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When I'm not working as an

Submitted by shawnmike12 on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 19:30.

When I'm not working as an Engineer, I like to do a bit of writing. My first book on How to Become a Chick Magnet was created using the OpenOffice.org 3.1 Office Productivity Suite. I like OpenOffice because it's free, is community-supported, and has most of the features that I really need to get my job done. Here's my experience using it on a seriously sized project. I recently finished the 3rd draft of a 450 page book, so I know what it's like to use OpenOffice.org Writer to create and edit a significant work with over 30 chapters, a two-level table of contents, and several pictures. I also used OpenOffice.org Draw for the cover design for my business of website hosting, and PDF export to generate files to send to LuluLulu 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 120,000 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. OpenOffice.org keeps improving, and some issues that used to get in my way, like that document outlining was half-bakedoutlining was half-baked in 2.4 have now been improved in 3.1. The main issues that got in my way were: * The layout engine can hanglayout engine can hang on complex documentscomplex documents. * * You can't load styles from a master documentcan't load styles from a master document into a sub-document directly. * Putting the page numbers in the header margin was trickyin the header margin was tricky. * Captions added to frames appear within the frameappear within the frame rather than above/below it. * Scaling objects in Draw doesn't scale containeddoesn't scale contained text. * Objects don't remain centreddon't remain centred when generating HTML for the web. * * No text-to-speech/screen-reader integration.

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