![]() ![]() ![]() is the flagship of the open source movement: a free equivalent to Word, which boasts an almost perfect and seamless conversion filter, so that you can edit almost any word file interchangeably in Word and Writer without ever noticing. MS Word probably needs no presentation: the omnipresent causer of headaches over lost or corrupted files the producer of hoardes of ~WRL2354.TMP files in some hidden system directory (look in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\MicrosoftOffice if you don’t believe me) and the single most influential spreader of bad typographical taste in a hundred years, since the previous low point in the late nineteenth century. That led to a discussion about various hyphenation algorithms, and this time, I have decided to turn on automatic hyphenation in all three programs, using the default settings. ![]() In the former test, I had deliberately turned off hyphenation. I will also go more in detail with the points of comparison, not just considering the crude parameters such as font size and page margins, but also taking into account the finer typographical details. Now it’s time for the next round of tests, this time including another application in the comparison: the “typesetting environment” LaTeX. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software - it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies. I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with Writer.
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