Dis-se-mi-na-ting know-led-ge
It
took me two hours to edit the manuscript of my next book to follow the
format that were emailed to me by the publisher this morning. I am
still not done, probably not even half-done, but at least the page
sizes, fonts, indents and other things of that nature are pretty much
the way they ought to be. I actually don't have the fonts that the
publisher uses, but I trust that I'll be able to find reasonably
similar free fonts somewhere.
(What free fonts are similar to Minion?) After this task, I pretty much
just have to clarify the last requirements and then wait for the
proofreader to send me the list of typos and other errors, after which
I can compile and prettify the index, send the final PDF file to the
publisher and pour myself a congratulary drink.
I wrote and typeset all my earlier books with raw LaTeX (which I edited by hand using Emacs, of course), but for this fifth book, I decided that oh what the heck, let's give OpenOffice.org a try, especially since its new version 2.0 had promised all kinds of improvements. The user interface of OpenOffice is similar to Microsoft Word, but the program seems to occasionally have a weird logic of its own, at least compared to LaTeX where you can always see exactly what is going on. For example, it took me a while to make page headers behave differently in odd and even pages. The help system, as is usual with all programs, is mostly useless, concentrating on things that the help writer feels like talking about instead of the things that users actually want to do.
All in all, OpenOffice seems like a solid and professional piece of software, which is why the one bad thing that I noticed about it is so very puzzling to me. Now, this might come as a surprise to Americans, but many people around the world use languages other than English, and the hyphenation rules in these languages work totally differently than in English. For example, it is usually wrong to hyphenate a Finnish word in places suggested by the English-language hyphenation algorithm, and vice versa. Seeing that hyphenation is important in a language such as Finnish in which words tend to be long, you might think that the OpenOffice installation would come with a Finnish hyphenation module. But surprise, it doesn't.
And no, I don't want to download the version of the program where the user interface is completely in Finnish, even if this version comes with the built-in Finnish hyphenation, because doing so would make it totally impossible to seek help, documentation and hints from the main English-language OpenOffice community and later update the program to new versions, the translation lag necessarily being what it is.
Of course, it is possible to download and install a Finnish hyphenation module to OpenOffice, if you know what you are doing. The thing is, this process is so complicated and involves editing cryptic configuration files that I guarantee that 99% of average end users will not be able to do it. And what do you know, when I updated the software to version 2.01 few months after I had forgotten this ordeal, the same thing had to be done again.
Seeing that this is not some alpha or beta version of a chrome-laden program meant for hackers and other computer experts, but the version 2 of a program meant for the vast masses of average users, a program whose supposed goal is to become the number one office suite in the world, I would say that leaving out hyphenation modules for foreign languages is a rather serious omission. I guess that they wanted to save space or something, seeing that the necessary files are a few kilobytes large. This whole thing is about as stupid as Opera Software's old idea to make the back button disabled by default in the earlier versions of their web browser, so that the user has to find the place to turn it on after installing the program. (I haven't used Opera for years now that FireFox exists, but I hope that they no longer do this.)
I wrote and typeset all my earlier books with raw LaTeX (which I edited by hand using Emacs, of course), but for this fifth book, I decided that oh what the heck, let's give OpenOffice.org a try, especially since its new version 2.0 had promised all kinds of improvements. The user interface of OpenOffice is similar to Microsoft Word, but the program seems to occasionally have a weird logic of its own, at least compared to LaTeX where you can always see exactly what is going on. For example, it took me a while to make page headers behave differently in odd and even pages. The help system, as is usual with all programs, is mostly useless, concentrating on things that the help writer feels like talking about instead of the things that users actually want to do.
All in all, OpenOffice seems like a solid and professional piece of software, which is why the one bad thing that I noticed about it is so very puzzling to me. Now, this might come as a surprise to Americans, but many people around the world use languages other than English, and the hyphenation rules in these languages work totally differently than in English. For example, it is usually wrong to hyphenate a Finnish word in places suggested by the English-language hyphenation algorithm, and vice versa. Seeing that hyphenation is important in a language such as Finnish in which words tend to be long, you might think that the OpenOffice installation would come with a Finnish hyphenation module. But surprise, it doesn't.
And no, I don't want to download the version of the program where the user interface is completely in Finnish, even if this version comes with the built-in Finnish hyphenation, because doing so would make it totally impossible to seek help, documentation and hints from the main English-language OpenOffice community and later update the program to new versions, the translation lag necessarily being what it is.
Of course, it is possible to download and install a Finnish hyphenation module to OpenOffice, if you know what you are doing. The thing is, this process is so complicated and involves editing cryptic configuration files that I guarantee that 99% of average end users will not be able to do it. And what do you know, when I updated the software to version 2.01 few months after I had forgotten this ordeal, the same thing had to be done again.
Seeing that this is not some alpha or beta version of a chrome-laden program meant for hackers and other computer experts, but the version 2 of a program meant for the vast masses of average users, a program whose supposed goal is to become the number one office suite in the world, I would say that leaving out hyphenation modules for foreign languages is a rather serious omission. I guess that they wanted to save space or something, seeing that the necessary files are a few kilobytes large. This whole thing is about as stupid as Opera Software's old idea to make the back button disabled by default in the earlier versions of their web browser, so that the user has to find the place to turn it on after installing the program. (I haven't used Opera for years now that FireFox exists, but I hope that they no longer do this.)
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