I am a writer, and I use the OpenOffice.org Office Productivity Suite exclusively in my work. I like it because it’s free, is community-supported, and has most of the features that I really need to get my job done.
I recently finished the 3rd draft of my first book, Freedom To Live, so I know what it’s like to use OpenOffice.org Writer to create and edit a significant work of 400 pages, with over 30 chapters, a two-level table of contents, and several pictures. I also used OpenOffice.org Draw for the cover design, and PDF export to generate files to send to Lulu for printing. I was pleased to find that OpenOffice.org was up to the task, but there were a few quirks I had to navigate and some missing features which made the task more painful than I would have liked.
I partitioned my book as one sub-document per chapter with a master document containing the top-level table of contents and separating pages for the various sections. This approach worked really well because the text is huge; over 130,000 words. By avoiding applying formatting directly to paragraphs and using styles consistently, I could make global style changes just by editing the styles in the master document. I could also set the page size in the master document to what I needed for publishing, while leaving the page sizes in the sub-documents more appropriate for easy editing on-screen.
I struggled somewhat to get OpenOffice.org to do everything I wanted; partly because I’d never written such a large document before and needed to use features I had never used before, and partly because I ran into a number of bugs and missing or brain-dead features. Some of these may be due to OpenOffice.org’s compatibility with Microsoft Word, but in other areas OpenOffice.org appears to lag behind Word slightly. Most of these issues were already reported in the OpenOffice.org project issue tracking database. I have a background in Software Engineering, so I was better placed than most to track down the issues that I ran into, the main ones being:
* Document outlining is half-baked, making numbering and headers difficult.
* Scaling objects in Draw doesn’t scale contained text.
* JPEG images from scanners don’t crop correctly when inserted as links.
* The layout engine can hang on complex documents.
* Objects don’t remain centred when generating HTML for the web.
* You can’t easily set the image resolution when exporting from Draw.
* Page Styles don’t act hierarchically, making page size changes difficult.
* Putting the page numbers in the header margin was tricky.
* No text-to-speech/screen-reader integration.
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