Openoffice.org_writer

OpenOffice.org Writer
OpenOffice.org Writer 2.2
Developed by	Sun Microsystems, community
Latest release	2.3.0 / September 17, 2007
OS	Cross platform
Genre	Word processor
License	GNU Lesser General Public Licence
Website	www.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org Writer is the word processor component of the OpenOffice.org software package. Writer is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word, with a roughly equivalent range of features.

As with the entire OpenOffice.org suite, Writer can be used across a variety of platforms, including Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. Released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence, Writer is free software.

Features

Writer is capable of opening and saving documents in a number of formats, including the OASIS Open Document Format (its default format as of version 2.0), Microsoft Word\'s DOC, RTF and XHTML.

Writer provides a number of features not present in Word, including the ability to export to the PDF format natively.

Criticism

Though OpenOffice.org Writer has a spell checker, it lacks a grammar checker, as do Abiword, Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, and other word processors. Writer\'s mail merge functions, drastically rewritten with 2.0, are still less flexible and less stable than other word processors.FOSS word processors compared: OOo Writer, AbiWord, and KWord..

Writer has also been criticized as a poor performer because it lacks a normal view editing mode, where borders, space between pages, and formatting information, such as bolding and italicizing beginning and ending points are shown alongside text "normal" view option needed. Retrieved on 2007-07-16., such as by way of the "Reveal Codes" screen, a service that existed in WordPerfect 5.1 in the early 1990\'s. Moreover, the text search function is no faster with OpenOffice.org Writer than with other products, and Writer lacks the capacity to do approximation searches within document text, such as finding search phrases that contain intervening punctuation in the original.

Writer features the ability to convert documents prepared using competing word processing applications, but does not yield documents that are the clones of originals, particularly in the case of extremely long documents, because pagination may not remain consistent, and clerical revisions may be needed to reproduce the original formatting. Writer automates the selection font alternatives for documents containing fonts unsupported by a given computer, but does not offer users the ability to choose fonts manually instead, and does not indicate where font changes have been made.

See also

• List of word processors
• Comparison of word processors
• Comparison of office suites

References

External links

• Writer home page
• OpenOffice.org Processing Project
• Word Processor Writer FAQ

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