LibreOffice and "complex documents". Back
in the days of Libre/OpenOffice 3.x and Office 2003, Writer was much better
than Word in handling large documents with complex formatting and a large
number of included objects (say, around 100 pages, with around 150
equations, plenty of figures as included graphics and diagrams and
book-like formatting using custom style sheets).
I understand this has changed somewhat now, with newer versions of Word
being increasingly capable of dealing with such documents.
LO Writer for me has been a solid performer in this area with each upgrade,
no big changes in functionality. I've written a book lenght technical
manual in it, and it performed superbly.
What I've never managed to achieve was good interoperatibility between
pepople using Word and LO Writer. Once an ODF, doc or docx file pases back
and forth, format details are always altered somehow, sometimes to the
point of ruining the work. It would be great if there was a format that was
really *lingua franca* between the two applications, but I do not think
that is viable.
The main complaint I've observed regarding different capabilities in MS
Office and LO comes from people that expect both products to work exactly
the same. Commonality exist between them, but each one is it's own product,
with different design, coding and debugging standards.
For large documents involving small contributions from lots of people, I've
successfully used a manual "patch" approach: I kept the "master" copy of
the document, with page and line numbering on published as PDF for
download, and accepted corrections from contributors in pure text, doc, or
odt format, and then merged them manually in my master document and
republish. It's labor intensive, and I do not think it scales well, but it
saved me a lot of time and arguments. When writing these kind of documents,
I really miss being able to have the same facilities that are available
while coding (version control with automated patch/merge funcitonality and
conflict resolution)
I hope this helps.

Pablo Dotro

#5

Question: in what ways does LO Writer "fail" at editing or creating "complex documents"?

This where a definition for "complex documents" is mandatory.

Does anyone here have any experience with LO Writer and "complex documents"?

I've had as many as 10,000 images in a single document. OOo 2.x didn't
balk when I created it. Libo 5.0 beta does have any problems when I edit
that document.

LibO had no problems with an outline that was 50,000 pages long. (That
project is on temporary hold, whilst I verify that GIT backup for LibO
works as advertised. My current estimate is that the completed document
will be 5,000,000 pages.)

I've had as many as 10 different writing systems in one document.
LibO does has some issues correctly displaying them, especially when
they are intermixed in the same sentence, and a Pan-Unicode font is not
being used. (FWIW, when using two or more writing systems that are BiDi,
CTL, or CJVK, use a Pan-Unicode font, to minimize display issues.)

I'll leave the definition up to whatever you would consider a "complex document". :slight_smile:

Most commonly, when people talk about LibO's inability to handle complex
documents, they are comparing Calc with Excel, not Word with Writer.
Less frequently, it is a comparison of Impress against PowerPoint.

The major issue with Calc is the lack of an ecosystem similar to that of
Excel.
The minor issue with Calc, is that Excel templates, especially those
whose MSRP is greater than US$100,rely on both the macro language of
MSO, and various DLLs, and similar critters, that are Windows only.

The perception that Calc isn't up to the tasks that Excel can do, is
because it is trivial to find titles like _Microsoft Excel for
Scientists_, and _Microsoft Excel for Advanced Financial Forecasting_.
Similar titles for Calc are notable by their absence.

Personally, I don't use Impress, or PowerPoint. My experience in
sitting through PowerPoint presentations, and that user either doesn't
know what the subject of the presentation is, or else doesn't know how
to write a report, or else is trying to hide data that is both
mission-critical, and unfavourable. (IOW, if being graded, the best hope
is for "fail".)

I've submitted on LO Writer bug where Writer didn't handle Word
documents with pages with different page orientations well.

If one is not paying attention to what one is doing, when changing page
styles, one can unintentionally change the wrong pages to the wrong page
style.

jonathon

#6

It's worth saying that you are mixing your ideas here. This experience is not about LibreOffice's facility at creating or editing (text) documents with mixed page orientations, but about how it can handle whatever Microsoft Word puts in its proprietary file formats to encode similar structures. That may well matter to you, but it has little to do with how good LibreOffice may be at achieving this particular structure.

You surely cannot believe that it is at all difficult to create and edit text documents with mixed page orientations in LibreOffice?

Brian Barker

#7

Take some letter that had been edited by a dozend of editors because
nobody ever learned about templates. One opens the letter document,
clears the text body pastes some other document's text body, selects
here, adds bold, selects there removes underlining, adds several new
lines and so on and on.
After a dozend editing cycles the document has one or two pages with
hundreds of different text snippets, some of them just one character
wide with another font pasted from somewhere, other snippets are blank
paragraphs with all kinds of attributes.
In most MS Word documents I have seen I never know how the text will
look like when I put the cursor at some position and start typing.

A professional letter is formatted by a page setup (page style in ODF)
with 5 or 6 paragraph styles and some fields for sender info and date.
All this is stored in a template.
When you create a new document from the well prepared template, you
write the address or fill up address fields from a data source. Then you
type the message body, save and print.
Any pasted content is pasted as plain, unformatted text into the
preformatted sections.
May be you add some underlining or emphasis by means of character styles
or hard formatting but the next document starts again with a page setup,
5 or 6 paragraph styles and fields for sender info and date.

#8

Unfortunately, most of the comments I had read were more of a "general"
nature, so details like the ones you raise were left out. I think it
could be a combination or mixture of both. Maybe in some cases,
"actual" complexity of documents was being considered and in other
cases, the perception that Writer couldn't "handle" anything other than
basic word processing tasks.

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#9

I've had no problem using Writer to create 200+ page documents with over a hundred illustrations, annotated screen shots and drawings, imported from Microsoft's Visio or LO Draw (LO Draw works best) and JPEG photos. Also frequently use tables to show information. The documents have many, many cross references embedded in them and four level table of contents at the beginning.

Impressive! :slight_smile:

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#10

The main complaint I've observed regarding different capabilities in MS
Office and LO comes from people that expect both products to work exactly
the same. Commonality exist between them, but each one is it's own product,
with different design, coding and debugging standards.

Yes, I've encountered this as well and I consider each its own product,
as you. :slight_smile:

What frustrates me some is people not giving LO a legitimate chance to
function as its own suite vs being viewed in the "shadow" of MS Office.

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#11

Does anyone here have any experience with LO Writer and "complex documents"?

I've had as many as 10,000 images in a single document. OOo 2.x didn't
balk when I created it. Libo 5.0 beta does have any problems when I edit
that document.

LibO had no problems with an outline that was 50,000 pages long. (That
project is on temporary hold, whilst I verify that GIT backup for LibO
works as advertised. My current estimate is that the completed document
will be 5,000,000 pages.)

I've had as many as 10 different writing systems in one document.
LibO does has some issues correctly displaying them, especially when
they are intermixed in the same sentence, and a Pan-Unicode font is not
being used. (FWIW, when using two or more writing systems that are BiDi,
CTL, or CJVK, use a Pan-Unicode font, to minimize display issues.)

Well, I think this certainly serves as a great example of a very complex
document. :slight_smile:

I've submitted on LO Writer bug where Writer didn't handle Word
documents with pages with different page orientations well.

If one is not paying attention to what one is doing, when changing page
styles, one can unintentionally change the wrong pages to the wrong page
style.

Understood and I can easily see this happening. I've never created a
document like this, but I've imported a couple MS Word documents that
had a mixture of landscape and portrait pages and Writer applied one
page orientation to the entire document. This has since been fixed.

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#12

... I've read many comments about whether or not LibreOffice is a
good alternative to MS Office. Some say yes, others say no. One
common comment made by those who say no is Writer isn't good for
"complex documents". For "basic" word processing, it's fine.
Question: in what ways does LO Writer "fail" at editing or creating
"complex documents"?

I've submitted an LO Writer bug where Writer didn't handle Word
documents with pages with different page orientations well. I was
helping a friend with a term paper and most of the paper was in
portrait orientation, but a few pages were in landscape. LO Writer
treated the entire document as either portrait or landscape but
couldn't handle the mixture of both.

It's worth saying that you are mixing your ideas here. This experience
is not about LibreOffice's facility at creating or editing (text)
documents with mixed page orientations, but about how it can handle
whatever Microsoft Word puts in its proprietary file formats to encode
similar structures. That may well matter to you, but it has little to
do with how good LibreOffice may be at achieving this particular
structure.

Yes, the example I cited doesn't reflect on Writer's ability to create
or edit documents with mixed page orientations but the behavior I
experienced could be easily viewed as Writer not being able to "handle"
some kinds of MS Word documents. This isn't my personal view but a
view I've experienced from those I've helped in using Writer.

You surely cannot believe that it is at all difficult to create and
edit text documents with mixed page orientations in LibreOffice?

I haven't personally created a document like this but I wouldn't have
thought it would be difficult to do. I would have simply looked up how
to do it and do it. :slight_smile:

Peace...

"The other" Tom

#13

Which document?

* 10,000 images in one document;
* 50,000 pages in the outline, with projected length of 5,000,000 pages;
* 10 different writing systems in the same document;

jonathon

#14

Certainly, the 10 different writing systems in the same document is
something *I* would consider complex, especially since that's not
something I've ever seen, done, or even heard of. :slight_smile:

The 50,000 page outline document sounds complex as well, since I imagine
that outline would have several levels and not be relatively "flat".

When I wrote my comment, I thought to these two documents were one in
the same. :slight_smile:

Peace..

"The other" Tom

#15

Certainly, the 10 different writing systems in the same document is
something *I* would consider complex, especially since that's not
something I've ever seen, done, or even heard of. :slight_smile:

The 50,000 page outline document sounds complex as well, since I imagine
that outline would have several levels and not be relatively "flat".

Four levels of headings.

When I wrote my comment, I thought to these two documents were one in the same. :slight_smile:

Whilst there is the possibility that the 50,000 page outline, when
completed, will contain material in a dozen different languages, it is
not currently at that point. When I complete it, it might be the poster
child of complex documents, due to length, number of tables, images,
writing systems, languages, indexes, and styles used.

jonathon