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Migrating to Open Office Writer© Copyright Darrell Anderson. (Current as of OpenOffice 2.1) As any visitor to this web site learns, one of the significant challenges to my full migration away from Windows NT4 to a free operating system is my dependence upon and preference for Microsoft Word 97. People who do not use or appreciate the concepts of styles, templates, and macros struggle to understand why I do not dump Word 97 and adopt OpenOffice Writer. Professional writers, especially technical writers, do understand the nature of a structured writing environment. Yes, Writer is similar to Word 97 and even does a few things better than Word 97, such as numbered lists and master documents—the dual bane of Microsoft Word. Some people would include long documents in that category, but I have created several long documents and never had a problem. So why don’t I dump Word 97? First, I like Word 97. Actually, I liked Word 6 and before that WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Word 97 was part of the last wave of software from the Microsoft world that was benign. I never have been bothered by Clippy simply because I ripped the idiot from my hard drive. Disabling all of that AutoText nonsense was a simple exercise. Inline spelling and grammar checking? Off. Thereafter Word 97 was just as advertised—a word processor that supported templates, styles, footnotes, endnotes, and macros. Word 97, unlike subsequent versions, never gets in my way, with anything. For the past 10 years I have refused to update Word 97 and infect or shackle my writing environment. The next hurdle is macros. Macros are self-contained programs, native to the application, that perform or automate various tasks. A simple macro could insert a snippet of text into a header or footer, or anywhere in a document. Complicated macros include performing multiple tasks. All of you propellerheads and geeks who swear that emacs or vi is the text editing tool—you know about macros. Computers are incredible tools for automating repetitive tasks and that is what a macro does. Automation means efficiency. In my professional and personal use I have developed several templates upon which I now depend. For example, I have a “cleanup” macro in my editing template to repair many common typographical issues. The macro replaces all double or triple dashes with a true em-dash, and replace dashes in between numbers with a true en-dash. Straight quotation marks are replaced with typographically correct “curly” marks. All of my templates contain many macros that automate various tasks into a simple point-and-click moment and several macros are mapped to keyboard shortcuts. For example, when I am typing my draft texts, and I want to use a computer text style, I press Alt-; and my text is converted on the fly. In each template I mapped the Ctrl-I and Ctrl-B shortcuts to the appropriate style and I never experience stray italics or bolding. Writer supports a macro language but there is no proven method to convert Word 97 macros to the Writer syntax. Twice I have been involved in converting word processors, which include templates, styles, and macros, to another word processor format. There is a lot of effort involved and nobody should underestimate the task of converting. Another pitfall is importing Word 97 documents into Writer. Although my documents are based upon templates and styles, features that should be easily converted into Writer, my experience, even with version 2.1, is that this is not the case. Importing creates a lot of nuances that are not worth my time trying to correct. Suppose, however, that I decided to manually convert my templates, styles, and macros to Writer. Would I migrate? Probably not. Why? I am a writer, editor, and proofreader. When I perform these tasks I want to focus on the text. I want to focus on reviewing and polishing text. When I use my templates, such as when I use my articles template to create the draft for this document, I already know that long ago I hammered out all the nuances for page layout. I do not want nor need to be bothered with layout. I want to focus on the text. When I write in Word 97, I always use the Normal View, what some people might call the Editing or Draft View. To the left of the screen is a column displaying the paragraph style. I can see that style label within the same plane of sight as my body text. I need not look above to a toolbar. Otherwise all I see on the screen is body text. There is no gray space between pages, no headers, footers, footnotes, or endnotes to distract me. When a new page begins all I see is an unobtrusive dotted line through the page screen, something that most of the time I never notice because I am focused on content. Working in Page Layout View is distracting with each gray space that interrupts the pages. I also have designed my templates to provide me a toggle button to disable the display of images while typing. Again in Normal View I focus on content and not layout. I can preconfigure my zoom setting to my preferences for my eyesight. That means my eyes remain comfortable with less strain. Because I am not in Page Layout mode, my mind remains focused on the content of the text and nothing else. If I decide to toggle my document into columns, Normal View never bothers me because all I see is the continual flow of the text. Only if I toggle into Page layout View would I see the actual columns. Writing in Normal View also is much faster than Page Layout View. This is not easily noticed with one or two page documents, or newer hardware, but load a large document and Page Layout begins to move slower, especially if the document is filled with headers, footers, and footnotes or endnotes. Writing in Normal View means my aging hardware satisfies my writing needs without incurring any additional expense for newer hardware. I never have learned how to type faster than my computer can display the text to my video monitor. Simply put, Writer can’t do this. There is only Page Layout View (Print Layout). As far as I can tell researching this one topic, many people have requested a Normal View option for Writer, but the developers have remained steadfast. I suspect this is a problem known as NIH (Not Invented Here). This a significant challenge in the free software world. For whatever reason many developers do not like admitting that a feature on a proprietary product is a good or beneficial feature unless they can do things differently with their software. Oh, there is something called Web Layout, but web publishing does not include status bar information such as the current page number or section (a web page is just one long page). Web Layout is actually another form of Page Layout but fine-tuned for web publishing, not writing. So if a page is formatted for columns, the user sees columns, not the basic text flow. Some people will try to out-think me in a typical cockeyed manner and tell me to use a text editor. The difference between a text editor and Normal View in Word 97 is that I can see basic formatting on-the-fly in Word 97. Not so with a basic text editor and anybody who thinks I’m going to start using Neanderthal underscores and asterisks to substitute for simple typography is living under a rock—or perhaps belongs under a rock. Focusing on content does include basic text formatting, which in all of my templates I provide through styles. This is the simple beauty about styles—writers need not worry about page layout and formatting. Once a template is created, all included styles eliminate the overhead and worry of formatting. Basic text formatting is not the same as page layout. I am after all, processing words—hence the name of the type of application. Should a writer or editor decide to modify a style there is only one change to make, not hundreds or thousands. The document always remains consistent in look and feel regardless of whether at the draft or final publishing stage. Writer supports styles and templates, but not Normal View where a writer, proofreader, or editor can focus on content. Furthermore, working in Normal View is just as fast on my box as any text editor. Some people will suggest Abiword. Oops. No macros. Don’t even dare suggest LaTex. I want to write, not perform desktop publishing. I do not need a publishing program—that is why I long ago developed my templates and styles. The next rebuttal is that I should install WINE to run Word 97. Been there, done that, as recently as version 0.9.37. I cannot get my VBA environment to function. After many years of using Word 97, my writing environment is finely tuned to my preferences. Recreating those preferences manually would be a chore and counter-productive. Tough to use, create, or modify macros when they are not accessible. I’m not saying that Word 97 is the best thing since sliced bread, only that through the years Word 97 works for me. I am productive and that to me is what computers are about—tools. The bottom line is that Normal View is at least one feature the Microsoft developers did correctly—long ago—and duplicating such a fundamental feature makes sense. People who write in any serious manner understand and appreciate the value of Normal View. Writers want to write, not fiddle with page layout. Proofreaders and editors want to proofread and edit, not fiddle with page layout. Not providing such a feature is a show-stopper for me. Why should I bother thinking about converting documents, macros, styles, and templates when, in the end, I would be unable to write as efficiently and calmly as I do now? Finis. |
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