I have been using Open Office for a few months now, and I really do love it. I do miss some of the unique features AbiWord had, but there is just so much in OO, it is hard to ignore.

But there has always been a problem for me that I could never straighten out.

I am using OO version 1.1.5, and even though all the margins are the same, the font is the same, and the font size is the same, every document I write in OO looks different in MS Word.

Specifically, the document is shorter on Word than it is in OO. If I write a 2 and 1/2 page document in OO, it usually turns out to be less than 2 pages when opened in Word.

The problem seems to be, just looking at it, that the lines themselves are too short, and even though everything is set the same as it is in Word, the document itself is not as wide as the Word document, which is giving me less space for text horizontally, and therefore making the document longer vertically, if that makes sense.

Has anyone else had this problem, and is there some way I can fix this?

Are you sure the paper sizes (A4, Letter, Legal, etc.) are the same in both programs? Does making the margins a bit smaller in OOo work?

I was going to ask how much you are zoomed in, but that won't help now that I think about it.

All of the settings I can see that might be the cause of the problem are the same in both programs. Paper, margins, etc.

I could make the margins smaller in OO, which might help, but then how would that effect the document when moved over to Word? Wouldn't it make the margins smaller in Word as well, just continuing the problem?

Are you sure fonts are equal? They may have equal names but be different at the same time.

Yes, Font metrics are the biggest cause. What may be "Times New Roman" in Linux may be different from the "Times New Roman" of windows. It may just be "Times" substituted for the "Times New Roman" font.

Again, there might be a few paragraph settings which might not be compatible across Word and OO.org when ported across formats.

All in all, if I were you and if I were so worried about page formatting and aesthetics, I would probably use the "Export PDF" option to produce a final version which can be used both in Windows and Linux without having to worry about font and page formatting.


Some general tips:

If you are in the intermediate stage of producing a document, you shouldn't really worry about page formatting, alignment, how many pages and so on. Worry about content first. Only in the end, when your content is done and the visual formatting doesn't come out fine, you should adjust the visual formatting of a document. That way, you will be sure of the final result. Otherwise you will end up wasting a lot of time adjusting the formatting and won't concentrate on producing the content at all.

This is why I use a system like LaTeX which frees me up from worrying about the visual formatting and allows me to write the content in a structured, logical way, rather than in a visual, WYSIWYG way. If you are in the habit of producing large, formal papers and documents, you should use a structured typesetting system like LaTeX rather than a word processor.

I too agree with MS3FGX when he says that there is some difference in the number of pages of output between MS Word and OpenOffice Document. However, the O/S being used in my case is Windows XP.

For instance, a 20 page document created in OpenOffice may get reduced to lets say 18 pages when opened with MS Word or conversely, If I created a document in MS Word with 18 pages, OpenOffice will display the same document as 20 pages. Usually I use the default font size of 10 and Arial or Times New Roman as the font. In Windows specially, font metrics will be same across applications.

I'd be curious to know if more people agree with this.

Regards,

Amit

I have experienced this, too. I'm using OO 2.0 and my friend is using Office2K. She had typed a small paper for a college class and told me she'd just started the 4th page and asked me to read over it. So I loaded it on my flashdrive and opened it on my laptop in OO. I noticed it was 6.5 pages but didn't think much then. When I was finished, gave it back and told her which pages I saw mistakes on, the page numbers didn't match. That's when I realized what was happening. I haven't found a solution yet.

I am glad (well, glad isn't really the right word) to see this isn't just for me. I hope that we can all get a resolution to this fairly odd problem.

Harishankar, while I agree with your comments, I cannot apply them here. The problem is that my girlfriend needs to type papers up on my computer and then bring them into her classes on a USB drive to work on them with the class.

The problem is, every time she shows up in class with her document, her page breaks are completely off, and she spends the beginning of each of her Lit classes fixing it all.

Followed immediately by her yelling at me for "Using the stupid penguin and not Windows like everyone else".

I will look into your idea of the font metrics being the problem, but I have used multiple fonts (both to try and fix this problem, and the fact that Times New Roman seems to be broken for me in OO) and have always had the exact same problem.

M$ promised to support a real document XML format (e.g. SXW) in the future
Office versions. Hope it will solve the problems with page formatting.
Concerning fonts, AFAIR you can use Win's fonts as well. There are tools like
mkfontscale and mkfontdir for this purpose.
Do you expirience the problem with RTF or DOC format? If RTF as well then it
is definitely because of font metrics.

I have tried opening a plain text file in MS Word, AbiWord, and OO. While it looks perfect in Word, the lines are again much shorter in AbiWord or OO, which would seem to suggest that it is indeed a problem with my system's fonts, and not OO in particular.

So what can I do to resolve this problem exactly?