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clove 02-16-2004 12:43 PM

Switching from WORD to OpenOffice - Has Anyone? (i have issue)
 
Hi All..

I currently run SuSE 9.0 w/ XD2 as my Desktop. (it comes with Ximian's version of OpenOffice)

I have been using XD2's OpenOffice and Star Office for a while now.. they both work great..

Editing and working within both products works as expected. Hoever...

When I send a document to anyone using Microsoft word, my pages are
always a few lines off. I see the problem in OpenOffice and StarOffice.
It may be a bit different in the 2 apps, but end result is the same.

its getting to the point, where I need to make my document, then find a
windows box w/ word, so I can fix my pages to fit.. just so I can send
it out..

Anyone have this problem? or know what I can do to fix this?

b0uncer 02-16-2004 12:52 PM

hmm...nope - I've heard many complaints about this type of problems...that documents created with OpenOffice aren't exactly the same when viewed with Word.

You can, of course, use pdf-format - if I remember correct, OpenOffice has somekind of "export to pdf" option in it's menus? If you export to pdf, then the document should remain exactly the way you did it - printing prints it out as it should come (at least I think so).

Pdf's are not my favourites, but quite useful sometimes...I really don't know if there is solution for your OO->Word -problem because the apps use different code (of course, because they're different apps :) hehe) and that's why they can't do things _exactly_ the same way.

but tell me if you find a solution....that'd be more than helpful for many people.

brassfish 02-16-2004 01:20 PM

I think word defaults to US Letter, whereas I think OpenOffice defaults to A4, which is smaller than US Letter.

clove 02-16-2004 01:34 PM

ok.. I did some testing..

I made a document that was 1 full page long. I used the courier font @ 12 and I got 4 different results.. lol i made a page just conting lines and I found..

:::Courier Results:::
44 === MS Word 2003 bottom of Page 1
47 === oOo 1.1.0 Bottom + MS Word 2004 (XP) bottom of PG 1
54 === MS Word 2000 SR1 Bottom of Page 1
56 === StarOffice 6 Bottom of Page 1

:::Times Results:::
44 = oOo 1.1.0 Bottom of Page1
48 = MS Word 2003 bottom of Page 1

I put the file on my site http://www.spazmataz.net/ooo/

Does it happen the same on you?

what are your thoughts? I am lost myself..

Edit: I also changed it to letter before

esteeven 02-16-2004 02:26 PM

Is it a fonts issue? Have you loaded the MS core fonts on to your Linux box and used those to produce a document?

davidcrawley 02-16-2004 02:35 PM

It is important to note that word has a million and one options that can affect how it justifies text and thus how many lines it gets on a page. Also it will configure the page according to some mystical parameters passed to it by the default printer driver (this is no joke, particularly when you discover this at 4am when trying to print the final draft of your 300 page 100Mbyte PhD thesis on a printer which had a subtley different printer driver to the one on which you wrote the thesis in the first page).

You will find that similar installations of word connected to different printers can often give different results in the type of test you propose even when all the page formating options are the same. You can try embedding fonts, making sure that all 476 options that can affect page length are identical and even try setting the default printer driver to the same type but believe me you are much better off going straight to something sensible like PDF.

clove 02-16-2004 03:11 PM

Ok.. I installed the new fonts into /usr/X11/lib/fonts/truetype/

then ran..

/sbin/conf.d/./SuSEconfig.fonts and restarted X

tested my documents and everything is ok now..

However my Mozilla & Firebird no longer have text? it like installing those fonts messed up others?

esteeven 02-16-2004 04:35 PM

do you mean that they no longer have text on web pages or on menus etc?

clove 02-16-2004 04:53 PM

no text on web pages..

see : http://www.spazmataz.net/ooo/screenshot1.png

esteeven 02-16-2004 05:16 PM

But you say that your original problem has gone? That's good --- but I really don't understand why firebird would do that. I installed the same fonts on this box last week with no firebird/mozilla issues. Does Konqueror work? Or Opera?

clove 02-16-2004 05:44 PM

thats the odd part.. the other browsers are ok.. its just Mozilla & Firebird..

clove 02-16-2004 05:48 PM

ok.. I will restart this into a new topic..


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