Before I start, let me tell you the little story, how I got the idea for writing this article. When I wrote my first article for OSNews, one of the screenshots I included showed my diploma thesis. I merely wanted to show that OpenOffice.org in Fedora Core 2 features native icons, nothing more.
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So, just because I wanted to show off a little, I loaded my diploma thesis, which was then already 130 pages long and took the screenie. I am a moron, I admit it… So, the funny thing was, when that article went live, I got an email from a crazy german who told me that I was not formatting my diploma correctly. He specified various mistakes and, to my amazement, he was right on every single issue he mentioned. O.K., it probably wasn’t THAT difficult because I just used no automatic formatting at all, still I just couldn’t believe that he could tell all that with nothing more than a simple screenshot. I emailed back, asking some innocent questions and basically got overwhelmed by his long and detailed responses. A few days and emails later, my diploma was a lot easier to work with.
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I was puzzled. I have worked with text processors since 1995 now and even though I have never been interested in the features of Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer, I thought that I, at least, knew something about them. As it turned out, I was wrong. Now that I am done with my diploma, I feel that all this knowledge should not go to waste. So I decided to write an article about text formatting. This is not really osnews-typical stuff, but I think that there are some people here who can benefit greatly from this article, just as I did. This article is to a great extent based on what Christoph wrote in his emails to me.
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Basically, whenever I wrote something with a text processor in the last decade, I just fired it up, wrote the title, selected the title with the mouse, made it 16 points large and bold, hit enter 2 times, set the text to 12 points and normal weight and started off. This is O.K. for all the small documents, up to, let’s say 20 pages or so. Beyond that, this becomes a nightmare. I was struggling throughout my academical career with the same issues over and over:
- I hated adding a table of content after I was done with my text, hand-editing all the page numbers into it.
- I hated editing all the headings, losing track if they were 12 or 13 points, bold, underlined or whatever.
- I hated having to look through my entire document when I changed something, just because everything after my change could be formatted badly again.
Well, surprise, it’s 2004, it does not have to be this way 🙂
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So how do we start? Hmm… we open OpenOffice.org Writer and type… STOP. No, this time we’re not going to do it this way.
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First of all, we want to give our document a title. Let’s call it “Text formatting with OpenOffice.org Writer” 🙂 We click “File” – “Properties” – “Description”. Let’s fill in a title here. Why? Because we can do fancy stuff with this information later. Notice that OpenOffice.org now calls the document by its title instead of “Untitled1” in the title bar. Now let’s have a look at the Stylist. The Stylist handles all our formatting tasks. With the Stylist we can edit Page Styles, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles and so forth. Think CSS if you are a webdesigner. Yeah, it works exactly the same way. If you aren’t a webdesigner and don’t know what CSS is: well, basically, instead of highlighting text and assigning “Bitstream Vera Serif”, size “16”, and “Bold” to it, we just “tell” OpenOffice.org Writer, via the Stylist, what kind of text this is: a heading, a quotation, normal text body, whatever. Why do we do this? Because it is far easier to control the layout and design of our document when we use a central layouting device. and that’s exactly what the Stylist is!
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Now, we want a real “First Page”, and it should later display our documents freshly chosen title and other information. We click “Page Style” in the Stylist and look what is highlighted: it’s “Default”. Double-click “First Page”. Cool, we have just promoted the empty page to being the “First Page” of our document. Now, what comes next? Well, the next thing we definitely want is an index (even though we haven’t even written a single word yet!): we click “Insert” – “Manual Break” – (chose style: “Index” and activate “Change Page number”, starting with “1”) – “Ok”. Now we see that our document got another page. We click somewhere on this page and notice that the “Page Style” changes to “Index” in the Stylist. O.K., nice, we add another “Manual Break”, now choosing “Default”, activating “Change page number” again. Now we got the basic structure of our document: first page, index and space for our actual text.
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Now let’s have a look at the properties of our “First Page”: we right-click “First Page” in the Stylist and chose “Modify”.
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Here we can see that the properties are grouped in eight tabs. “Organizer” tells us in the “Contains”-section all the settings that are chosen. We click on the “Page”-tab to change the paper format, set margins and so forth. Disable/Enable Header and Footer, if we like. You get the basic idea. Everything you change here just applies to the first page of the document. Now let’s do “Insert” – “Header” – “All”. We notice that OpenOffice.org now lets us choose where to insert the header: on the “First Page”, the “Index”, “Default” or on all pages. We click somewhere in the header and then “Insert” – “Fields” – “Title”. Woah, here it is, our document name. We repeat that for the other two sections. Let’s “Insert” – “Footer” only for “Index” and “Default”, because we don’t want page numbers on the first page. We click into the footer of the index, “Insert” – “Fields” – “Page Number”, do the same in the footer for “Default”. Voilà, here we have page numbers. Now, we’ll do some magic: Right-click to modify “Index” in the Stylist, change to the “Page”-tab, and chose roman letters. Our index gets Roman page numbers, and our default text stays at Arabian numbers. Cool, eh?
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Now, we click on “Paragraph Styles” in the Stylist, search for “Footer” (that the text in the footer uses pre-defined), right-click to modify it, and set “Alignment” to “Right” or “Centered”, wherever we want to see the page numbers. We do the same to move the title in the header to, let’s say, centered position. (Right-click “Header” in the “Paragraph Styles”, “Alignment” – “Center”). Easy, huh? Now, we’ll take a closer look at the “Paragraph Styles”. Just like “Page Styles” does with the page layout, this helps you to format all possible kinds of headings, titles, subtitles, the header and footer, the “normal” text body, and so on. Now, let’s have a close look on my diploma. I used 21 different styles. This may sound like a lot, but really it isn’t: I heavily used and customized only 4 styles myself, “Heading 1”, “Heading 2”, “Text Body” and “Quotations”. The rest was either automatically set by OpenOffice.org, or touched once, like “Title”, “Header” and “Footer”.
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We click on the first page, “Insert” – “Fields” – “Title”. The title displays at the upper left edge of the page. Now we look at the Paragraph Styles: “Default” is still highlighted. So we search through the Paragraph Styles until we find “Title” and double-click it. Whoa, it’s centered and the font is bigger now! How that? Well, you probably guessed it, “Title” uses different settings than “Default”. We modify the “Title”-style and we see that we can do almost anything with your title. Ah, yeah, and if it is not clear yet: if you ever want to change the document’s title, just do that in “File” – “Properties” – “Description” and all the title-fields you have inserted into your document are automatically updated. You can add a subject (or subtitle) easily by writing it into the “Comments”-section there and doing “Insert” – “Fields” – “Subject”. Also your name? “Insert” – “Fields” – “Author”. Notice that you have to add your name in “Tools” – “Options” – “User Data” before!
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Now, we’ll jump down to our “Default”-section, where the actual text will be located. Let’s type a first heading. Afterwards, we select it, search for “Heading 1” in the Paragraph Styles, and double-click that. We adjust the heading by modifying “Heading 1”, again not by changing it directly, because we want all the “Heading 1”-class headings of our document appear in the same way. Now we hit “Enter”, double-click “Heading 2” and type your first subheading (or type it first, select it and assign “Heading 2”, as we did before). Notice that we are not adding any outline numbers, OpenOffice.org will do that for us later. Now, we’ll hit “Enter” again and type some text. Watch out, the text should not be “Default”, but “Text Body”. Assign that if needed, modify as you wish. One nice example: we modify “Text body” – “Indents & Spacing” – “First Line” from 0,00 to 0,50.
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This gives all our paragraphs a nice indent. Now we’ll add another Heading, two Subheadings and some more text. Now we definitely need outline numbers for our headings. Easy enough: “Tools” – “Outline Numbering”. Select “1-10”, “Number” = “1,2,3,…” and we add a separator after the numbering (I used [.space] in my screenshot). Wow, all my headings are numbered now, with the scheme “1. Heading Class 1”, “1.1. Heading Class 2”, “2. Heading Class 1”, “2.1. Heading Class 2”, “2.2. Heading Class 2”. This is really starting to shape up nicely! Of course, we can add headings later as we wish, everything gets updated automatically.
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Time for some magic again: we go up to our index, click “Insert” – “Indexes and Tables” – “Ok”. Now, this one is nice. No more cruel hand-adding an index after writing a document. It just works automatically, if you have properly declared your headings via the Stylist! Now, modify “Heading 1” again, we “Enable” a “Page Break” in “Text Flow”. All our headings (class 1 only) move to the start of the next page. We can also do that for our headings class 2 of course. Notice that you have to click into your automatically created table of contents, right-click it and chose “Update Index/Table” if we change the order or position of something inthe document, because the table of contents is not updated automatically. Or do you want to update everything in the whole document? Choose “Tools” – “Update” – “Update all”.
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So, that’s the basics for editing long documents. Now let’s have a short look on another useful tool in OpenOffice.org, a tool that really helps editing really large documents. The Navigator! As the name already assumes, this serves a totally different purpose than the Stylist. Don’t mix it up with the Stylist, you can open the Navigator by pressing F5 or via “Edit” – “Navigator”. It is accessible in the “Function Bar”, on the left of the icon for the Stylist. If we assigned the appropriate Paragraph Styles to our headings, it is much easier to navigate through our document. Just double-click the entry (heading, table, note, graphic, whatever…) and the cursor automatically jumps there. Really nice when you have more than 100 pages, believe me. The Navigator gives you a really nice feeling of complete control over your document. Its usefulness increases literally exponentially with the size of your document.
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So, that was our small introduction into the wonders of OpenOffice.org Writer. I hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it. I certainly did…
Information in the web:
OpenOffice.org project: www.openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org information and support: support.openoffice.org
About the Author:
Christian Paratschek, 28, is an IT-Administrator in Vienna, Austria, Europe. When he does not write hypercomplicated articles about word processors, he likes to break his right forefinger while playing beach volleyball (even though he does not look like a typical beach volleyball player). Well, whatever…
Christoph Noack, a 24 years old self taught OpenOffice.org enthusiast, tries to escape from writing his thesis by annoying randomly choosen osnews article writers: Next time it could be you!
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I haven’t worked with the Openoffice styles much but I’ve recently been messing around with LaTeX. It’s pretty cool but quite a change from a WYSIWIG editor. I guess I just like seeing the results of my editing right away.
Does anyone know how OO.o compares to LaTeX for formatting basic text documents? It seems like most profs still use LaTeX for their coursepacks and papers here at the uni instead of a WYSIWYG editor.
The other reason I don’t like OO.o so much is because of it’s formula editor sometimes screws up spacing between subscripts and normal letters.
Great article by the way. OSNews needs more articles that inform instead of throwing out an opinion (I know I’m guilty of contributing to this too).
I don’t mean to be too harsh, but I never understood people who decide to write long, complicated document with a WYSIWYG text processor like Word or Writer.
I’ve been using Latex for quite some time, and really, I still think it is the easier text processor (typesetting engine for the purist?) when it comes down to produce high quality materials. Last year, I had to use Word in a lab… this was a real nightmare for me! 🙂
Anyway, again, just my opinion. Other than that, the article was nice…
I have been “trying” to write a manual. I gave up on OpenWriter because of problems with getting the numbering as I would like it. My document formula was Contents, Information then an Index. So instead I went to KWord which would do what I want but crashes so often with tables that it isn’t funny. I wasn’t prepared to us LaTeX because I need to focus on the documents looks as opposed to fiddling with formatting but I was doing that in the end anyway.
If your method works like you say it does then I will move back to openoffice.
Brilliant article.
You should wrote your tesis in latex, beside the learning curve its a quite crispy and elegant way to make stylish reports.
And i must say that for any professor, doctorate, rocket scientist, whatever, that knows what latex is and involves, you would get those extra points upfront, just by having the “latex inside” logo.
I never knew it had these kinds of capabilities. What an awsome article!
And to all you pro-latex posters, what is it that latex does that is so much better then this? I thought this kind of functionality was latex’s advantage.
what is it that latex does that is so much better then this?
Cross-referencing in OpenWriter kinda sux. Time and time again, I’ve tried to give a figure or table a meaningful name, but when I need to insert a cross-reference I still have to know the number of the figure – with LateX you can only use (meaningful) names.
The way figure placement is handled in OpenWriter is horrible, and the fact that (as far as I know) you cant have tables in a float or frame just turns me off.
The whole layout of OpenWriter is just like the dreaded M$ Word – good for trees, bad for paper producers and typographical rules.
OpenWriter/Word are wonderful for small quick tasks but other than that…
Great article
Excellent article.
Try Lyx, the easy way to do Latex.
By the way, here’s the best book that you will ever find on OO.org’s Writer.
Download it, print it and learn it:
http://www.inf.sgsp.edu.pl/pub/LINUZ/PISANKO/OOo_book_English.pdf
I’m not sure why you think that the tools used to produce a thesis should have a consequence on the grade: only the result matter!
Also personnaly I don’t like latex because I find the language hard to learn, with special cases (not that I like wordprocessor either, the only one I liked is FrameMaker and it cost too much!)..
As apparenlty you like latex: a thing I noticed is that quite often articles made with latex put the images at the end of the article (which I find quite annoying), I wonder why this happen?
The main reason to prefer latex are for me the built-in algorithms that decide where to put pictures and tables.
Second, the fact that styles in ooo are relative to the paragraph, so I must always do a style three times:
text first paragraph,
text mid paragraphs,
text last paragraph
note first paragraph
note mid paragraph
note last paragraph
(the first paragraph must have space above and no indent,, the mid paragraphs must have no space and indent, and the last must have space below and indent)
This is boring, especially because a first paragraph often becomes a second, a last paragraph often becomes semi-last. So I have to continuously apply styles.
Third, the fact that I have to use emacs to type my documents, due to the completion feature (M-/ dabbrev-expand) 🙂
Kile – a KDE-based software (kile.sourceforge.net is the best bet for those who want the power of Latex and the simplicity of WYSIWYG word processors. Nice article but I fell in love with Latex looong time ago.
I did my first term project documentation with OO Writer. Having 20 or more pictures within a document of at least 60 pages created problems and sometimes messed things up. In previous years I have used MS Word and when I came to OO Writer and started to have similar problems with it for big documents I changed to Latex. So, I did the documentation for the last term project in latex. The big advantage of latex over OO Writer or MS Word is that it doesn’t mess things up if your document is large. It is also much easier for two people to work on the same document as you can include other files. For example I gave each chapter its one file which proved to be very useful.
Maybe some thoughts on LaTex and OpenOffice.org Writer… LaTeX is a great type-setting system. It’s unbeaten in the production of HIGH quality texts. It has scientific roots, and so it requires some more preparation than just starting your text processor. Even inserting a general pixel based graphic was not so easy some years ago. This is getting better: now we have some very good text editors supporting LaTeX. Really good diagrams and graphics can be produced by using special programs (GNUplot, Xfig, …), but they are mostly developed and by scientists – not even known by the average user.
The thing is: most of the guys outside aren’t scientists, they are users that are happy to generate some pages of text. And they aren’t aware that there is more than Word outside, even the existance of OpenOffice is for most of them a real surprise: “Is it like Word?” (Some versions of) Office tells the user that he is going to write a “Word Document”. Not a text!?
Somebody who knows what to focus on will write the text in LaTeX. For the rest of the world it is good to know that their text processing application is more than an “electronic ypewriter”. When they learn what kind of functionality OOo Writer (or another text processor) has, they can thinking about what to do with their system. Maybe they want LaTeX! Even Writer has it’s limitations. (It’s getting better, 2.0 is on the way…)
Let people start slowly, show them some things that can be useful. Then we get better quality texts – and maybe they demand even more and start using LaTeX. But consider, even at my university department 100% of the students and profs, use MS Word! I know people who start writing letters using MS Excel, because they are used to it.
It should be our goal to show them that there is more. More freedom and better quality in open source software in general. Tell them to choose always the right tool for their job. LaTeX, OO.o Writer, KWord, …
We hope this article could help to make people think about they currently handle their work. And how they can improve that.
Have a great day!
Christoph
Linuxjournal.com has a series of Openoffice tutorials which are also very useful for those who want to learn the capabilitis of word processors.
I’ve used Open Writer to write my masters thesis as well… Mainly because parts of it required me to do code both under Linux and Win32… When I was done with writing the Linux part I switched to Windows and much to my surprise the length of the pages (ie. the number of lines per page) in the Windows version of Open Writer increased as compared to the Linux Open Writer version… Needless to say I was greatly disappointed, since that messed up most of my paragraph formatting, etc… When I use a utility that claims to be cross-platform then I expect it to work EXACTLY the same on each of the supported platforms… This obviously isn’t the case with Open Writer as it rendered the same document differently (there may have been various reasons for this happening, like windows version not supporting the fonts I used and substituting them with some other fonts…. but no matter what the reason is, this is not what a common user seeks from using cross-platform software)…
This might be long … (brain dump)
If you are going to write long documents with lots of sections, references, cross references, figures, tables, Table of contents, equations etc… then LaTeX is by far the best solution.
I must say that I use OOo a fair bit too, but would never recommmend someone write a thesis or a book with it. The “sytlist” is a really nice feature though. OOo is actually a lot more powerful than people realise at first, and it often has an elgant way of doing things … but it is not always obvious at first.
Anyway, the reason I like LaTeX so much for “long” documents is that it does everything automatically for you (references, numbering the chapters and sections, subsections, writing equations is simple (when you are used to it) and it will number them automatically as well keeping them in the right order!, cross references, table of contents etc…)
I would always encourage people to write LaTeX manually, since you will always be in control and understand how it all works. It does take a little time to get use to, however there is also a lot of help on the net. The time you spend learing it will pay itself back at least x10 when trying to “fix” MS word or OOo writer. As a side effect I now write HTML by hand as well, and wonder why I never started before! (It is really a lot of fun… or am I becoming a geek. :O)
I recommend Jedit. The more I used Jedit with LaTex the more I liked it. (Don’t be deceived by its simple looks. It is highly configurable, and has lots of very useful plugins.)
For those how want a quick intro to latex this is what a simple book would look like.
documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{book}
egin{document}
itle{Short intro to LaTeX}
author{Well … me!}
maketitle % This will automatically create the front page.
chapter{Introduction}
This is a short introduction to LaTex
% This is a comment and will not be parsed.
chapter{Main content}
label{Chap.One}
This is going to be long so better break it up into sections
section{This is the first section}
blablabla
section{This is the second section}
Here is an axample of referencing something. As we saw at the begining of Chapter~
ef{Chap.One}. Ok this would be pointless for chapter one but if you had many chapters and decide to “rearrange” the order of your chapters or even sections, LaTeX will be able to track everything and reference everything properly.
chapter{Conclusion}
Better conclude now…
end{document}
better stop here before it gets too long;) …
For some reason the back slashes have been removed in the previous post! \\
I cant sing the praises of latex highly enough. The fundamental problem with Word is that it encourages you write first, layout later ( which never works well ) and creating multiple consistent documents is difficult.
I use LyX, aside from a horrible installation process it works fantastically well. You just write. Let LyX handle the layout issues. It can be a little counter intuitive, but as of the latest version is really good. Say goodbye to your formatting woes.
I loved the article. I now actually know something about OO.org other than it is free.
For those LateX supporters, can you please find in your free time to write a similar article but that teaches LateX.
Please
Latex is already very well documented. For example, you can read “the not so short intro to latex2e”, the official guide.
That would be nice. And perhaps someone else can write an article about Docbook.
John Blink wrote: “For those LateX supporters, can you please find in your free time to write a similar article but that teaches LateX.”
There are LOTS of resources for guiding you through Latex. May I take this opportunity to plug my own tutorials. I’ve had lots of great feedback from people who have used them to learn Latex. It can be found at:
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/andyr/misc/latex/
Back to the article though. I am glad that the uses of styles within word processors are being encouraged – it’s the only way to go! Of course, I tend to use Latex more than OO.
For all the LaTeX fans out there, if you use vim then try
LaTeX Suite
http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/
I’ve been using latex and vim together for years but only discovered this a couple of days ago, absolutely fab stuff.
lyx and latex is one of the reasons i use linux/bsd.
i have produce all docuemts over 3 pages using lyx – and no it doesn’t have to look like a university exam paper… you are quite free to tweek styles and layouts as you please… even inserting tex/latex/extension as you wish.
it is stable and is designed for serious use (eg turn off preview of inserted graphics) ..
highly recommended.
and even better – your lyx source can be used to exprot to ps, pdf, html, other …
And could anyone write a not so short introduction to LyX?
A not so short intro to Lyx is included in Lyx :-))
Also, Lyx has a “rival” called Texmacs. You should try that one as well.
I like the concept of latex and have tried using it a few times but I think it’s almost unusable because of the complexity. Sure, it’s not very difficult to write simple things but when you want to use fonts, pictures, swedish characters and hyphenation etc it becomes highly complex. Of course, this complexity and unusability is probably partly why some people praise it so much.
I think that’s the point where Lyx comes in:
http://www.lyx.org/
I’ve never used it yet, but i will try it as soon as i get my HD back.
Hand-typing the pagenumbers? Oh man you must have been busy!
For LaTeX: Tried to do my papers in it too, but since I’m a business major and all my stuff needs an exactly defined style (Times New Roman, 12 for Text, Arial 14 for Header 1 etc) and I didnt figure that out within THREE DAYS (yeah, I may be a morron when it comes to LaTeX
, I gave up. Writer works fine for me.
Dont forget the fonts? Bit Stream Vera?
Ok, Bit Stream Vera is a rather nice font, however most user in the closed source world would not have this typical font on their system. What would happen, font substitution in their particular word processor. Unless you generate a PDF then the formatting will change on the recievers end. Just like web browsing folks. If specifiy a font on the web page and you dont have it in your collection, then your browser will substitue it for another font (unless you define custom fonts in your preferences). Why is Arial so popular (shudder)…
Just my .02c worth.
I have used (under protest) Digital Standard Runoff during the 80s and Latex during the 90s. I had endless problems getting diagrams anywhere near the related text, or nested lists to work properly.
Another serious problem with Latex was the use of standard included files as company policy. These files evolved over the years, with the result that old documents became unprintable.
Give me Wysiwyg every time, even the old DEC screen editor that managed little more than word wrap. (It did have a neat feature for inverting upper/lower case, or forcing the case to one of these.)
I am not so proud of my typing that I disdain the use of spell checkers or style checkers. I am surprised that the use of styles is seen as new by so many postings here.
Yours sincerely,
C. E.
I’m just facing a huge task, writing a UFH user manual for a program and this article is really create intro into OO.org.
Thanks.
Great Article!
I hear a lot of scientific minds wishing we all convert to latex? (-:
I’m happy with this manual, so I can use my favourite wysiwyg a lot easier.
Lighans
Hello skript (IP: 62.233.169.—),
Easiest way to handle your font issues is to make sure you have the same fonts installed on both your systems (win32 and Linux). The problem with any document are the fonts and the said substitution of those fonts. You can use the MS core fonts on Linux: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
Or you can use the infamous fonts from:
1) ghostscript
1a) http://sourceforge.net/projects/gs-fonts
1b) http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get704.htm
2) gnome fonts (bit stream vera)
2a) http://www.gnome.org/fonts/
Some things to keep in mind is that MS doesnt natively handle Type 1 fonts. Why? Because they were made by Adobe. Microsoft is in competetion for the Deskstop Publishing space and they are not the biggest supporters of Type 1 fonts. So you basically need another application to read those fonts like Acrobat Reader, Ghostscript, Xpdf and so forth. However, it comes back to that age old issue of font substitution. You have 2 choices:
1) Embedding the fonts in the document (IE: pdf).
2) Use common fonts amoung the documents.
Tis a real shame, both univerises (*nix, windows, mac) all have some excellent fonts. I just wish there could a little more co-operation on a font base. Am I saying eveyone use free fonts? No. Each company should use their own equivalent font (Arial, Times and so forth). But that wouldnt still be a perfect mix for various differnces between the fonts themselves (arial windos vs arial mac vs arial linux). Ok, I am just complaining way too much, it just wont happen due to licenses, font differences and ideaology. Stick to option 1 or 2 in the above section and you will be fine.
I actually forgot to talk about styles. Darn!
Styles have existed for quite some time, however most users never notice or thought they would be of any use. I think most people would benefit from a basic type setting class in their education careers.
However, styles have their cross platform limitations:
1) styles are not always translated between competeing office suits. However, it will help new users create better looking documents. That is providing your into the cookie cutter thing.
2) Basic formatting works cross plaform. You can almost mirror a style with out using a style and have the same formatting work cross platform. However that is more work in the end.
Yes, this is the result of proprietary formats: Frustration. I do find OO more usable than their commercial counterparts.
The usual problem with pics showing up at the end of the article is because the pics are too big. If the pics are too big, they are put at the end.
End of story.
You don’t have to reformat the pic, pic-size are adjusted easily in latex with width=10cm, height=10cm depending on what kind of pic you’re using (ps, eps, etc).
I write even my notes in latex. And I used nano to write my master thesis. Latex == complete controll. WYSIWYG == maybe it works, maybe not.
I am not a programmer, I hardly know some basic HTML but I’m fairly good at LaTeX so it’s not only for the guru’s but in the end, it’s all about what you need/want.
The first time I had to write this kind of documents, I tried LaTex and … and got all the formatting for free without any need for learning menus. You need three commands (more or less).
Text formatting has been a profession for centuries. There are loads of people who worked hard to get these things right. Why reeinvent the wheel by defining it each time for yourself?
The LaTeX standard packages give you enourmous power and control over the content with footnotes, references, citations etc, but leave you alone with the tedious task of defining page breaks that don’t come right.
Thanks. Bookmarked now
@ Anonymous (IP: —.client.comcast.net)
Everyone can do it’s job with the application they like. But maybe they want to save some time by using functions they did’nt know that they exist. Maybe. This is not only a problem of textprocessor applications.
In the real world one can use a hammer to get a screw into the wall (really, it’s possible), but it’s more obviously that this is not the best way (I think…). Show them a screwdriver, and hey, maybe they fall in love with it. If not, they can also use the hammer. Just “telling” (meaning: giving them an advice) them something does not mean to force them something to do.
Christoph
heh, I’m just giving my vote for LyX! I love it! I still use OO.o for small things, but for anything substantial I use LyX. The best part of it is BiBTeX! I edit my .bib file in xemacs bibtex mode, it’s so easy, and you can share the references across multiple papers, and it does it all automatically! The last paper I wrote, I spent about 30 seconds on formatting!
On another note. I’m doing a PhD, and I get to see quite a few students use word processors and what not. And I’m absolutely astounded how few people use the stylist in word!! People doing table of contents by hand!?!? That’s ridiculous!
I really don’t know how people don’t know this stuff! Good Article though, it’s sorely needed!
Since there seems to be some mention of laTex in this thread as well I thought I might take advantage to ask a few questions.
I’ve been planning on writing all my essays in similar way nano + LaTex, if for no other reason then being able to read them several years from now on the computer (e.g. no vendor lock in!).
Couple of questions for you:
1) I love nano, but disabling the word wrapping never seems to work (I think there is a compile and run-time option). How have you gotten around this? Do you hit enter at the end of each line or are you using latex to determine the end of a paragraph?
2) What reference have you used for Latex? I’ve looked at local bookstores and there doesn’t seem to be anything brief and useful.
3) I’ve been planning to have all my essays bound together as a portfolio. Is it easy and reliable to convert to pdf to take directly to a printer?
Thanks!
As much as I hate using public forums for private discussions, there’s no other way for me to thank Nix_User for usefull information on fonts substituting… Well then, thanks
It’s a real shame though, that some people (like me
may blame Open Writer for errors it isn’t responsible for (like the problem I’ve had with fonts)… For the common user, if the application isn’t behaving correctly, then there simply must be something wrong with it (never mind that the fonts issue is completely EXTERNAL to the Open Office Suite)… And that kind of thinking isn’t really doing any good for the widening the use of Open Office…
My response to Zen’s questions:
“1) I love nano, but disabling the word wrapping never seems to work (I think there is a compile and run-time option). How have you gotten around this? Do you hit enter at the end of each line or are you using latex to determine the end of a paragraph?”
Couldn’t offer any help with nano. I’m a vim user. However, with regards to how Latex determines new paragraphs, you need two carrage returns, aka a blank line between paragraph 1 and 2.
“2) What reference have you used for Latex? I’ve looked at local bookstores and there doesn’t seem to be anything brief and useful.”
There are some good books available at the bookshops. My fave is: Guide to Latex (4th Ed) by Kopka and Daly. Very nice book. If you become a Latex convert, then maybe The Latex Companion is worth a purchase too, as it goes in depth with Latex.
Of course, there are many free guides. The most “book” like is The Not So Short Guide to Latex. Search for that in Google and you’ll get LOTS of hits. Is a decent guide. My previous post gave a link to my web-based tutorials which are suited for learners. (At least that was my plan!)
“3) I’ve been planning to have all my essays bound together as a portfolio. Is it easy and reliable to convert to pdf to take directly to a printer?”
Pdf output from latex is soooo easy. I find the pdf output from OO is little skakey at best (a good feature though). There are a number of ways to achieve your pdf. Latex by default produces a DVI file. It’s then possible to use ‘dvipdf’ to convert. Nowadays, I use the slightly modified latex interpreter, ‘pdflatex’, which is distributed with Latex, but outputs pdf files directly. And if you use Lyx, you can do all that at the click of a mouse
I havent’ read the comments yet, but I’m sure there are some saying this is off subject, etc. But I just wanted to say thank you. This is something that I can use. In addition, the fact that you are teaching it in OOWriter instead of MS Word means that many people who might still be on MS Office, or in my case use both a little bit, have more reason to use OO next time. That is what really makes this quite relevent to OS News. Thanks, and how bout a Fedora 3 Test 2 review when it comes out?
In reply to Fooker,
I do think there is a place to discuss Latex in these comments. The author of the original article is essentially expressing his surprise (and relief) at having styles available in his word processor of choice. Yet, for those who are familiar with other methods of producing documents, for example, Latex, there isn’t really a choice. You are almost forced to opt for a structured approach – defining which bits are titles, sections etc. But Latex has been around for AGES! Before all the fancy wysiwyg processors came along.
Therefore, if people are interested in approches to stucturing their OO documents using styles, then maybe they would be interested in Latex. Just because it’s not wysiwyg does not (i believe) make it any less valid a comment.
I my mind, the average reader of OSNews is fairly proficient in their technical abilities. Therefore, I wouldn’t be worried about recommending tools without a GUI.
I can’t imagine that anyone who has mentioned Latex here thinks it’s cool to do so. I do use Latex, but I also use OO. Both are great but for different types of documents (in my experience anyway). This thread is more about text formatting than it is word processors IMHO. It applies to web design too, in so far as it’s best to stucture your document with the proper tags for headings and subheadings etc. And then you can customise their appearance using CSS style sheets.
The subject is not so much about WYSIWYG editors but rather how to write long documents (a thesis) properly in OOo Writer.
Being a LaTeX AND a OOo writer user, I must say that both have their strength and weaknesses.
There have been many comments about LaTeX because people who use LaTeX know from “EXPERIENCE” that it is a lot more robust and will cause a lot less headaches compared to other tools, when writting LONG and COMPLICATED documents, like a thesis, as was the case in this article.
Please understand that we are talking about doucments that are over 50 pages long with lots of pictures, tables, references etc…
Also a lot of the articles that mention LaTeX also mention that this is a good article.
So let me make it clear: OOo writer is BETTER than LaTeX in many respects, however when it comes to writing a thesis (as mentioned in this article), LaTeX is the “better” choice.
I am not trying to force it on anybody nor come across as an elitist, but from EXPERIENCE, I have found that it is well worth learning since it pays off in the long term.
first of all: thank you (and all the others in the other comments who liked this article)!
> and how bout a Fedora 3 Test 2 review when it comes out?
hmmm, rather not. it’s a pain to install a test system just to remove it again afterwards… but i plan to write something about debian sarge 🙂
best regards,
christian
it can even export to LaTeX and Docbook. So you can
(1) conveniently edit
(2) finetune typsetting of
your output
Rob
I still feel that WordPerfect (on Windows) is the best at this. I’ve been using styles since the DOS days with WP for DOS 5.0, and upgraded as time went on. WordPerfect has always been great at long documents. Long as in hundreds of pages. Memory and hard disk space being the only real limitation as to the size of the document.
Four years ago I turned my back on Windows and started using Macs. I currently have a iMac (G4) and use Nisus Writer Express.
People consider me a geek but I didn’t like LaTeX when I tried it. It got in my way of writing. Everyone’s different.
Have any of you checked out O’Reilly’s book on OpenOffice.org? I looked at a copy in the bookstore and it looks like it provides comprehensive coverage of the word processor only…though it does come with the CD for the entire suite.
Chris wrote:
For LaTeX: Tried to do my papers in it too, but since I’m a business major and all my stuff needs an exactly defined style (Times New Roman, 12 for Text, Arial 14 for Header 1 etc) and I didnt figure that out within THREE DAYS (yeah, I may be a morron when it comes to LaTeX
, I gave up. Writer works fine for me.
This is an interesting remark, it (partly) shows why people are confused about LaTeX. A rough explanation.
With tools like Word, OOo, Writer, the end user enters the text and after having entered the text, she/he applies styling, manually or with the help of predefined styles (a).
Using LaTeX, the process is inverted. You firstly inform LaTeX by giving it some directives on how the text should be styled and formated. Later, you enter the text (b).
The netto results may be the same (neglecting the technical superiority of TeX), the editing approach is different.
I would say, this is because you want “an exactly defined style”, that you have to choose the (b) way. You write the text and then you “milled” it with LaTeX.
Interestingly, the text you submit is not formated. It is a pure ascii text, a serie of characters, it may originate from Linux, Windows, Mac of from different editors like word, notepad or writer. Only the text is relevant.
The publishers are using that way. They recieve the text from around the world, then they “milled” it with their own LaTeX directives before printing.
The principles are still valid on a single PC. It may take time to create the first document. But, later, you save time, a lot of time.
For Windows users:
To install MiKTeX, download and run the MiKTeX setup wizard:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/miktex/setup.exe.
For more information, visit the MiKTeX Project Page at
http://www.miktex.org.
A wrapper for LaTeX, GPL
http://www.texniccenter.org
Nice. Refreshing article.
jmf
Another comment. On your paper you use full justification. Please turn that off, it may look cool from a whitespace point of view. The spacing between the words looks awful in itself, and the spacing becomes inconsistent and difficult to read. Also I tend to use the length of the ragged right edges to judge where I am. Especially when scanning around a paragraph or if returning from a distraction.
It’s not full justification that’s the problem. The text width is way too big. There’s a reason LaTeX produces huge margins with full justification
Thou everybody is probably dead-tired of ‘use LaTeX’ comments by now, I would still repeat that. I use OO.o for greating drawings for LaTeX documents, it can export EPS and PDF, that’s great. Then I use Subversion for versioning LaTeX documents – something one can not do easily with WYSIWYG editors. XEmacs *AND* GVim for editing, dependant on situation. Finally provide nice output with pdfLaTeX.
…and mandatory note about the usage of Dvorak keyboard…
Why no hotkeys for the stylist, or even better tabbing through styles. I write screenplays which have a specific format (dialog, action, sluglines, characters, transitions, etc…) all these things can easily be handled in stylist, but switching every couple of lines to a different style is a major waste of time. So is typing a bunch of markup in latex. At 300 bucks and currently broken on wine (used to work six months ago?!?) Final Draft simply tabs through the styles. I’d be happy with ctl+ combinations for stylist, but having to manually access it every time is a deal breaker.
Have to say I’m an Indesign fan. I absolutely hate MS Word and my experience with OO Writer is limited but as I do a lot of DTP/Print work I do a hell of a lot of layout and design work in InDesign.
Layout first and text secoandary. It is so easy to deal with graphics, pagination, notating and typography. I hope OO becomes more of a tool like this rather than a more Word than Word program. I think if people are introduced to software that treats the page as a canvus instead of a bloody typewriter, then we will have progressed greatly. Time to stop waisting CPU cycles doing things the way machines did them over a century ago. Sure you couldn’t insert images in a typed document on the typewriter but why do we need the typewriter paridigm anyway?
While improving the DTP features in OOo is useful, remember the target market is the average user. Since the average user currently uses MS Office, OOo must maintain its focus on that market. DTP programs need to support complex PDF workflows and state-of-art color management systems that aren’t required in Office suites.
Note the upcoming version 2.0 of OOo (due to be fully released end of 1Q2005) will have a much improved GUI as well as a user-friendly database (complete with Form Design Wizards etc).
On the DTP side, check out Scribus. A good article over here
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/09/02/scribus.html
The Scribus team are also working to allow users to drop OpenOffice files directly into Scribus.
Overall, thanks for the article. It was a good encouragement for me to invest the time to learn how to make better use of OOo’s Formatting features.
And by the way, you mentioned a Debian Sarge review / suggest to check out Gnoppix http://www.gnoppix.org/ that provides a GUI installation for a Gnome-based Debian Sarge install.
Sorry, I should have made clear that the first four paragraphs of my previous post refer to the posting from Piers, while the last two specifically refer to Christian’s article.
“I don’t mean to be too harsh, but I never understood people who decide to write long, complicated document with a WYSIWYG text processor like Word or Writer.”
Nor can I. These are suitable for business letters and short reports, not theses or magazines or books.
Use a proper DTP program such as InDesign, Quark XPress or Pagestream. Then each element (such as a picture) stays exactly where you put it on the page. Styles are a basic feature of all DTP programs.
I have been using OO.o and latex quite long together with linux. Yet on the another XP box, its MSOffice 2000 installed with Endnote 7.0 integration helpe me actively to fulfil references. of course you can do it manually, Endnote helps you to auto-complete right after citing something on MSWord *.doc. That is rarely to do with OOo.
However, OOo is preferred when I write math fomulas, I really like it.
I’m no big fan of oowriter and I agree that it is not dissimilar to MS Word. Many of you propose LaTeX as the format for writing documents. Well, it may have a long history and it seems practical, but my personal view is that it in’t very well designed. You are limited to predefined “tags”, many of which are named without a good convention. subsubsection? LARGE large Large? Seems very ugly to me. It looks more like a hack – even if it indeed is a useful one – than a serious format.
This discussion brings up the subject of good document formats and their editors. Formats should be portable, easily readable, provide means to edit styles in a simple way. Too bad there are so little. But don’t we only need one?
Think about PDF. There’s that ‘P’ in the name but I wouldn’t call it that at all. It’s in the hands of a commercial company and if you’re not using their tools, you can’t be sure what your document will look like to other people. I haven’t seen a good PDF viewer for linux (gpdf, xpdf both had problems – no navigation, occasionally unreadable text, etc.). Portable documents must be easily modifiable and you should be able to reclaim information from them with ease. With PDF that is not the case. Allright, enough, this is not meant to be a critique of PDF.
oowriter’s document format does not count as a portable document too, as you are confined to OO.org if you want to edit and/or use it. Yeah, it is xml, but it’s non-standard, zipped (and therefore not easily accessible) and split into many files. This makes it complicated to edit it by hand or even write a simple editor/viewer. I also think that OO.org is too bloated with features and designed in a way too similar to MS Word (I’m not even considering .doc here as a portable format for obvious reasons).
That’s when (X)HTML comes in. It’s trivially simple to edit, manage its styles (css). It has a nice structure. It is also very easy to create an arbitrary document format in xml and then convert it to XHTML with XSLT. Taking into account MathML, SVG (though it’s not all that supported yet), this is clearly the best available format for all-around documents. There are many F/OS tools out there that handle it nicely for all the popular operating systems.
Well, maybe a bit off-topic, but what the hell 😉
XML is good for structuring information, for example for a catalog.
But how do you tackle the design of a document? How do you position a picture to an exact coordinate on a page? How do you set up a drop capital with controlled runaround of the main text?
You don’t. There are things that XHTML can’t do. It’s designed to be displayed on any media and can’t depend on exact object sizes and positioning relations. True, in the context of creating an attractive layout for a page that can act to its disadvantage. However, if I were to write a formal document, I’d do it in XHTML. It would be readable by the whole world and look good in print.
> XML is good for structuring information, for example for a
> catalog. But how do you tackle the design of a document?
Take a look at FOP:
http://xml.apache.org/fop/
It’s great a great formatting engine that can output PDF, RTF, HTML, text, MIF and several other formats. It doesn’t have macros or any of the conveniences of a language like LaTeX, but since it’s XML you don’t need them. XSLT allows you to define your own “macros” which can be converted to FOP.
IMO, the key problem with LaTeX is it’s inconsistency. It’s like one of those swiss army knives that can do anything, but when you try to use it to do anything too complex, you just end up pinching yourself. Case in point, you can place lists in the first column of a table, but you can’t place them in the second column. I’ve tried everything including placing a table in the second column of a table and placing the list in the first column of that table. No dice. There also doesn’t seem to be a way of placing a newline in a column of a table. You can fake both of these by using nested table and bullet characters, but you arrive at another issue. If you specify that a column has a flexible width, it can (and if you’re not careful, does) cause the inner table to expand outside the outer table giving you weird results. You can specify that the column is fixed size but then you end up with another issue. If you ever decide to change the width of the outer column, you need to manually tweak the size of each inner table.
LaTeX is great for writing theses since you don’t run into these sorts of issues. But it’s not good for formatting the stuff a general word processor is. FOP is a much better consistent match.
As a professional graphic designer and “DTP” based computer user I have found the comments in this thread quite interesting. Never used LaTeX so can’t comment but seems a bit too much like coding HTML by hand or the days of professional typesetting before WYSIWYG
i.e. <font:times bold> <12pt/14pt> <indent 18pt> Type the damn text <italic> HERE </italic><new para><6pt before>
(Pre WYSIWYG typesetting – NOT LaTeX before anyone starts….
)
WARNING: this will probably wander way off subject so don’t flame me for it…
I work in the commercial printing business so what I have to say regarding WP vs DTP relates mostly to MY job and should not be taken as an attack on any *other* way of achieving a result. (Let us progress…)
Styles (preformatted text) or whatever you like to call them are an essential part of using any WP/DTP if you are going to produce more than a couple of pages. Let’s face it, if you want to write a one page letter why not use Excel if that is your programme of choice and you know how to use it? In “most” professional layout packages styles link to many variables (including those that build auto TOC/Indexing
Also they have great currency in larger organisations where predefined “templates” (aka Stationery Pads etc.) with preset styles allow coprorate identity to be maintained without every worker having to study the whole “identity manual” and remember it.
Regarding the use of Word Processors as Layout Packages – this is fine if you are going to print the stuff yourself (e.g. your thesis) or create PDF files to distribute (whatever reason). If you are intending for some poor b*st*rd like me to have to make something that can be commercially printed – PLEASE DON’T DO IT (unless you have got written permission *in blood* from your service provider that it is OK).
As to why we are *still* using the typewriter paradigm – I don’t really know, the difference between WP and DTP used to rely pretty much on whether the thing behaved like a glorified typewriter or was more “object oreinted” (frame based). These days it is all a lot muddier. From my trade point of view the big problem with Word/OO/MS Publisher etc. is they are neither “device independent” (open a PC Word doc on the Mac and pray the page formatting holds *not the text formatting* or that the fonts match. Do you have any idea how many different versions of Arial are floating around out there?) nor do they support proper spot or CMYK colours, everything is RGB. This causes commercial lithographic printers severe headaches. People like me get paid to circumvent/reverse engineer/overcome these difficulties – but normally the customer foots the bill which is normally more than they think they saved by doing it themselves.
For *proper* DTP (that is actually going to a commercial printer) you will normally need to use something like QuarkXpress or InDesign or make a decent “press quality” PDF. Some other programs might be acceptable with provisos…
Some print companies (like mine) also support some cheap/free/old/obscure packages such as PageStream, Aldus Home Publisher, MS Publisher, Serif PagePlus or whatever their pre-press gurus have tucked away/an old soft spot for/some old kit that still runs it/etc. But remember to ASK them before commiting yourself, some packages may have limitations (MS Publisher is fine for mono or CMYK but usually no good for spot color e.g. black and red.)
To me “aged tho I may be” a Word Processor is a means to an end, you process text with it. Write/compose, spell/grammar check, organise/cut paste, polish/edit, use an outliner if necessary/desired, etc.,etc. Apply text formatting (font, headings, suheadings). Then you pass the text to the next step (this may mean directly to your desktop printer – in which case you can use as much of the attached “bloatware” as you want. If it isn’t going to leave your own little network loop it don’t matter what “pseudo DTP” features you use!
If that next step means “professional” DTP/Print then it heads off to the Quark/InDesign/etc. package. i.e. the PostScript centred object oriented layout tool that links to your litho printer’s proofing/prepress/digital/litho workflow. Usually basic text formatting etc *will* be retained. More complex features? YMMV
If the next step is some sort of Web page then I guess you’ll be palming off to the Dreamweaver/Freeway area which I don’t know much about except that they are pretty much to the webpage what my tools are to the printed page…
Please don’t flame. But any and all relevant comments appreciated.
Serenak
A men. The amount of times I have had to redo someones work because they thought they would get smart and try to lay out their text and pictures in a program not suited for press work has been too much. The clients have ended up pushing up the costs of their work because we have to then take the maligned formatted text and re do it again in a DTP program (InDesign is our work horse). Then we usually have to get the client to give us the image material in either hard copy or try to explain to them the format requirements needed for printing (which is usually harder for them to grasp). If a client just came in with a word/OO/text file (paragraph formatted and nothing else), some raw images (photos prefereably) and a basic hand scetch of what they require, the process is so much easier.
Unfortunately todays phsudo DTP/WP programs encourage the average user to try everything them selves when they unfortunately have no clue to page layout, typography, and basic formatting skills.
Even the clients with Graphics/DTP programs have work submitted that requires a lot of simplification and tidying up as god knows the amount of times I have seen very conveluted artwork submitted to us in AI or Indd formats. You can’t be all things in the work place and people shuld just stick to what they are good at and ask for help on things they aren’t but todays workplace environment probably makes that hard. People do get quite pissed when they realise how much time has been wasted by their trying to do it themselves but at the end of the day it is the quality of output we do that concerns me and that is what we build our rep on.
Hi there Piers,
Don’t I know it – and it looks lik you do too…
True enough many are led astray by the “”word can do it all” interface.
I don’t always blame the creator of the file… Often a little education goes a *long* way…
Also however I (like you) have seen work submitted by *professionals* in AI/EPS/PDF/INDD/PMD/QXD that makes your blood boil/freeze at it’s incompetence….
Been away checking in with various other boards…
Local now reading 2:30am BST
Gotta log off – two kittens, a nearly 4 year old daughter and my new one week old baby demand it…
Will check back tomorrow am Piers I promise – I seem to have a knack of joining “dying ” discussions…
Sorry for the delay, was away this weekend.
Couple of questions for you:
1) I love nano, but disabling the word wrapping never seems to work (I think there is a compile and run-time option). How have you gotten around this? Do you hit enter at the end of each line or are you using latex to determine the end of a paragraph?
I don’t remember how I compiled nano specifically (gentoo system) but I toggle word-wrap on/off with the -w flag.
2) What reference have you used for Latex? I’ve looked at local bookstores and there doesn’t seem to be anything brief and useful.
I’ve used google exclusively. There is this page (http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/teTeX/latex/late…) which is some kind of “official” command-listing and you will see this exact same document on several sites. I found this one just now with google.
3) I’ve been planning to have all my essays bound together as a portfolio. Is it easy and reliable to convert to pdf to take directly to a printer?
You compile latex to DVI and where you go from there is your choice. If you want to print, use .PS, if you want to read on-screen, use .PS or .PDF.
I usually have two terminals open in one screen. One covering almost the whole screen where I edit my document, and another smaller terminal at the bottom where I run “latex document.tex && dvipdfm document.dvi && gv document.pdf -magstep -1”
latex: TEX -> DVI
dvipdfm: DVI -> PDF
gv: PDF viewer for linux, -magstep -1 is one step zoom out (fits nicely on my 1600×1200 screen).
To get PS, you could use DVIPS, youi can go from PS to PDF with PS2PDF (bet you didn’t see that one coming
…
So my workflow is like this: edit a line/paragraph/equation/whatever, alt-tab to the smaller terminal, arrow-up + enter and GV flops up showing the document. alt-f4 to close, alt-tab back to the editor and continue working.
It used to be beyond my level understanding how anyone could even try to write a larger document *without* using styles.
Learning to use “dtp” using Ventura Publisher (running under GEM, we’re talking early 1990’s here), I got hooked on the beauty of stylesheets, templates, automatic indexes and the likes real quick.
As my employer switched from Uniplex to Word, the knowledge I gained on Ventura really helped me in setting up standard templates in Word. Over the years, as a trainer, I must have taught hundreds of staff members how to use templates, styles and so forth, probably saving the company a lot of money in saved working hours.
The achilles heel of Word however, is that it saves it templates in separate files from the document. I have seen people wanting to comit suicide because their document all of a sudden looked different because the template was not present at the computer hooked up to that nifty laser printer ;-).
Now using OpenOffice.org again I enjoy the ease that some good templates and styles bring.
My compliments for an article well written. It is probably one of the major drawbacks of word processors like Word en OO, that it is so “easy” to change a font “on the go” that most people never take the “trouble” to learn about styles.
I sincerely hope that your article steers a couple of users in the right direction!
Kind regards from Germany,
Frits
I know a few academics that would consider swithing from MS Word, and even to Linux, but only if they can have a footnote tracking/maintaining program equivelent to EndNote.
It’s a deal breaker — even for the ones who are desperate to get away from Windows.