OFB Community Mailing Lists

[Frank Bax]

At 11:14 PM 10/13/04, N. Thompson wrote:

>I've found OpenOffice.org infinitely annoying in typing up my notes for 
>school, all the "features" such as automatic starting of bulleted and 
>numbered lists to state the biggest offenders are really annoying, that 
>along with the startup time OpenOffice has just so I can type up a few 
>simple notes has left me very inclined to switch to a simple rich text 
>editor. I tried Abiword but after the first time using it I found that the 
>printouts were tiny, the ratio of width and hight are correct for an A4 
>paper size but it prints out absolutely tiny and I use "Letter" sized 
>paper. I have not been able to change the paper size as of yet since I'm 
>still just learning the user interface but I would appreciate any help 
>with this. I'm using Abiword in Windows right now because my printouts 
>look much better there, in Linux the colours and shades come out faded a 
>little because the driver is probably a little light on the ink.


Several others have already mentioned that those "annoying features" in OOo 
can be disabled.  Another good one to disable is 'Printing sets "document 
modified" status'.

I don't use Abiword, but on several systems (Windows and Linux), I've found 
changing paper size through system printer properties the best place to 
change default paper size.  Some software (OOo included) does store such 
information in the actual documents, so changing the system setting would 
only affect new documents.  You may need to change it in two places for 
existing documents.

I've noticed OOo 1.1.3 opens/saves documents quicker than previous releases 
(on Windows, haven't had a chance to test it on Linux yet).  Quickstarter 
helps a little, but first access to OOoWriter after reboot still takes 
longer to load than subsequent documents.  YMMV.

Frank