OpenOffice.org 3.1: the same shit
2005, 2007, 2008, and now 2009: in OpenOffice.org one still can’t change the default paper format from Letter to A4 for all the new documents (bug #39733), nor can one write paragraphs with more than 65534 characters (bug #17171, extra text is simply lost upon pasting). Everything is still as stated here, and for those unable to understand what is it all about, these screenshots should be of help: what’s so bloody rocket science to add a fucking button that would then change the default settings for all new documents based on the default template, which is something Microsoft Office does for many, many years?!
Maybe writing some code to change the default document template with regards to the paper size and margins is indeed impossible for the guys at Sun Microsystems. They’re too busy with subtle improvements, such as “When you drag an object in a drawing across the screen, OpenOffice.org now shows you a ’shadow’ of the object, rather than just a dotted outline.” and “Highlighted text is now displayed with a subtle background colour, rather than reverse video.” (UPDATE: who the fuck needs to overline the characters with lines, dots, and waves?!)
Good document format, shitty GUI. Or maybe you’re not allowed to use a US English system in continental Europe…
May 7, 2009 at 23:05
Abiword is not an option for you?
May 8, 2009 at 07:32
I guess its a common plague in opensource projects. Everybody wants to work on the cool and usually superfluous features.
Who would want to work on a boring thing like default paper size setting? LOL
May 8, 2009 at 08:59
For simple documents, Abiword becomes more and more of an option.
May 8, 2009 at 12:25
You're right crc32, it is now about a year since I reported a bug in firefox 3 which prevents me from printing in A4, whatever the settings are, and no one seems to care.
Aug 2, 2009 at 07:20
I agree with both Beranger and crc2.
Tons of effort wasted in the Opensource world due to lack of coordination. Multiple projects with the same objective and the same lack of effective results, simultaneously.
Many projects re-written from the scratch with a inferior result than the previous one (KDE4)
A continous effort for rediscover the wheel, instead of fixing bugs (everywhere)
More and more wasted time on opensource drivers for hardware that already has support (and the good one) from the vendor (Nvidia)
A stupid worship for flying windows and boot times when the filemanager crashes at the first movement (Ubuntu)
Always doing the "keep it simple" thing to the point of not doing the job (Gnome)
etc etc etc