I’m working on a rather large web site for a rather large organization. Given the large number of people that will eventually be using the site - easily more than any other site I’ve built - I decided to write a manual of sorts for the site as I build it. That sounds like a job for a word processor!
Now typically, when I write documents which need formatting, I use OS X’s standard TextEdit. It’s small and svelte, and it gets the job done. But I wanted a few more features for this document; specifically, I wanted the ability to create a stylesheet, footnotes, and automatic page numbering and table-of-contents-building. I needed a beefier text editor.
But which one? At work, I have Microsoft Word, but I wanted the ability to work on this from home if need be. At home, I have Pages from Apple’s iWork suite, but I didn’t have that at work. Conundrum. But hey, I’ve heard that the OpenOffice.org open source office suite recently released a new version that works on OS X without having to start up X11. So maybe it’ll have a Mac-like interface. And I’m not quite sure, but maybe it’ll have all the features I need… With this mindset, I decided to give it a try.
So, having used it for about a week now, and with my page count now in the low teens, here’s my thoughts. Though, to be fair, this really is only a review of the word processing part of the app (and the drawing part, to a lesser extent); the other parts of this multi-faceted app will be outside my range of scrutiny.
Okay, first the negative stuff. OO.o really feels like an app ported from something that’s not Mac OS X. Of course, it was, but every time one of these big-name open source tools gets a/another major Mac release, I just can’t help but hope that someone will get it right some day; that it’ll be ported by someone who realizes that Windows 95 was not a high point in graphic user interface design and application integration. OO.o isn’t it. The spell checker does not recognize Mac OS X’s system-wide dictionary; some of the smaller subwindows which don’t use the standard GUI widgets have the close widget on the wrong side of the window; some of the key commands are wrong (Command-Y is redo instead of Command-Shift-Z); the Enter key on the keypad does not “click” the default button in dialogue boxes; and cursor movement is severely wrong for Mac users: Home doesn’t go to the beginning of the document, Page Up/Down move the cursor as they scroll, tricks like click-and-a-halfing inside a word to select the word and then dragging over the next word to select it as well do not work. And the default fonts are Times New Roman and Arial. Barf!
Check out that lovely notification thingie that appeared in the right side of my menu bar. With a yellow ballon, yeah. And when I clicked on the icon, instead of getting a menu, a window appeared - I’m not sure how that’s even possible. And it didn’t go away when I declined to update the Canadian French grammar checker or whatever it was.
Non-Macness aside, the interface just isn’t very friendly. Many operations require going through dialogue boxes with lots of tabs and buttons (sometimes two rows of tabs), and to make matters worse, trying to bring up the in-program help system hard-crashes the app. Then, when you start OO.o up again, it, without your permission, brings up this ridiculously large window to try to “recover” the documents you were working on when it crashed. The problem is that this window seems to get hidden underneath other applications’ windows while the standard OO.o interface elements (dock icon and menu bar) become unresponsive and beachball as if the application has hung. You can fix this if you go to that recover window and either start or cancel the recovery process - but, again, as it gets hidden underneath other app windows and doesn’t appear when you click on the OO.o dock icon, it’s easy to miss if you have other app windows open. Argh!
Then there was the fun when I tried to import a diagram I had drawn in Illustrator. The first thing I did was try to just paste it in; all that did was paste in the text parts of the diagram and none of the art at all. Oops, that’s a result worse than failure. So I switched back to Illustrator and exported the drawing as an EPS. After all, EPS is a fairly universal vector art format, right? Well, OO.o opened it, but then it would only show the low-res bitmap preview version of the drawing, including on export (and presumably on printing). Unacceptable. I found a plug-in which purported to let me open SVG images in OO.o, but that just caused the program to crash when I tried to use it. I wanted this document to eventually be both printed and viewed as a PDF, so doing it as a bitmap was an unattractive option. I briefly considered just redrawing it in OO.o’s drawing tools, but after starting up a drawing document with OO.o and trying to use it for a few moments, I collapsed into something between hysterical laughter and desperate sobbing and gave up on that idea. THERE’S NO KEY COMMAND OR BUTTON TO ZOOM IN EVEN, FER CRISSAKE. (Or if there is, it wasn’t as obvious to find as it should have been.)
After doing some searching around, I found a solution; in Illustrator, I had to export the drawing as a Windows Metafile format, with an extension of WMF. To my surprise, this imported into OO.o perfectly. What the hell?! Who would have even guessed that “Windows Metafile” was even a vector art format?! It certainly doesn’t sound like one.
Okay, now for the good stuff - and, believe it or not, there is some. The styles? They work great. The footnotes? They bring up an unnecessary dialogue box every time you try to insert one, but they work great. Automatic index-building? Kinda tough to figure out at first, but now that I have, it works great (it would be better if it automatically updated itself, though). The PDF export? Works great and produces smaller PDFs than Mac OS X’s standard PDFing trick. So all its bugs and headaches and unfriendliness aside, it delivers on its promises, at least as far as the word processing component is concerned. In fact, it kind of has the same problem as Word, erring on the side of having too many features, too many ways to do things.
Maybe future releases will be more Mac-like, but seeing as how Firefox has been on the Mac since the beginning and it still feels very un-Mac-like in some ways, I’m not holding my breath. So the final conclusion: If you can tolerate running ugly, unfriendly semi-Mac apps on your Mac, and can learn to save your documents early and often in exchange for a free, cross-platform program with an open document format, OO.o - or at least the word processor it contains - is worth it.
