Luke Ashe-Browne Open source, web technology and feeble attempts at eloquence

Writting Documents with OpenOffice.org . re-covering old ground.

if you read my previous posts on word processing, you may have seen my begun and perhaps abandonedentry that was only a paragraph long, writting-documents-with-openofficeorg which was meant to be a re-visiting of my earlier article ms-office-openoffice-and-google-docs-winner?

So where have I been all this time since beginning and not necessarily finishing these entries. Unfortunately i've been writing very little with these tools and so don't have a huge amount to add to the topic. This post is just to put a cap on the topic. Also Google Docs being such a moving target, i've decided to leave this topic to those who are more invested in the practice of word processing. My working life  consist more of web forms and editing code in vim than arranging and formatting characters for others to read in atomic documents.

Needless to say, over the time since the origional writing of this article i have found reason to play with google docs and indeed it has some items that make it useful in immense ways. The one pitfall i've found, dont' try to write a book in it especially if there's a collaborator. Myself and a colleague tried to work together on a report that was over 100 pages long, long before we reached that length the document started to throw sync errors between our changes, and we had to abandon the online method and revert to office.

I will however accredit google docs with the parts i do like about it. The ease with which you can share a document with another person who has a google sign-in is wonderful. The graphs and charts are a little stiff in the configuration area, but the resulting look and feel i find very appealing. Generally the base choice of font face and sizes for headings I find to produce a very aesthetically positive result.

So i will leave this topic for now with those few comments and be happy i don't have to do more word processing as of right now. Back to Python.