madelf said:
I found OpenOffice a little counter intuitive at times, but (short of things only a layout program will do) I never ran into anything I expected of it that it wasn't capable of. The only reason I decided to go with PagePlus is they offered me a deal on it that I literally could not refuse. Before that I was well on my way to a 200 page book layout in OpenOfffice, with never a problem once I took the time to get used to it.
Things I do routinely in Word that, based on message board posts on openoffice.org no one could help with, I guess cannot be easily done in OO:
1) Having chapters in a book, make only tables you designate as labelled tables, have a label such as: Table 3-7: Table Name, where 3 is the chapter number and 7 is the order number of the table in the chapter. Should the table be cut and pasted at the begining of chapter 2, the heading will automatically be labeled Table 2-1: Table Name and all the other tables in chapter 2 will be incremented appropriately. Note this is only designated tables, there could be tables in the chapter that are not numbered (such as the mini-tables inside the Detect Magic spell). Oh, and of course you can create a Table of Tables contents list with ease from these designated tables.
2) Again dealing with chapters, the chapter title appears in the heading of every page in the form "Chapter 3: Stuff". If you drag the content of chapter 3 between two other chapter, all the chapters renumber and the headings update.
2a) The first chapter in the book is an introduction without number labeled "Introduction", the next chapter is number 1 and called "Chapter 1: Name" If I update the "Name" in one place it is updated in all reference. Even in references like "See page 13 of Chapter 1: Name for details".
3) Every even page has the name of the book on the right and page number on the left of the footer. Reversed on the odd numbered pages. This works seemlessly on begining of chapter pages which have additional background graphics that appear on every first page of a chapter but not on any other pages. (The graphic is the same each time.) OO support left and right page styles but you have to set the page's style. If you add a page toward the beginning of the book, how do you relabel all the pages again?
4) Designate multiple indexes and put the results anywhere in the book. Merging multiple indexes if necessary.
5) Create dictionary headings in some chapters but not in other chapters. (Dictionary headings used in long lists of "definitions" where the title of the first definition on the page is placed in upper left of the header and the title of the last definition on the page is placed in the upper right of the header.) I use this technique in Joe's Book of Enchantment to get the spell names of the spell chapter at the top of each page. If I add a new spell to the document right now and it repaginates the spells after it alphabetically, the dictionary headings automatically update. (JBoE also uses dictionary headings in the class, skill, feats and monster chapters.)
Now, granted, a lot of this is pretty esoteric stuff. But I don't have Acrobat, or Page Maker, or Quark, or InDesign, or any other layout program besides Word. I've been using a version of Word since Word 3.0 (DOS) in 1986 so I understand that most people don't know about most of its capabilities. But until OO can do at least the first three things above, it may as well be Notepad for how useful it is to me creating PDFs. YMMV.
