Thanks very much.
I'm afraid I don't want to use .odt.
I will look for the Help guide. I never found it from OO window HELP
menu; in fact, almost never found anything useful there.
I'm afraid my tolerance for reading about yet another application's
unique world-view and unique user-interface metaphor is low. By
contrast, my appreciation for intuitive programs with Excellent help
files is high.
As a former programmer, my feeling is that the user should not need
Help files, as the program should be self-explanatory; but that Help
files should be well-designed and -written in case they are needed. I
recognize that this is not the case with most programs.
My idea about a word processor is that it should be transparent.
Word-Perfect was, and I thought so at the time, too. Various others I
tried occasionally were not. WORD was very much not. OO is not only
not transparent, it's grossly ill-behaved, as I described. Still, I
will try what's suggested.
Regards,
jb
www.JamesBoyk.com "Boyk on Piano" blog
www.PerformanceRecordings.com
www.its.caltech.edu/~boyk
www.its.caltech.edu/~musiclab
- - - -
On 7/3/13, James Boyk <b...@caltech.edu> wrote:
Please excuse this intrusion. I have been using OpenOffice (now 3.4.1)
on my Mac (now 10.6.8) for a couple of years, at the recommendation of
a physicist/programmer friend (who, however, uses OO on a PC).
As experienced on my Mac, OO is absurdly defective. I would happily
pay for an hour of time from someone knowledgeable to see if there's
some obvious thing wrong or if I should get another word processor
(the only OO function I use).
OO font size changes spontaneously, e.g., from 12 pt. to 10 pt.
Sometimes I Save in 12 pt., and when I Open the file, it's 10 pt.
Hello, I have several recommendation for you:
a) Work with OpenDocument formats (odt)
b) Have a look at our Help guide, working with styles.
Styles:
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/Introduction_to_Styles
Tempates:
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/Working_with_Templates
c) I would suggest to also read about OpenOffice Writer unique
features such as Navigation
http://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/Using_the_Navigator
The font changes spontaneously, too; or rather, certain points in the
document turn out to have different fonts associated with them. I'll
be working in Courier New and will put the cursor at a point where I
want to enter some new material; and it will appear in Palatino or
another font that's not Courier New.
Text does not 'flow.' That is, there are gaps many lines long that
don't fill up automatically with succeeding text.
Many things are unintelligible. Help function is useless. (No, I do
not participate in forums for such things.)
For what it's worth, I have a BA in math, and was a programmer in the
'60s at Hughes Aircraft, System Development Corp. and Owens-Illinois.
I taught at Caltech for 30 years, including supervising many student
projects involving programming. I mention these things just to make
clear that, while I'm not technically up to date, I'm not a dope about
programming, either. But I have never seen an application that is so
opaque as OO, and so exhausting to work with. It just *can't* be the
case (I say to myself) that the developers find this behavior acceptable.
If you can point me to someone really knowledgeable, I'll happily pay
that person for 30 or 60 minutes of phone consultation.
(So what word processor *have* I liked? Hands-down, WordPerfect, which
I used from ver 4.1 to 5.2, giving it up only because I switched to
the Mac. The lack of WP is the one thing I don't like about using a
Mac. I have written a novel in MS Word on the Mac, and consider Word
shockingly bad. It is for "creating documents," I supposed; whereas
WordPerfect--at least as I experienced it for years, including writing
a short book and much else--is for Writing!
Yours,
James Boyk
Los Angeles
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