An imponderable, word-crunching edition
May. 20th, 2009 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyAt the moment, I have three word processors on my computer: MS Word 2000, WordPerfect 12, and Open Office 3.0. As you (may) know, oh interweb-Bob, I loathe Word with a white-hot passion. So why, you ask, do I have it on my system?
An excellent question, interweb-Bob! I'm so glad you asked.
Originally, I only had WP. I've used WP for years and years; I like it in direct correlation to the degree with which it differs from Word. (This means, of course, because WP has been handed through a succession of increasingly stupid companies, that I have liked it less and less, but that's a different problem.) But I am also well aware that it is going the way of the dodo as Microsoft eats more and more of the software market, and if I want other people to be able to read my files--and that's more and more how things work these days--I need to be thinking forward about cross-platform compatibility and what I do when WP finally turns up its little toes and dies.
But I hate Word and Microsoft and their little dog, too. So Open Office looked like it might be a good solution. I've been using OO for a couple months, and it's . . . meh. It does not irritate me to screaming point the way Word does, because it makes fewer assumptions about what I want, but it's a Word clone, so I dislike it for all the reasons I dislike Word.
And then there was this weekend's snafu, in which OO decided that an .rtf file (of the draft of the new wolf book) it had opened and saved happily the night before was now unopenable. (Word, when I installed it, concurred. WP opened it without complaint, but of course lost all the Track Changes formatting which is kind of essential to the whole collaboration process. This required kind of a lot of work on my part to remake the file, and I was Not Happy about it.)
Which leads me to my imponderable. If I can't use OO to go back and forth with an .rtf file, is there any reason to use it at all? Am I not going to be happier--since I don't like OO anymore than I like Word--using WP for my own files and Word for my collaborations? Except then that whole WP-in-decline thing is still an issue, and I don't know what the hell to do.
Yes, this is the sort of thing writers think about when we should be working.
An excellent question, interweb-Bob! I'm so glad you asked.
Originally, I only had WP. I've used WP for years and years; I like it in direct correlation to the degree with which it differs from Word. (This means, of course, because WP has been handed through a succession of increasingly stupid companies, that I have liked it less and less, but that's a different problem.) But I am also well aware that it is going the way of the dodo as Microsoft eats more and more of the software market, and if I want other people to be able to read my files--and that's more and more how things work these days--I need to be thinking forward about cross-platform compatibility and what I do when WP finally turns up its little toes and dies.
But I hate Word and Microsoft and their little dog, too. So Open Office looked like it might be a good solution. I've been using OO for a couple months, and it's . . . meh. It does not irritate me to screaming point the way Word does, because it makes fewer assumptions about what I want, but it's a Word clone, so I dislike it for all the reasons I dislike Word.
And then there was this weekend's snafu, in which OO decided that an .rtf file (of the draft of the new wolf book) it had opened and saved happily the night before was now unopenable. (Word, when I installed it, concurred. WP opened it without complaint, but of course lost all the Track Changes formatting which is kind of essential to the whole collaboration process. This required kind of a lot of work on my part to remake the file, and I was Not Happy about it.)
Which leads me to my imponderable. If I can't use OO to go back and forth with an .rtf file, is there any reason to use it at all? Am I not going to be happier--since I don't like OO anymore than I like Word--using WP for my own files and Word for my collaborations? Except then that whole WP-in-decline thing is still an issue, and I don't know what the hell to do.
Yes, this is the sort of thing writers think about when we should be working.
