Business and enterprise software, and other applications that help a business run

We have been looking at Open Source, both the theory and applications. Yesterday, we talked a little about Open Office, an Open Source replacement for Microsoft Office. We generally concluded that Open Office is an excellent replacement for the Microsoft product. What we didn’t say is that we pretty much cast off MS Office 90 days ago in favor of this free product.

My primary concern has to be the Writer application. That is because I am a writer, I suppose. One of those things that I have to do is submit manuscripts to agents and publishers. Both of those groups are mighty touchy about the format of their manuscripts. If a manuscript is not just so, they will know it immediately and may well reject it out of hand, which is very bad news for the writer. This is actually a pretty good test of word processing software.

Pretty much everything that you need to know about manuscript formatting can be found on the William Shunn Website. What he describes is exactly what agents and publishers want. So that is the way I have always formatted my manuscripts. I have never had a manuscript rejected for formatting reasons, although I have had them rejected for most other reasons. ;o) Thus Mr. Shunn’s formatting rules pass my acid test.

My first important test of Open Office Writer was to simply open an MS Word manuscript file. The file that I opened is a novel. In Word, it is a 444-page document (because manuscripts are double-spaced, the page count climbs quickly) comprised of 101,436 words made up of 472,969 characters, all spread our across 10,793 lines. I would guess that is a pretty good test of a word processor’s ability to format.

When I opened the same document in Open Office Writer, the first thing that I noticed was that it was two pages shorter, coming in a 442 pages. That, of course, made me suspicious. The word count tool is not quite as detailed, but it informed me that the document had 101,891 words (more than the MS Word doc) and 572,225 characters (much more that the MS Word doc). The latter tells me that Word is not counting the spaces and Writer is. No problem. The word count may be in the way it handles hyphenated words. Again, probably no big deal. It also indicates 10,730 lines, slightly more than Word. Hmmmm.

However, being two pages off would seem to mean that the preferred lines-per-page rule may be being violated, sure to set an editor’s teeth on edge. Just looking at the manuscript, which is after all exactly what editors do (and I am also an editor), did not reveal anything to me. Both versions look fine. So I consigned myself to looking through the two documents and comparing them. On page 100, they still exactly matched. But by page 200, they were no longer identical. So I started looking for where things went awry.

On page 154, a word and it’s trailing period (turns.) which was on a line by itself in the Word document had been retained at the end of the previous line in the Writer document. It turns out to be either a kerning difference or a difference in calculating exact letter and line widths. Every once in a great while, this results in a single line dropping down onto a new page from the full page above at the end of a chapter. So the number of pages changes. I doubt that an editor would ever notice it. The differences are probably in the way the algorithms for when a line is full are being rounded.

Since then, I have loaded a wide variety of simple and complex Word documents into Writer, finding no differences any more important than that described above. I have written new documents of all kinds with Writer, and saved them into both Word and Writer formats. I have yet to find an important difference there, either. Even more important to me, not a single editor or publisher has complained about the format of my submissions.

Perhaps best of all, if you have ever used Word, you can use Writer. The interface is similar, as you would expect. They are both word processing applications. Writer seems a little more responsive in some situations; Word looks a little better on the monitor. To be honest, if I had to pay for one of the two of them without knowing which was which, I would choose Writer. Take a look for yourselves. It’s an easy download and install. And it could save you thousands of dollars. When it does, don’t forget to donate  a little of that to the folks at Open Office.