Star Text Formatting with OpenOffice.org Writer
Linked by Christian Paratschek on Fri 10th Sep 2004 05:18 UTC
Features, Office 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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@Zen
by Andy Roberts on Fri 10th Sep 2004 14:29 UTC

My response to Zen's questions:

"1) I love nano, but disabling the word wrapping never seems to work (I think there is a compile and run-time option). How have you gotten around this? Do you hit enter at the end of each line or are you using latex to determine the end of a paragraph?"

Couldn't offer any help with nano. I'm a vim user. However, with regards to how Latex determines new paragraphs, you need two carrage returns, aka a blank line between paragraph 1 and 2.

"2) What reference have you used for Latex? I've looked at local bookstores and there doesn't seem to be anything brief and useful."

There are some good books available at the bookshops. My fave is: Guide to Latex (4th Ed) by Kopka and Daly. Very nice book. If you become a Latex convert, then maybe The Latex Companion is worth a purchase too, as it goes in depth with Latex.

Of course, there are many free guides. The most "book" like is The Not So Short Guide to Latex. Search for that in Google and you'll get LOTS of hits. Is a decent guide. My previous post gave a link to my web-based tutorials which are suited for learners. (At least that was my plan!)

"3) I've been planning to have all my essays bound together as a portfolio. Is it easy and reliable to convert to pdf to take directly to a printer?"

Pdf output from latex is soooo easy. I find the pdf output from OO is little skakey at best (a good feature though). There are a number of ways to achieve your pdf. Latex by default produces a DVI file. It's then possible to use 'dvipdf' to convert. Nowadays, I use the slightly modified latex interpreter, 'pdflatex', which is distributed with Latex, but outputs pdf files directly. And if you use Lyx, you can do all that at the click of a mouse ;)