Hi, I've nearly completed a long book with OpenOffice 2.0 Writer in Debian Linux Etch. I think the Writer is great. I didn't have any problems with it. There are some suggestions I would like to make, but as far as I'm concerned, anyone can write a whole book with OpenOffice Writer. Several times during the last four years, I have had to reboot before I saved the document. The Writer rescued everything, and did file repairs perfectly. This Word Processor is extremely safe and reliable, much more so than MS Word, which has lost or destroyed many of my documents over the years.
I would have liked a keystroke macro recorder, where I could click on 'Record', enter a key combination to activate the macro, click 'Record' again, and touch keys to form a key sequence macro, click stop, and when I touched the key combo to activate the macro, the key sequence, of which the macro consisted, would be executed. When using the Alphabetical Index function, the Index builds well. I would like to see some work done on the way OpenOffice Writer behaves in regards to adding entries. When the entry is highlighted as an index entry, if you try to put a comma after the highlighted word, it becomes part of the index entry. I have a cumbersomely programmable keyboard made by CVT, so I programmed some macros into it to accommodate placing commas at the end of words highlighted for the index function, without making the commas part of the index entry. Other additions to the index feature I woudl like to see are the ability to change the first letter of a word highlighted for the index, and have the capitalized word have its first letter still part of the index entry. As it is now, If I capitalize an index entry, the first letter is no longer part of the entry. Also, There is no way to add an index entry using the keyboard. I couldn't figure out the keyboard shortcuts for formatting. There is no feature to automatically adjust the document so there are no widows and orphans. Widows = Less than 2 sentences of a new paragraph, or a sentence fragment at the end of a page. Orphans = A sentence fragment, or less than two sentences of a paragraph end at the beginning of a page. This feature would save me three hours of work on every revision. And don't worry, I intend to support the project when I sell the book. The bullets and numbering feature is not intuitive. It took me a long time to learn it. When the user hits 'enter' twice in bullet or numbering mode, without typing anything after the first enter, bulleting or numbering should delete the last two bullets or numbers, and turn bullets or numbering off. When the user deletes too many carriage returns, and heading text from the next chapter butts up to body text closing the the previous chapter, the heading text and body text should not change formats. When a bullet or number has a long text portion attached, if some text is added or deleted from the entry, the formatting should stay the same, not get all messed up with tabs in the middle of lines. -MasonCide -- He who exalts human knowledge makes himself laughing stock for The Sons of God. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
