why cant linux community create a proper word processor ?

It is also possible to get Office 2010 installed on Linux. www.playonlinux.com. For the stuff that 'has to be' M$ Office compatible, I use this. If it does not, I'm all over LibreOffice.

Choose either open office or libre office. Document your findings. File a bug in the relevant bugzilla.

thanks allend,TobiSGD,rtmistler !
i will try Lyx , i am installing it right now. thanks for pointing me in the right direction, i had no intention to troll or upset anyone.i just felt frustrated that i am being pushed to use ms office just because my document formatting goes off when i send it to someone.

Someone said i should get involved in the project myself , id love to but i am not a programmer and i lack expertise,still i can want free software, so i shall continue to test various FOSS .

All I know is that I've used OpenOffice for years, as though it was Word/Excel, saving to Microsoft-format files as necessary ... and it has always faithfully done everything that I've ever expected of it. I also find that .odt files are also widely understood and accepted now. Therefore, I am quite puzzled by the opening statement in this thread: "what do you mean? it works great!"

I have used word processors since IBM's DisplayWrite 3.0 to produce not just routine office correspondence, but training manuals, workbooks, and user manuals.

I have found OOo and now Libreoffice to be robust office applications. I have found that, when trying to "save as" Word formats, documents with complicated formatting (nested lists, etc.), the formatting sometimes does not save properly. I used to be treasurer of my church and had a neat 26-sheet Open Office *.ods file which, when I updated it each week, automatically updated the monthly reports, the YTD figures, and the end-of-year-report.

If you like MS Office macros, that can be an issue, as they are in MS Visual Basic and therefore do not translate to Linux.

LO is a robust and full-featured office suite which can do almost anything you would ask it to do. One of the guys at HPR has an detailed series of tutorials on how to get the most of it.

LO and OOo might not be to your taste--or might not meet your needs if you have to produce complex documents for a Microsoft shop--but they are not LameWare.

Originally Posted by ccxalee libre and open office are alright but if you have to get real work done , then they lack alot of things. since people commonly use ms office , the real problem is when i send a file to someone , the whole formatting is off. where as documents produced in kingsoft retain the formatting , even when opened in microsoft office.

If consistent formatting is the issue, when why aren't you looking at Latex, Postscript/PDF? There are people in the Linux community generating documents with command like text editors and notepads and use markup to PDF or *tml utilities that produce documents that look 100% the same on my iPad, Android or Windows machine as they do on Linux.

when i was job hunting i would send out my resume in *.odt, *.doc and *.pdf formats (gotta' love open-offices built-in export to pdf feature).


also, i worked at a computer lab in college and they had open office as well as m$ office.

this worked out very well because the number 1 problem is people had floppies from home (yes i'm old) and used word-97 which is not forward compatable with word-2000.

opening it in oo, and saving in the appropriate format worked 100 % of the time.

i even had people with ms-works, lotus-works, coral-wordperfect files and oo was able to read the file most of the time.

Microsoft Office 2007 when it came out, would you believe was produced and issued in English. Oh Yes! However, they had a little problem that has with Office 2010 vanished, and what would that be? Well the spell checker, the spell checker? Yes. How? Instead of having English as the default, they found that it was French.

Blue in the face on the Microsoft site, they found the following. Unfortunately, Microsoft is unable to rectify the problem. Please install a 3rd party one. I have one of these Office 2007 disks. The Office works very nice indeed and I did install a 3rd party spell checker.

Regarding Kingsoft, Softmaker Office and LibreOffice and the lightweight AbiWriter. If you are prepared to use work-a-rounds you can get the job done. I am a trained Technical Writer. For most people they will do as they never use half the options that exist. They use a third if not less. Those wishing to save hard disk space would be better using these.

Likewise, when looking at the situation with graphics, true Adobe Photoshop and Corel PaintShop Pro are king of the road, however there are several small freeware programmes that pick up on various options in these king of the road software.

To sum it up see what you need, and use what you need.

why cant linux community create a proper word processor ?

Because of people's mentality. Linux community loses its taste for things. Thus ugly software is produced, replacing normal things created earlier.

Originally Posted by moshebagelfresser ...I am a trained Technical Writer. For most people they will do as they never use half the options that exist. They use a third if not less. Those wishing to save hard disk space would be better using these...

Isn't WordPerfect still the "industrial strength" software for heavy duty word processing?

http://www.corel.com/corel/category....roducts_Office

LOL, I've used a 2000/2001 version of 'star office', which open office was forked from. Its amazing how far its come, star office 2000/2001 was quite awful.

Originally Posted by ccxalee libre and open office are alright but if you have to get real work done , then they lack alot of things. since people commonly use ms office , the real problem is when i send a file to someone , the whole formatting is off. where as documents produced in kingsoft retain the formatting , even when opened in microsoft office.

In what format/file extension are you saving files as in Open/Libre Office?

I tend to save documents I'm sending to someone as word 2000 .doc, and I dont seem to normally have that issue when I'ved open those files on MS word 2000/2003/2007/2010. (I have done it a lot, as I'd rather check a file on the #&^# XP/MS word machine here or a random machine with MS word at someone elses house than for a file to have bad formatting). I'd better check that again, though like schneidz I tend to send out .pdfs as well, so it shouldnt be an issue.

I've seen MS word stuff up documents from another MS word version happen about as often as word stuffs up an open/libre office documents saved as .doc.

You could always save as .rtf, that works almost everywhere.

Originally Posted by ccxalee sorry if i am unable to get my point across , kingsoft is an office suite but the functionality and outlay is almost like ms office suite and it is free to use but proprietary

I take it you're....I was going to say 'a newbie' but I realise that it was 2007 when MS moved to that awful 'ribbon' layout,and that is 7 years ago. For people that got used to word pre-2007, open/libre office has a much more familiar layout.

From the few times I've run across people with no experience of either the 'old sytle' or 'new style/'ribbon' interface, it seemed to me that they took to the old style interface faster. Maybe thats in part because I was helping them and I prefer it....

What functionality do you feel is missing from open/libre office?

I've deployed LibreOffice to an entire office, for a savings of 20,000$+ instead of using MS office. I have no issues with it, compatibility or otherwise.

The only thing missing is Outlook. Sure there are mail clients that tie into it fairly well, but none of them tie in well enough to use all features of Outlook. So we had to purchase licenses for it and deploy it to the machines. That is my only complaint about the linux versions,.. but I also understand that M$ has Outlook/Exchange locked down in a pit of proprietary madness, so I don't expect that situation to ever be resolved. Its unfortunate, but unavoidable.

There is also Apache Openoffice, but I had problems a few years back when it was being moved between Oracle and Apache, and I've never looked back into it. I considered it a failed project. But from what i read, OpenOffice is back and working well. Unfortunately I've already went with LibreOffice and I'm unlikely to go back.

Dear Mr. Alex, I'm not so sure I 100% agree with you on your statement.
One must take into consideration that Linux is maintained by a lot of volunteers who don't get a penny for their ideas. Neither is knocking the software manufacturers a correct thing to do. Many of them have adopted the Open Source communities and placed so called Beta editions at Linux Open Source community. If there was no money coming in to the paid software community, open source might find itself scraping the barrel.

Now having written this doesn't mean that the software companies haven't been getting away with it for years. If you buy a washing machine, or T.V and it doesn't work then you complain to the shop, and you can even get it exchanged. With Software the item is not yours, you are expected to agree to a story book as long as your arm. Then you find that there are bugs in it, some of it doesn't work and no one knows why. They bring out a new version with these supposed to be fixed, instead often you get landed with a different bug, and what's worse they expect you to pay for their mistakes in production.

Originally Posted by moshebagelfresser ... Linux is maintained by a lot of volunteers who don't get a penny for their ideas.

This is not true AT ALL.

Many contributions to the Linux kernel are done by hobbyists and students. Some kernel contributors are contractors hired to work on the Linux kernel. However, most of the top kernel maintainers are employed by companies that produce Linux distributions or sell hardware that will run Linux or Android. See the Linux Foundation's annual kernel report for which companies are top Linux kernel contributors. In 2012, the demand for experienced Linux kernel contributors was far greater than the number of applicants to job opportunities. Being a Linux kernel developer is a great way to get paid to work on open source.

Source: http://kernelnewbies.org/KernelDevViewpoint

Thanks for correcting me! I've no knowledge of the programme developers these days. Obviously Hardware has to be developed by people who know what they are doing. Heaven forbid that I meant to chastise them - no I really do appreciate using Linux, and as a user appreciate the hard work put in by you and your colleagues, whether or not you get paid for it. As a Kernel developer you certainly are in the know more than I am of what is going on in development. I have a feeling Android may overtake Linux one day who knows. I would have thought that Software is maintained by volunteers, according to what you are telling me if I understand you correctly not so. Food for thought here.