is open office ready for university?

[Paul King]

To answer the original question, I am a user of OOo 2.0, and I do not feel it 
is ready for anything math or science-based at the university level, owing to 
their broken equation editor. Algebraic expressions as common as "2x" get 
handled incorrectly (x is not itialicized unless there is a space, as in "2 x", 
which just looks dumb when printed. I have reported this bug to the OOO team, 
and they told me they are not really placing a high priority on it.

MS Word and WordPerfect handle this properly. I am not satisfied that OOO is 
ready for the big time in science/math education. Maybe in the arts, where no-
one cares about equations, it might be.

But even there, there is another problem. Suppose I am Dr. Academic, Ph. D. 
(doesn't matter what faculty) of the Faculty of Basket Weaving, and I am on the 
editing team for a textbook on weaving baskets on behalf of a publisher. The 
standard way to put editor's remarks in a document is to place comments in it. 
The comment editor in OOO has a poor 1-line-that-goes-on-forever editor, which 
many people who write comments will find utterly annoying. Under OOO, they are 
not called comments; they are called "Notes". Again, in this important area, MS 
Word and WordPerfect come out on top.

Paul King

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists