Myopia

[allsorts46]

Tux, for the first time in ages I'm in that precise, perfect mood - awake, slightly crazy, fairly happy, slightly horny, listening to Eve 6, after just the right kind of conversation with Shanna, missing her but not quite enough to feel lonely, willing to think back and to remember - that I need to face my diary entry.

Everything is just right. If

Comments

[parallaxlioness]

Why on Earth are you using Word? =P

Kris sent me something in Word today and I made her send it again as a text file. -20K later I got it. I happened to be booted into my wintendo at the time; just encouraging good form. ;)

I used to use Word a lot until one day I upgraded and it couldn't read my old files any more... a friend showed me OpenOffice, which could read (and write) both, and that, as they say, was that.

[allsorts46]

I've tried OpenOffice before, and wasn't particularly impressed. However, I did go back to the site to see if much had changed, and seeing there's a release candidate for version 2.0 there, have just installed it.

First of all, it looks much more 'complete' than it was last time I tried it, and I do rather like it so far.

The good points... It's the only program (other than Word itself) that has successfully opened my password-encrypted diary, and also managed not to destroy all the formatting in the process. That's a good start. And then... I found the option that lets me set the paper colour! I have never seen that option anywhere! That makes me happier. None of the features I'm used to having seem to be missing, and overall it works in a familiar way

[allsorts46]

That is, couldn't just download Writer. Please, LJ, editable comments!

[parallaxlioness]

No kidding. You know, we could probably write them the code for it. It is open source. ;)

[parallaxlioness]

Yup. Other advantages include what I mentioned before: namely that it can read and write most anything, even older-style Word docs that Word itself can't read anymore! The fact that it's free is nice, too. As for downloading individual programs, I don't really know. I wanted (because I use) the entire suite, so it wasn't an issue for me.

Things do seem a bit more customizable under Linux, and probably do run faster. Especially with Gentoo, since it is, of course, going to compile itself from the ground up to your system. =D

I also appreciated the sheer efficiency of it -- the whole suite is about the tenth the size of MS Office, where the latter was compressed and the former wasn't. Last I checked, anyway. Which was, admittedly, a while ago. It mattered a lot since I was on dial-up.

[allsorts46]

Hmm, I liked it a lot more before I realised it liked to throw away parts of my work...

[parallaxlioness]

Very interesting! I've never heard of that problem, but then, I've never tried to make a paragraph that long. What, if may I ask, are you using it for?

[allsorts46]

I've always written my diary entries as single blocks, except when quoting things such as conversations. This made sense when I started, since they used to be only paragraph-sized anyway, but now they tend to be 40,000 words or so. Since the transition was slow, growing over several years, I never changed my style.