Cropping photos (Astronomy, Graphics & Video Software [WAS: VMWare / Wine))

[Eric Dunbar]

On 24/02/07, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu> wrote:
> Eric Dunbar wrote:
> > I must agree -- cropping images just doesn't seem to exist in FLOSS.
> > Recently I was trying to use only FLOSS to set up a file (so that I
> > knew I could tell some students it was possible). I tried OO.org,
> > Abiword and GIMP and ended up firing up MS Word because the FL/OSS
> > couldn't manage to present an intuitive cropping facility. GIMP could
> > but it was nowhere quick, Abiword and OO.org simply couldn't manage it
> > (I think one of the two offered an interface that you could TYPE in
> > some constraints but this is 2007, NOT 1984!!!).
>
> That's apparently OO (even in Draw), which I agree is a major
> deficiency.  It's a known bug
> (http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=19665)
>
> > Anyway, my encounter with OO.org and Abiword wasn't all bad. OO.org is
> > as oversized as Word without some of the more useful pieces of Word
> > (most notably Word compatibility ;-)
>
> The compatibility has usually worked for me.  What problems have you had?

I have avoided using OO.org for anything more than ultra-basic word
processing (and, once when I was upgrading OS X 10.3 to 10.4 ;-) so I
have limited experience with it, but when I have tried moving files I
created in OO.org to Word I've had poor luck with fonts, margins and
especially graphics (graphics when coming from Word). This isn't
necessarily a knock on OO.org since, if you don't need to exchange
docs with Word users it's a moot point, but, since I do most of my
work in Word and 90% of real-life users I know use Word (the other 10%
mostly use Apple/ClarisWorks and a precious few WordPerfect) 100%
compatibility is vitally important.

In time either OO.org will either get better at handling Word or else
people will start using open standards for their word processing
documents (I expect the former will happen before the latter :-(.

Eric.