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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
From:       Vadim Plessky <lucy-ples () mtu-net ! ru>
Date:       2002-02-26 11:54:48
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Hello Eric, Cathy, people on Koffice list!

On Thursday 21 February 2002 04:21, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
|   Reflected because Cathy has DNS troubles.
|
|   On Tuesday 19 February 2002 10:31 pm, Catherine Olanich Raymond wrote:
|   > On Monday 18 February 2002 07:14 pm, Vadim Plessky wrote:
|   > > On Saturday 09 February 2002 19:34, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
|   > > |   Toshitaka Fujioka <toshitaka@kde.gr.jp>:
|   > > |
|   > > |   because you have to be respectful of the end-user's time and
|   > > | limited attention span.  Cathy is not a geek; she has more
|   > > | important things to do than pick her way though that ugly jumble.
|   > >
|   > > So, buy her a Mac - and that's it.
|   > >
|   > > Why Cathy bother to use KDE in this case?
|   >
|   > Two reasons:  1.  I share Eric's dream of wanting to see genuine
|   > Linux/open source alternatives to MS Office and related closed source
|   > products.

Great!
So we have common goal, and should work together fullfilling it. :-)

|   >
|   > 2.  My law office still uses Windows.  Because I sometimes work at
|   > home, any machine I use at home must be able to understand and edit MS
|   > Word documents. Neither Eric nor I know much about Mac software.  
|   > Neither of us knows whether there are any Mac programs that can edit
|   > Word documents, let alone would be able to troubleshoot Mac programs
|   > that claimed they could edit Word documents.

As it was said in answer to your mail, MS Office for Mac, for sure, can open 
files from MS Office/Windows.
I understand quite often your problem, as I (silently) started using Linux at 
office, and from time to time colleague of me sends me as an attachement .doc 
or .ppt, comes to my desk and says: "ok, let's look at it together. Open my 
attachement"
At a moment, I have no choice but tell "wait a minute. I will save your 
attachment to my disk and reload Windows".
It looks _stupid_, and I feel myself quite uncomfortable in such situation.

Anyway, I see positive moments even in such bad situation:
* few colleagus of me learned that there is something different existing in 
the world, comparing to Windows.
* one of them started using ftp :-))
Ok, he is using now CuteFTP(Windows) but may be one day he will switch to 
Konqueror.
* good motivation to promote PDF usage inside your office or with partners.

Despite all problems with WYSIWIG KWord 1.1 has, it's still great tool for 
PDF generation.
Treat it in this way for now - commercial software generating PDF costs a lot 
of money, and in many cases produces PDFs of not very high quality.
In particular, that software has problems with National Languages support 
(Cyrillic, for example).
KWord uses Unicode, embeds fonts, etc., and so far (it's version for KDE3) is 
free of font embedding/encoding problems with Cyrillic.

If I was in Publishing / Graphics Arts industry - this could be a good reason 
to install at least one Linux workstation.

BTW: I am now re-working several Product Datasheets from MS Word format to 
KWord and/or HTML.
So far, process is going ok.
If you are interested - I can send you off-list original MS Word .doc file.
Just moving from Word to KWord reduced disk consumption from 31K to 5K, which 
can be a HUGE disk space saving (and network BANDWIDTH saving) in case you 
mail those datasheets to partners, and have a lot of them (both datasheets 
and partners).
Don't ask me why people (before me) decided to use MS Word format.
That's some kind of history, we should think about future - and move forward 
to XML / XHTML, partially - to PDF.
KWord helps here a lot :-)
 
|   >
|   > > |   About 70% of KPresenter is unusable to Cathy because it's not
|   > > | documented. The remaining 30% is much harder to use than it ought
|   > > | to be because it's not documented.
|   > >
|   > > May be Cathy should improove her Learning Skills in this case?..
|   > > No offense, just an advise.
|   >
|   > However, I wasn't the only one who had problems with KPresenter; both
|   > Rob Landley and Eric encountered difficulties in using it.

Ironically, but documentation is not the biggest problem withg KWord or 
KPresenter . At least in my opinion.
FILTERS, *FILTERS* - that's what killing KOffice at a moment.
Well, problem is known, every month someone is asking "when Kword will have 
MS Word Export filter" - but, as KDE/KOffice is a volunteer project, we need 
either wait or submit patches. Or provide funding :-)

Cathy, Eric: may be you should give a try to StarOffice/OpenOffice?
It's not available in "Download" version of my favourite Linux distro, and I 
don't have it installed, but I guess you can download binaries from 
OpenOffice.org.
It may fix your problem until KOffice got better filters.
 As far as I know, it can open all major MS Office file formats.

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/
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