We got at memo a work today, a 300 word memo in Word that was 45 KB
long. It has a small corporate logo on it. I decided to experiment. Using
Word97, I saved it in four formats, DOC, HTM, RFT, and TXT, with the
following file sizes:
46k .DOC
3.2k .HTM
196k .RTF
2.0k .TXT
So, RTF is the biggest file. html is almost as good as text with size.
I then mailed them home and tried to open these with abiword, staroffice,
wp9, and wp8.
Results:
abiword.
DOC: Perfect, but moved the logo from the top to the bottom.
RTF: Perfect.
TXT: Almost perfect, but one line with tabs had funny spacing
HTM: wouldn't open it.
wp8
DOC: Good. Messed up the logo (too big, odd colors) and one funny spaced line.
RTF: Almost Perfect, one funny spaced line.
TXT: Good, but funny spacing with a tabbed lines.
HTM: Fair. Unable to handle tabbed lines at all. Just dropped tabs.
wp9
DOC: Looked good BUT: Dropped two lines in the return address and added a
line so the memo went on to two pages. This dropping of lines is
UNACCEPTABLE.
HTM: Fair. Paragraph spacing too much and didn't handle tabs quite right.
RTF: Almost perfect. Added one line so it took two pages.
TXT: UNKNOWN FORMAT
StarOffice 5.3:
DOC: Perfect. Logo looked good and in the right place.
RTF: Perfect.
TXT: Almost perfect. One tabbed line not quite right.
HTM: Almost perfect. Paragraph space too wide.
Kword (1.0):
DOC: No filter
RFT: No filter
TXT: Badly formatted (margins.)
HTM: Very good. Gave the best paragraph spacing and wasn't bad with tabs.
No HTM, RFT, or TXT preserved the logo.
Conclusion: The undisputed winner was staroffice 5.3. It worked very
nicely, basically perfectly, with all four formats. I was surprised by
the poor showing with WP9, which I had thought would be the best. wp8
was good, but it really messed up display of the logo. Its HTM was
incompetent with tabs. Abiword was a fine performer. I don't know why I
couldn't get the HTM to open with abiword. Kword must be better by now,
but it is a moving target.
So, still no reason not to keep using StarOffice.
Joel
_______________________________________________
Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
