OOo documents look different

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 7/11/06, Erwin Rol <mailinglists at erwinrol.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-07-11 at 08:23 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le mardi 11 juillet 2006 à 01:38 +0200, Erwin Rol a écrit :
> >

> Once again, you can give 1000 technical reasons or metaphors, my
> expectation (and that of several others) is that OOo should be able to
> reproduce a saved document in the same way it looked when it was
> created.
>

Ok how about this. Your expectation is too high for what a WYSIWYG
editor can do.

This is the reason that PDF/Postscript is the preferred structure for
many legal documents because you have greater than 95% assurance it
will look the same on all platforms/boxes. Word, Wordperfect and
Office are in the best effort category (80-90% assurance). I work in a
very large organization (>40,000 people) and we have problems with
someone with Word XP in Washington sending documents to someone in
California with Word XP and the documents not being exactly the same.
This is what led to having Acrobat being the render engine for forms
and legal documents.

There are very few WYSIWYG editors that actually can produce greater
than 95% assurance.. and they are the ones that pretty much ship the
'fonts+render engine+preferences' (basically it was the 1980's form of
vmplayer with the editor set up in it).

> And apart from not reproducing the document correctly, it also now
> renders text extremely ugly with the big font height, there ends up way
> to much space between the lines.
>

That would be a bug for bugzilla with a sample document that produces
it, what fonts you have installed on the system, and what your font
preferences are set in GNOME or KDE (dependign on what you are using).

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator