"Please insert next disc"

[julesjones]

I am re-installing Windows, and by extension Everything Else. I have been doing this for over a week now, and do not expect to finish before Monday. Knowing that it would take this long (if I was lucky) was one of the reasons I'd been putting it off, even though my installation has been getting steadily flakier for the last six months.

However, I am now at the stage where I have the OS, the million and one updates to the OS, my preferred browser, my grudgingly accepted but unloved primary viruschecker, and my prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands email/usenet client installed. Which means that I have contact with the outside world again, even if I'm still installing the other stuff, including my preferred office suite (which is not either MS or OpenOffice, thank you).

The one good thing about this process is that each piece of software comes on a single shiny disc. I remember all too clearly the days of sitting there with a stack of 15 floppies to install the then-current version of the preferred office suite...

(No, I do not want to move to Linux, not unless you want to write a Linux version of the email/usenet client and the office suite for me. Bear in mind that the office suite in question is in fact optimised for OS/2, and that I have been using it since the time of the OS/2 divorce. And that I occasionally fantasise about a port to VMS.)

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

And I suppose it's too much to hope that IBM might have released a file import filter for the fork of OpenOffice now known as Lotus Symphony ...

[julesjones]

Having just checked the Wikipedia entry for Symphony, it says that it can handle SmartSuite file formats. However, it being an OpenOffice fork disinclined me to investigate further, unless someone who's used both comes along and tells me that Symphony uses the same mental model of a document as Word Pro does rather than the one used in MS Word.

I'm not exaggerating about this. I use Word at the day job because it's compulsory, but it drives me to screaming incoherent rage if I have to use it in any context other than pre-generated form letters, and sometimes even then. (I did a full on rant about this on rasfc some years back, and had Pat Wrede agree enthusiastically.) OpenOffice does exactly the same things that drive me nuts about Word, plus adds an undocumented incompatibility with Word that affects the one RTF/Word feature I *must* be able to access (and that my ancient Word Pro can handle perfectly well). Or at least it did the last time I seriously tried to use OO, which admittedly was when I was still in California, and thus some years ago.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I'd download a copy of Symphony anyway, if I were you.

It's free, and it gives you a route for turning SmartSuite documents into ODF, RTF, or .doc files if you ever feel you really need to move to a different platform.

(Meanwhile, there are alternatives. On OSX I'd recommend taking a look at (a) Pages, which is around £6 in the Mac app store and a very clean Apple UI-compliant word processor, and (b) Nisus Writer, which is not lightweight but may be the most powerful RTF-based word processor I've ever used. On Windows ... well, the 500 kilo gorilla that is MS Word has stunted the competition, but I'm sure there's other stuff out there.)

What's the RTF/Word feature you need?

[julesjones]

I may just do that, particularly as I can't find the install disk of my legal copy of MS Office (which I reluctantly bought back when I was job-hunting and everyone wanted "experience of Word and Outlook" as part of the job requirements). SmartSuite has a large range of import/export filters, but a current iteration of Lotus filters that can read modern M$ files would be useful. And better to poke at it occasionally now to see if I can get used to it than have to do so in a hurry come next machine. I do actually appreciate the suggestion, as I'd forgotten that there was a Lotus-flavoured OO fork.

I need to use electronic post-its. They are standard at my publisher for scribbling editing/copy-editing/proofing notes. (My editor sends rtf files rather than doc, and I think this is standard but couldn't swear to it.) When I seriously looked at using OO, it was on a version number that did not display them, and more importantly, did not say that they would not be displayed. Editor: "Why didn't you comment on the longer stuff in the stickies?" Me: "What stickies?" [opens file in Word pro] "Oh. Those stickies. WTF?"

The only acknowledgment that they were not displayed was buried somewhere deep in the bug tracker, where people kept asking when they were going to be implemented, and would get the very occasional reply that can be summarised as "you're the tenth person I've told today, there's no call for that feature" and/or "we're not wasting resources implementing a stupid toy that real users don't need". Both the undocumented lack of said feature and the attitude displayed to those who wanted at least a less obscure documentation of the non-functioning put me off OO. They were pushing OO at the time on the grounds of its intercompatibility with the Spawn of Redmond, and that was a *major* feature used in collaborative working. I had to wonder in what other ways it was rather a lot less compatible than claimed.

I generally work in Word Pro's native file format, but save regular backups as RTF and less regular backups as TXT. I'll also work in RTF file format if I'm doing manuscript rather than something that needs dtp tools. I like the tools in Word Pro, but I also like human-readable raw files that I can manually extract my 7 bit ASCII text from if the file glitches. It's *tedious* stripping the
control codes out of an RTF that's borked, but at least it's something I can copy-type from if necessary. And of course the final submission file is either RTF, or Word format for those editors who don't know any better.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Annotations (interoperable with MS Word's annotations) are a standard feature of OO.o now, and have been for a couple of years at least -- I think they came with 2.0, and we're now on version 3.2.

I work over copy-edited manuscripts with Ace these days using change tracking and annotations -- they use Word, I use one of the Mac forks of OO.o (there are three of 'em, confusingly enough). I notice you couldn't find the feature back in 2007 -- nearly five years ago.

[julesjones]

Yes, I couldn't find the feature 5 years ago, and it's been fixed since then -- but I'm not convinced that the accompanying attitude from the developers has been. But the primary problem is that I actively disliked the word processor precisely because of where it did emulate Word perfectly, and Open Office is very much not a feasible replacement for SmartSuite for me unless the mental model of a document has changed drastically since the last time I used it for more than viewing a document. And believe me, I *wanted* to like it. I won't voluntarily touch Word and its never-ending file format changes with a ten foot pole, but sometimes I have to handle Word files.

The 2005 version of SmartSuite is now installed, although I have yet to check that it does anything more than open correctly. I will fiddle about with that, then install Dragon, then a couple of other things, and then go and find the latest build of Symphony to play with.

[julesjones]

Found the posts from the time about the stickies. One's locked to my crit group, the other was a public summary, with further ranting about OO *and* Word in the comments threads.

http://julesjones.livejournal.com/132126.html
http://julesjones.livejournal.com/132390.html