[Kde-i18n-fa] Office tools [was:farsi in RedHat 9]

[Aryan Ameri]

On Saturday 03 May 2003 19:16, Hamid wrote:
> As I said, I am in the middle of a fun! process called "THESIS
> WRITING" , and since I can not share my documents in KWord or
> OpenOffice format with my advisor (and also school's library) I am
> bound to select M$ Wingooz :-) when I fire up my machine !
>
> Looking forward to the end of the May ;-)




Understandable hamid, and indeed what I am going to say below is no 
flame, rather I would like to view it as a helpfull hint, or a guide.

I can't forget windows because I need MS Office is a myth, which is not 
true anymore. Sure this argument was valid 5 years ago, but not 
anymore, not at all. 

I am a student myself, and our university is also heavily windows and 
Microsoft office dependant. While I am not writing my thesis, I do have 
to send projects and homeworks regularly to my instructors, and they 
use nothing but Microsoft Office. I have been living very happily in 
this windows-only environment, without ever installing windows on my 
box. 

First of all, you seem to have forgotten that OpenOffice.org can save 
the documents in Microsoft Office format. So, you can edit and write 
your documents with OpenOffice.org and then save them as M$ Office 
format, and send them to your instructor or whatever, without them ever 
realizing that you did your job on something other than M$ Office. OOo 
is so powerfull in handling M$ Office files, that it even beats M$ 
Office in this regard. No kidding in this, I read an article yesterday 
on O'Reailly network, which showed how OOo was able to handle a 
corrupted M$ Office file, which M$ Office itself couldn't handle.

Second thing, you seem to have forgotten the option of using external 
formats. Two widely used such formats are HTML and PDF. Both KOffice 
and OOo can save files perfectly well as HTML and PDF. Indeed believe 
me, sending a file as a PDF is much more professional than M$ Word. 
With PDF you can even protect your document from editing, and thus from 
theft. Something that M$Office do not provide.  I have been sending 
files as PDF to my windows friends, without ever facing a single 
problem. 

OOo even goes further than this. OOo Impress (the presentation tool) now 
has the ability to save files as Macromedia Flash. I sent my last 
presentation to my professor as flash, and he didn't ever figure out 
how I did it. He thought I used Macromedia Director (As if I could use 
such a thing).

Aside from OOo and KOffice, GNU/Linux also offers some very rich text 
processing tools. Ever heard of LaTeX? It is the ultimum text 
processing program, offers things that even M$ Word doesn't. While 
using it is not easy, I recently found a perfect front-end to it, which 
is called LyX. LyX so far, seems to me to be the most capable word 
processor ever (It just doesn't have the hype and the marketing force 
behind it). And yes, it integrates nicely with PS and PDF files.


Anyway, Probably you are now in the middle of your thesis, and it is not 
wise now to change things. But all I want to say is that Office and 
Word Processing are a no barrier for GNU/Linux anymore. I wiped windows 
nearly a year ago from my hard disk, and I haven't had a single problem 
in exchanging documents with anyone.

Cheers
-- 
/* The best part about banging your 
head against a wall is when you stop.
Same with using windows */

Aryan Ameri