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Converting complex Word Docs, and Open/StarOffice lock-ups


Guest JaseP
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Guest JaseP

I've noticed that when my wife tried converting some of her old Word Docs to OpenOffice, she locked up my Linux box... When I tried to convert one of the docs, I noticed that it would lock up for me as well.

 

It seems that complex Word Docs, formatted with a lot of tables, there is a greater chance of lock-ups.

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I don't really know about lock-ups, but I do know that OpenOffice.org/StarOffice does choke on any form of complex Word document.

 

Unfortunetaly, the two are not completely compatible. If you use Word like a desktop publishing program -- inDesign -- then OpenOffice.org simply can't keep up and will either die or mangle the document on you.

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Guest BooYah

Word combatibility is a work in progress, and it's a problem M$ is responsible for.

 

Straight text seems to hold up pretty well, but whenever I would transfer documents with complex graphics, things got a little screwy. I've never had one lock-up before though. My solution-use Open Office for everything. If someone else needs a copy and they don't have Open Office, I'll save it as a pdf.

 

 

BooYah

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Word combatibility is a work in progress, and it's a problem M$ is responsible for.

 

It's not a problem MS has to fix, it's a problem that's a solution to them...

I agree wholeheartedly with you: just do everything in OOo, and if people don't have it, either save to pdf and/or offer them to pass them a cd with OOo.

 

I recently heard here in Switzerland, the Kanton of Geneva has done exactly that to all taxpayers: they sent them a cd with (amongs other things like the tax form) OOo for Win and Lin!!

 

These people are using their heads. Wish all others would do the same.

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A push yes.. but that is future stuffs.. What happens to all the existing word documents already made.

 

Anyway, the sooner the push is made and the standard is created, the better for me. I have to downgrade my OpenOffice to 1.0.1 because the doc files opened in OO.o 1.0.2 have outline formatting problems, and I just cannot redo the formatting on 20 something pages of document just for printing.

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I don't have OpenOffice installed at the moment. However, you can make a pdf from almost an application you have that will print to a printer. Say, for example Mozilla. Select Print, Print to file. The default will be mozilla.ps, so if you use that it will print a file named mozilla.ps

 

once it has, open a terminal and type

ps2pdf mozilla.ps yourfilename.pdf

 

I know this doesn't really help with the OO question, but it might help in general.

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