Puppus Dogfellow wrote:
vic, how badly did the most modern LOs mangle your doc file? how well does word read odt?
Yeah, I wish there was one for all, too. At times some people manage to
bridge the gap between wish and fact, but people in general don't think it to be
that important. Alternatives like this one are actually necessary because they're made for special purposes.
The truth is that when I have to share a file, I'm obliged to ensure that others are able to just read it, and read it with the software already installed. To better understand this, I remember there was an Internet café here that had OpenOffice installed in absence of MS Office in all its WinXP computers, customers used it simply because it was the default program and did the job, yet the only two LibreOffice users I met in my town were one of my friends and a little girl who used StarOffice until she learned that LibreOffice was a more updated derivative.
LibreOffice is really good and I do use it regularly, it's just that I can't tell other people what to use in their own computers. Imagine sharing my documents with a brochure of how to install and learn to use LibreOffice from the beginning or how to set MS Office to read odt by default, I'd instantly get an answer like "stop messing about and do it at once!" Same thing in the opposite direction, if I receive a document and LibreOffice doesn't open it "as is" I have to spend some time tidying things before printing (till now I had to do it with FreeOffice only once), and sending it back after adapting it to LibreOffice's way of interpreting documents would make them spend some time re-adapting, too.
Finally, if I recommend something I think there's no point in being rigid. I'm not a "use this and only this" guy, I'm an "if this is your case then this may well suit your needs" guy.