On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 08:26:41AM -0400, Michael W. Lucas wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 27, 2004 at 02:19:00PM +0200, Peter Bex wrote:
> > My question is this: What do you guys use to communicate in the harsh
> > reality where Windows & MS Office are the common thing?
> 
> OpenOffice.
> 
> In the business world, .doc files are a fact of life.  Get used to it.
> We are simply too small a market for anyone else to give a damn.

sad but true.  Like Michael said, you can use openoffice if you're
on i386 or staroffice on sparc.  Also, I wonder if wordperfect
under compat_linux would work well with word docs.

> 
> The best way to advocate is show how your solution can make the world
> better or solve problems.  Demonstrating that your solution creates
> problems is not a way to win converts.
> 

I use latex for all of my documents at work.  We've found that latex
combined with CVS is a big win when we have multiple people working
on the document.  Its easy to see what changed, who changed it, etc.
Also, we don't have headaches with formatting that come when you have
3 people each writing a section or chapter in some office tool.  In
latex, it just works.  In most office tools, you end up having to go
though each of the contributions from different authors and fix formatting
for consistency even if its just a matter of applying the correct
style sheets.  Also, its way too easy in my experience to have changes
get lost.  For example you may have one primary author and a couple
of other contributers.  So each contributer modifies the main document
and sends the changes to the primary who then has to manually merge
changes.  Its easy to miss things when you work that way.

But then again, I'm lucky that I have reasonable co-workers and we
only need to be able to send out pdf's.

-Dan

--