Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats

[Micha]

On 05/02/2012 13:57, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Feb 05, 2012, geoffrey mendelson wrote about "Re: Preparing to convince to shift to non-propriety documents formats":
>> It depends. I can't speak to it directly, my Hebrew level is such
>> that a crayon would be enough, but my son who is in high school was
>> told by the school to use Microsoft Office for Windows because there
>> were capabilities that he needed that Open Office (for Windows) did
>> not provide for Hebrew.
> 
> I've been writing a lot in Hebrew in OpenOffice, and I can assure you,
> in my experience there's virtually *nothing* that OpenOffice is missing
> when it comes to Hebrew support. There are free Hebrew fonts (though you can
> also use the ones that come with Windows), free Hebrew spell-checker
> (of course ;-)), you can format everything properly right-to-left, and
> basically all the features, even the most obscure ones, work correctly
> in Hebrew: multi-column text, table of contents, index, niqqud, PDF
> export, etc.
> 

I can't seem to change page numbering (i.e suppress page numbering on
some pages) or change head/footer format. One thing that microsoft does
ok (but messes up a whole lot of others in return).

Neither can do proper math if their life depended on it, or make it
cross platform (openoffice can't handle microsoft equations and vice versa).

Personally I use latex (mostly via lyx), but that is hardly for
everyone, or even most.

> Many of these features did, at one time in the past, in fact not work
> due to bugs, but all the important bugs have fixed, most of them years ago.
> 
> Is there anything specific to Hebrew that didn't work for him in
> OpenOffice?
> 
>> I asked him about it, and he assured me that was the case. Granted
>> he is a special student in a special school, but I am sure he is not
>> unique.
> 
> Again, I've been using almost any imaginable feature with OpenOffice's
> Writer in Hebrew, and everything seems to work, so I wonder what caused him
> trouble.
> 
> Note that I'm talking about the Writer and MS-Word here - not Impress
> and Powerpoint. I do know that people complain that Impress doesn't have
> as many feature as Powerpoint - but this is not Hebrew-specific (and not
> relevant to the word processor). As far as I'm concerned, all the
> features that Powerpoint has and OpenOffice Impress doesn't are
> superfluous anyway ;-)
> 
>> I do know from users on the various Macintosh groups that both
>> Microsoft Office for the Mac (a stripped down version without good
>> Hebrew support) and OpenOffice do not do a very good job of Hebrew
>> formatting. Mac users have to buy "niche" packages which do, but
>> they do not run on any other platform.
> 
> OpenOffice does an excellent job of Hebrew formatting, in my
> experience.
> 
> Perhaps you're thinking about not doing a good job of displaying
> Hebrew "doc" or "docx" files? I haven't seen this as a Hebrew-specific
> problem, but I have seen files which didn't look exactly like they
> were meant to. But almost always it didn't really matter.
> 
>