Ubuntu Desktop Starter Guide

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 07 June 2006 14:32, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Perhaps you have never tried to write an entire book in OOo
>
> I've done it, and it works well. Of course you are supposed to use
> styles, what did you expect? OpenOffice styles, in my experience,
> work well. I would only use LaTeX if the book had a lot of formulas
> in it. I wouldn't mind DocBook for on-line help, or books that
> don't have to look visually interesting (e.g. O'Reilly books) but
> for books that do (e.g. highschool textbooks) I would pick
> OpenOffice.

Well that makes two people I now know who consistently use OO.o 
stylesheets - me and you. I know of the books you wrote, I have the 
entire collection right here at /mnt/share/books - it's the enormous 
number of OO.o User Guides, right?

I found with an 800 page book that I was hitting OO.o's usability 
limits. The style sheets are excellent for smaller jobs like form 
letters and reports that have an exact format used many times. With 
book layout, I found it to be an iterative process where I tweak a 
bit, check the results, tweak some more, etc, etc. Each time this 
involved reloading the document and you get one chance to get this 
right. I know what it feels like to take a technology beyond the 
point it was designed to go, and that book project felt just like 
that. But to each his own I suppose.

For the record, OO.o is a damn good product, I've been using it since 
1.1.0. I don't blame it for not being a page layout/typesetting 
program as it isn't one of those.

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five