Linked by Christian Paratschek on Fri 10th Sep 2004 05:18 UTC
Before I start, let me tell you the little story, how I got the idea for writing this article. When I wrote my first article for OSNews, one of the screenshots I included showed my diploma thesis. I merely wanted to show that OpenOffice.org in Fedora Core 2 features native icons, nothing more.
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Maybe some thoughts on LaTex and OpenOffice.org Writer... LaTeX is a great type-setting system. It's unbeaten in the production of HIGH quality texts. It has scientific roots, and so it requires some more preparation than just starting your text processor. Even inserting a general pixel based graphic was not so easy some years ago. This is getting better: now we have some very good text editors supporting LaTeX. Really good diagrams and graphics can be produced by using special programs (GNUplot, Xfig, ...), but they are mostly developed and by scientists - not even known by the average user.
The thing is: most of the guys outside aren't scientists, they are users that are happy to generate some pages of text. And they aren't aware that there is more than Word outside, even the existance of OpenOffice is for most of them a real surprise: "Is it like Word?" (Some versions of) Office tells the user that he is going to write a “Word Document”. Not a text!?
Somebody who knows what to focus on will write the text in LaTeX. For the rest of the world it is good to know that their text processing application is more than an "electronic ypewriter". When they learn what kind of functionality OOo Writer (or another text processor) has, they can thinking about what to do with their system. Maybe they want LaTeX! Even Writer has it's limitations. (It’s getting better, 2.0 is on the way…)
Let people start slowly, show them some things that can be useful. Then we get better quality texts - and maybe they demand even more and start using LaTeX. But consider, even at my university department 100% of the students and profs, use MS Word! I know people who start writing letters using MS Excel, because they are used to it.
It should be our goal to show them that there is more. More freedom and better quality in open source software in general. Tell them to choose always the right tool for their job. LaTeX, OO.o Writer, KWord, ...
We hope this article could help to make people think about they currently handle their work. And how they can improve that.
Have a great day!
Christoph