Originally Posted by
ninjaaron
I'm a MA student in Biblical studies, so I do a fair amount of input English, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic a bit of German, as well transliterated Akkadian, Hittite, Ugaritic, and so forth, and I haven't had any problems using OpenOffice. It handles the languages beautifully for me, but I did have to get the right fonts, and mess with preferences, and add some more dictionaries. It can be a bit sluggish on my old computer when working with larger files,especially those that contain a lot of vocalised Hebrew, for some reason I've yet to discover. However, my newer (but very low end) computer handles it just fine so far. I've also managed to get my diagrams to turn out quite well.
On the other hand, I don't believe I've written anything on it longer than forty pages or something like that, so I can't say much about how it handles organising higher volumes of information. Being that OpenOffice is one of the more extensible word-processors out there, I'm sure faculties have been created to handle this kind of thing. I would ask on the OpenOffice forums if I needed it (which I will, at some point).
As far as sharing my files, I always go with PDF if I can. I use a specific font for everything (Linux Libertine) because it has full support for all of the scripts and diacritics I need (which is saying something), and it also has a small caps font which is useful for certain conventions used when writing the name of God, as well as the transcription of Sumerograms in Akkadian and Hittite. Most people do not have this font, so some characters may not display correctly in formats besides PDF.
If they need to be able to edit the document, I prefer to send it in odt if I can (OO's native format), or in docx as a second choice. docx is Word's XML based format, and it seems to convert particularly well. From there, I just cross my fingers and hope they have a font that supports all the characters I use. If they have problems, I send them the link to download my font.
That usually works just fine, though a little formatting may get mangled here or there in conversion, especially when charts and graphics are involved. That's why I do PDF whenever possible; I know that it will look exactly like what's on my screen no matter where it's opened. OpenOffice also creates table of contents in the PDF, which is nice.
Obviously you're talking about something a little heavier than what I'm doing (though I doubt it is more demanding in terms of languages, unless you are working with logo-graphic and syllabic scripts, or scripts written vertically).
If it were me, I would ask around about your difficulties in the OpenOffice community and see what sort of recommendations you get.
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As far as *clutter* goes, I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if you are talking visual clutter, the work-environment is very customisable, and I run it with no visible rulers, and a single custom toolbar that has only ten or so tools that I use most often, and I have the colors changed to white on dark blue (which is only in my program, and I can switch all back immediately with one control), which tends to help me calm down and focus. The menus and dialogues can be somewhat overwhelming, it's true, but not once you've learned them. But you're right that OpenOffice is more or less based on Word, and it has some of the same problems. There is a branch project called libre-office which is trying to take the OO base in a different direction, but it's still in beta at the moment, and at any rate the shifts will be gradual, so that's not a viable solution right now, or at least not any better than OOo.
OOo just takes time to learn, like any software (except Apple software, seemingly, which is usually mind-bogglingly intuitive).
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