On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:03 AM, <j...@sdf.org> wrote: > Greetings PLUGers, > I'm trying to help out a first-time author using OOo Writer 3.2.0 on Ubuntu > 10.4 who needs to collaborate with a book editor using MS Word, probably > the 2007 version on Windows 7. Ideally, the book editor would be using > the "Record Changes" feature in Word, then forwarding it back for the author > to run "Edit>Accept or Reject Changes" on. Probably several rounds of this > sort of thing on an approx. 400 page book. Alternately, it appears both > programs can also merge differences via the "Compare Files" feature which > avoids having to deal with externally-generated "diffs" as with "Record > Changes".
I can't caution /against/ this enough. OO has a long and distinguished history or corrupting documents in many ugly ways. Often, this corruption only appears once the document is loaded in Word. eg: Everything will look peachy to the linux/OO.org user, then the client (or in this case, publisher) will see something that looks like it went through a blender. This might work if you don't have any formatting or images (eg: if you're essentially sending a text document), but given that Word is even in the picture, I suspect that that is not the case. The publisher may offer other formats that are acceptable, such as LaTeX or DocBook. Those technologies have strong support on a number of platforms, and offer a better solution. If Word is a requirement, then I strongly recommend setting up a VM with Word installed, and accessing it via VirtualBox. It will cost $200-300 in licensing, but you'll save days of frustration. Anyhow, be very cautious with converting from OO -> Word; in my experience, what you see in OO has little relation to what shows up in Word. If you must do it this way, then find a copy of word to at least preview the deliverables before sending them off. --Rogan > Anyways, my simple single page tests using the .rtf format were a mixed > bag, sometimes resulting in file corruption. The .doc format seems to be > more robust over several rounds of changes. However, there are several > Word versions available under "File>Save As>File Type" and I'm wondering > which is most likely to be best for this project? > > OOo "Save As>File Type" choices: > > MS Word 6.0 (.doc) > MS Word 95 (.doc) > MS Word 97/2000/XP (.doc) > MS Word 2003 (.xml) > MS Word 2007 (.docx) ## I think this is read-only so a non-starter > > I've not tested OpenDocument Text (.fodt) or DocBook (.xml). > > I am aware of the ODF Converter module for MS Office however it didn't > perform well in my tests which featured frequent MS Word (earlier 2000 > version) crashes whenever an .odt file was opened. > > My guess is MS Word 97/2000/XP is the best candidate but I'd like to get > some real-world feedback before committing. > > Regards, > > Jeff W > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug