HI All,
First let me preface this by saying I think OO.o is an outstanding
accomplishment and a fantastic job well done for the most part. In
addition, having once managed R&D software and hardware offices I am
reasonably aware of the very large problems of developing
applications. There; hope that's enough sucking up to get you to
read this<g>: I am at a make or break point with my attempt to use
OOo 2.3.1 for my
purposes. Either I figure out some work-arounds or I'll have to
relegate OOo back to a "future" date for serious use. After
searching many old posts and asking a few questions here and on one
of the other groups, I feel I have a reasonable head-around for
using OOo. However, I am unable to get around some problems that
prevent me from continuing to use it.
Example: I have one file (.doc from Word) that I've imported,
pasted, and otherwise played with to get it into OOo in a manageable
form. It's about 33Meg in size, 60 pages, and contains 101 embedded
(not linked) JPEG color images ranging in size from 1/16 page to 1/4
page , sized prior to insertion into the document. There are only 4
Word styles, no sections, in this particular document.
I create the .odt, close the document, Reboot just for grins, and
then open the .odt again.
Nothing I try has succeeded in an import/paste/paste special,
paste without last para mark, etc., of the .doc into an OOo .odt
file in any usable manner.
The largest problem is image positioning. Images beyond the first
about 8 pages are nearly all misaligned, misplaced, and their
anchors have moved to incorrect pargraphs. If the images were in a
table, they are now outside the table and cannot be moved back into
the table without deleting and re-creating it. Images will overlap
each other and even overlap text, but the text either shows on top
of the image, or the image isn't opaque, I'm not sure which. Touching
the image wiht the mouse corrects that and text moves away
from the image as expected, but the image may still be as much as an
entire page removed from its correct, anchored position.
As you can imagien, correcting this image positioning is a real
problem since they don't misalign in any orderly or sequential
manner, and the tables that held the images have just been
completely abandoned. There are also other spacing problems, but they
could be relegated to
the annoyance category if it weren't for the image mistreatment.
Spaces between paragraphs are not consistant and several other
things happen that means it would require a page by page treatment
to correct because "replace" operations can not properly function on
them. For whatever reason, spacing problems all seem to relate to
the vertical dimension; there are no horizontal issues except with
images; I see no pattern to their movement.
*IS* there any specific way around these problems? The images
moving in particular? If not, I think I'll have to relegate OOo to
the shelf again and continue using Office for my work for the
foreseeable future at least.
As much as I want to support OOo, I won't be able to since I just
plain won't have the time to gain the experience and background
needed to become a useful volunteer who can contribute to it.
Thanks for reading and if this pisses anyone off, I'm sorry, because
I don't mean it to do that. I just have a decision to make and must
do so soon as possible since I've gotten essentially no where with
being able to make a full and reliable transition to OO.o.
