KOffice vs. OpenOffice

[Steve Lamb]

claydoh wrote:
> Koffice is nice  enough, and much 'lighter' but it isn't quite as powerful as 
> OOo, My wife likes the simplicity (of appearance) of Kword as compared to OOo 
> or MS word,

    I'll say it is lighter...  Here's KWord and OOWriter with the same 17 pg.
odt opened...

grey      6562  5.8  9.5  52936 36804 pts/2    SN   18:09   0:04 kword
grey      6608 21.0 18.7 206112 72476 pts/2    Sl   18:10   0:04 oowriter

    1/2 the size in memory.

    Also KWord does something sensible.  I can save my document in
uncompressed odt.   When doing so the content.xml is not a single line.  For
most people this is probably not important.  However, I am a programmer and
when I think of writing I think of how programming tools can be applied to
writing.  Having, at least, each paragraph on its own line means that I can
use Mercurial sensibly for revision control.

    OOWriter's uncompressed odt stores the entire file in a single line.  As
such each revision's diff is just a snapshot of the document.  Might as well
just cp the file and append the date/time and be done with it.

    With each statement on a line one can do for writing all the fun software
development tricks that Mercurial makes possible for code.  For example,
create a branch and play with rewriting a portion of the text in Chapter 2.
Break out another branch and rewrite a portion of Chapter 8.  Then when you're
satisfied with both, merge them together and back into the mainline document
through Mercurial's automatic merging.  All because KWord's version has
newlines.  Go figger!

    The really crazy part is that the KWord version with newlines is smaller
than the unpacked odt.

{grey at igbuntu:~/Documents/NightsEnd} ls -l ??test/content.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 grey grey 59287 Sep 28 18:05 kwtest/content.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 grey grey 63302 May 18 09:54 ootest/content.xml

    How's that for craziness?

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | But who can decide what they dream
       PGP Key: 1FC01004       |      and dream I do
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