[conspire] Re: WP again

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Christian Einfeldt (einfeldt at earthlink.net):

> I found this message over at the Linux mafia site, and I wanted to 
> just post it here, because I know that some of the wizards on this 
> list would have comments about it.  Bruce Byfield, for example, has 
> written several detailed enlightening articles on functional 
> comparisons of OOo and MSO, and so maybe he or others could address 
> some of the issues discussed below. 

Having followed via the Web archive the brief thread (on
discuss at openoffice.org) that resulted when you cross-posted that
message, I'm relieved that nobody interpreted it as a criticism of
OOwriter.  

I love OOwriter, and am just pulling down the 1.1.3 Debian packages
right now.  (Reportedly, some other distros' 1.1.3 packages don't
include the libwpd7 support necessary for the new .wpd format filters,
but Debian's do.)

My understanding is that the "Reveal Codes" functionality cannot ever be
exactly reproduced in OO.o, because that's just not the way the OO.o
data format works.  Shrink-to-print might be possible, but I'm not sure:
The rendering code might be basically upstream-maintained.  

In general, I approve of WP8's design attitude of making things look
fabulous in print and not wasting cycles and RAM on minutely tweaking
the screen-rendering bits -- but I know that mine's a minority view, and
that the majority will drag the rest of us along.

Thus, I also approve of WP8's emphasis on PostScript for font-handling,
though not on the exclusion of all else (which is of course an artifact
of timing rather than policy).