[softwarelist] Re: OPW and copy/paste options
- From: Clive Bonsall <cbonsall@xxxxxxx>
- To: davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 21:12:30 +0000
On 5 Jan 2010, at 18:25, Martin Wuerthner wrote:
> In message <50d4ea3743charles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> charles <charles@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> In article <92F452E6-4CEB-457B-98ED-E6251A5919AF@xxxxxxxx>, Clive Bonsall
>> <cbonsall@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>> I'm a university teacher, and I often think the main group who would
>>> benefit from OPW are final year undergraduate and postgrad students when
>>> writing their dissertations. Virtually every dissertation I've seen
>>> produced in MSWORD is a presentational disaster, especially when it
>>> contains pictures ...
>
>> You are comparing apples with pears.
>
>> MS Word is a "Word Processor"; OPW is DTP software. One of the major
>> differences between the two types of program is the ability (or lack of it)
>> to handle pictures.
>
> Not quite. Handling pictures is a core feature of a word processor.
> The key difference is whether you can position text or a picture
> manually at a particular position on a particular page. If you write a
> large structured document, this is the last thing you want to do.
> Instead, you want the software to take care of the layout and you want
> all content to flow.
A fair point -- but to get WORD to do what I want with pictures seems to
require a level of expertise that I have failed to acquire, even tho' I use the
software daily. Similarly, most of my students have only a basic knowledge of
WORD, which is why they get into a formatting mess when trying to incorporate
pictures into essays and dissertations. The safe option is to add the pictures
at the end ... in which situation OP(W) has the advantage (my opinion, of
course).
> For something like a disseration a word processor is about 100 times
> more useful than a DTP program. Of course, that does not mean that
> Word would be a better choice than OP, though many would say that the
> lack of tables immediately rules out OP (and utilities like TableMate
> do not help here - for serious use, tables need to be able to span
> many pages and rows need to be able to flow between pages).
Lack of tables is a limitation, for sure. But it's relatively easily overcome
by using grouped frames (more time consuming in most situations, admittedly);
so, I don't think it rules out OP for producing dissertations. In a sense, a
dissertation is no different than a book -- and I've produced two books using
DTP software, one with Impression and the other with OPW, both containing many
tables and pictures. In each case, what would have saved me most time is not a
table generator, but <paste with formatting> from MSWORD.
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C.B.
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