[geeks] And The Linux Weenies Wonder Why They Aren't Mainstream...

[Mike Meredith]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:52:49 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Mon, 27 Feb 2006 @ 16:19 -0600, Jonathan C. Patschke said:
> 
> > [0] Which, you know, I rather agree with.  I have a relatively
> > simple
> >      Word document that refuses to lay-out correctly in OpenOffice
> >      2.0 thanks to it not shipping with fonts whose metrics are
> >      identical to the standard Windows/Office fonts.  Rather than
> >      spending the time to reformat the document myself, I just use
> >      Office on a nearby Macintosh.
> 
> This is Microsoft's fault, not Linux or OpenOffice's fault, or whoever
> you are really ranting at.

To some extent ...

Dragging up some ancient word processing support knowledge(*), it was
*never* easy to move a document from one word processor to another. Font
metrics weren't the only problem, but as users had a tendency to install
weird fonts from all over the place and then expect their documents to
be 'portable' it's certainly a major issue.

*: I once helped an academic out who was compiling a book written by
many contributors who each had their own favourite wordprocessor (this
was before the world was dominated by Word).