Cross-Platform Word Processing (MacOS/RISC OS)

While submitting RTF files might be acceptable in some cases most publishers have moved on.

Looks like Amazon prefers DOC(X) for the Kindle, but can handle RTF, HTML, EPUB, Mobi, etc.
Lulu seems to prefer DOC(X), RTF, or ODT. Interestingly, RTF is converted to EPUB, but there’s no mention in the file formats info that Lulu accepts EPUB directly. Hmmm…?

So many companies still do all their manuals in Word though…

My company uses Word. They had a brief trial with Linux-everywhere (and LibreOffice) and while the pencil-pushers mostly got on okay with LibreOffice, the Linux “solutions” for stock control were absolutely abysmal. When you’re pushing stock and resources adding up to nearly seven digits (at the time, more now!) you really do NOT want to find a huge chunk of it has “gone missing” in between the production site and head office and neither end seems to be aware of any discrepancy. It worked out safer (since we’re a full-tracability company) to jettison Linux entirely, pay for Windows licences, and buy a package that not only works but was quickly customised on-site for several specifics of how things are done.
So, yeah, back to Word and Excel and – oh my God – Powerpoint.
I have also noticed the management types have little green USB dongles in their laptops now. Hardware based encryption keys. I’m glad somebody paid attention to the GDPR. :-)
I wonder if their WiFi is still stuck at WEP? (-:=

we used FrameMaker, with its own file format

I dunno about you, but an estate agent I used to be involved with circa 1992 used to use FrameMaker. It was a 286 machine, and possibly predated Adobe’s involvement. The software was, to put it politely, poo. It was such a pain in the posterior quarters to get it to do things. I really didn’t care that it could cope with a 1,000 page document when it gave such grief coping with a 1 page document!
I did a better job in half the time using Ovation, and those were the days when Laser printers understood HP LJ2 so RISC OS had no compatibility issues with the printer either.

fiction’s really the only thing I do for paper publication

Never really got into paper publishing. Who prints yours? Is it something like Lulu? (print on demand)

For documents where I care about the physical layout, I tend to use OvationPro on RISC OS or Windows (attributes: RISC OS uses less electricity, Windows talks to the printer!) or sometimes Google Docs (although I’ve noticed “Print layout” with tab aligned stuff in the browser editor doesn’t match the mobile app, and neither match what actually gets printed (although the app is more wrong than the browser editor)).

and for online I write everything in HTML, which I do on a plaintext editor, Zap on the Pi or Atom on the Mac.

Yup. My blog (which, let’s face it, is about the only part of my website I update these days) is often written in either Zap (RISC OS) or Notepad++ (Windows). Long things are written in RISC OS (saves power!) but things with plenty of images are written in Windows as PhotoImpact5 is just so nice to use. And, anyway, due to security I need to use Windows to log into the server to push the files. ;-)
Hand-written markup, generally of the HTML 3.2 vintage (for what I’m doing, I don’t need HTML5 fancy stuff – I prefer content to bling).

The publisher who takes most of my stuff is happy with .odt.

Don’t publishers accept PDF? I can understand “document formats” with e-readers and the like, but surely the layout ought to be fixed by the time it gets to publishing?
…if my question sounds weird, the last version of Word I used in any amount is Word97. I don’t even have it on any of my current PCs. Why? Because the stupid bloody piece of excrement insisted upon completely reformatting entire documents when you switch printers and the margins are a little different even when the change in margin is outside of any printed content. When you have to spend hours fixing the mess it just made of an 80 page quality manual because you switched to a different laser printer with margins like 2mm different (and for some reason Word interprets that as suitable justification to trash hard pagination and run everything together), and it’s not the first time, you quickly learn to hate the software. Oh, and don’t talk to me about the different versions of Word circa Y2K and the difficulty they had in coping with their own file formats. Jeez…
I’d have used Ovation(Pro) if it wasn’t for the fact that everybody “just expected Word files”. I’ve never ever not once had Ovation(Pro) mess up a document if the margins changed. I’ve had it warn me of unprintable content (like those cheap inkjets with epic huge bottom margins) meaning I’d have to adjust the page margins and fix any changes myself, but otherwise, no, it has never taken it into its own mind to destroy a document for the evulz.

The software [FrameMaker] was, to put it politely, poo.

I wouldn’t have put it quite so politely. The one thing it did do very effectively was force you to structure things according to the rules set down by the Boss, and it wasn’t too awful once you got used to it. But after using Impression Publisher at the Journal of Physiology it was a bit of a come-down in productivity terms!

Who prints yours? Is it something like Lulu?

It is precisely Lulu. The publisher is Xin Publishing, but they use Lulu for printing and distribution. And Amazon.

Don’t publishers accept PDF?

Yes, they take PDF – and that’s all very well if you’re doing all the page make-up yourself, and not using an editor. If the publisher does any editing – or even just copy-editing – and they do their own page layout etc, it’s better to supply a word processor file rather than PDF.

I prefer content to bling

Snap! As anyone who frequents my website knows.

I’m afraid my rather enthusiastic recommendation might have been a bit premature. When I hand in copy it’s usually very plain: 60 characters per line, 30 lines per page, line spacing 1.5 and no proportional font. Everything else is done by the publisher.
Well, for test purposes I created a more complex document and exported it as microsoft DOC. Much to my surprise Microsoft Word flat out refused opening the file at all, claiming the file extension didn’t match the document. Kingsoft did slightly better but not only did it add some garbled characters at the beginning and end, it also substituted certain characters within the document with cyrillic script. Not what I had hoped for!
I even downloaded a test file:

http://www.iiswc.org/iiswc2009/sample.doc

which worked fine with both Kingsoft and Microsoft. EasiWriter got some of the formatting wrong but it didn’t look too bad. Saving it as EW document and exporting it as Word document afterwards however resulted in another failure. Microsoft again refused opening the file and Kingsoft displayed a barely readable document, ugh!
Now this may have something to do with missing fonts but still: very disappointing.

I wasn’t sure about mentioning this, but I don’t see why not: the “gathering” yesterday was the funeral of the aforementioned Boss. Quite the best boss you could ever ask for, taken far too young – just 54. Stuart Smart, RIP. My boss for nine years, by far the longest I ever worked anywhere, which tells you what a great boss he was. And a very good friend.

Why the little text? If you had a boss you really respected, that should be in bigger text, not smaller!

What small text? 8~P

Follow up to my last post: Open Office on MacOS had no problems opening my EW *.doc file, everything looked correct. Saved as Word Doc 1997-2007 in Open Office and gave it yet another try using both Microsoft Word and Kingsoft Office: no problems whatsoever this time.
I’m slightly less disappointed now.

Creator: AH XSL Formatter V6.2 MR4 for Linux64 : 6.2.6.18551 (2014/09/24 15:00JST)
Producer: Antenna House PDF Output Library 6.2.609 (Linux64)

So probably “classic” XSL-FO workflow. Last time I looked, the only “free” XSL-FO formatter was Apache FOP, and it was in a rather incomplete and/or buggy state. XSL-FO was once the great hope for all people fighting with proprietory source “languages” for formatting text and graphics on a page (e.g. many big insurances still use IBM DCF, because that was the only thing available back in the 60s on their mainframe – thankfully, there is nowadays a modern implementation available that works on everything from mainframe to x86), but I don’t think it worked out the way it was planned.

Last time I looked, the only “free” XSL-FO formatter was Apache FOP, and it was in a rather incomplete and/or buggy state.

Used Apache FOP successfully to do all the documentation for a big engineering firm for about 6 years and had no problems – I would heartily recommend it with DocBook XSLT (although when I left they decided not to get another Technical Writer and instead started using LibreOffice and now I think they are back to Word for some reason…you never know I might go back in a few years and fix all their documents again!).

I also briefly worked for a company that had their own processor using their own document creation tool. It was all Windows based and I can say without hesitation that in all my life it was the worst piece of software I have ever used. I quit the company after a short time partly because I was utterly sick of their software.

Linux “solutions” for stock control were absolutely abysmal

There isn’t any real reason why the good Windows software couldn’t be written run on Linux and its becoming increasingly easy to write software now that can be used cross-platform. I’ve seen similar things happen in other companies where the boss wants everyone to use Linux and thinks he’s saving a big chunk of money because all the software is free. There is no reason is should all be free (as in beer or speech or whatever your interpretation). Its perfectly possible to write good software that is commercial and runs on Linux.

For that matter, there is no real reason why Linux can’t be a commercial product too! I have paid for it in the past and probably will do so again at some point…

Other companies have managed the use of Linux better (the current place I work use a combination of MacOS, Linux and Windows and each to their strengths and/or the comfort of the developers). Eventually I think the underlying OS probably wont matter so much as the applications themselves but we’re probably a decade off that state*.

Follow up to my last post: Open Office on MacOS had no problems opening my EW *.doc file, everything looked correct.

OK…so OpenOffice is better at opening Word documents than Word is…?

Saved as Word Doc 1997-2007 in Open Office and gave it yet another try using both Microsoft Word and Kingsoft Office: no problems whatsoever this time.

Think I’ll be OK then! I have no plans to get Microsoft Office so it shouldn’t be an issue…I have just found out that the publisher I am thinking of using also accepts Pages documents so that might be an option if I have to import into something else (they accept Page, ODT and DOC documents)

*Like we were a decade ago.

OpenOffice is better at opening Word documents than Word is

Indeed it is – in the sense that it’s more tolerant of file format irregularities. And it then spits out documents formatted in such a way that Word is happy. In my experience Word may then produce a document that is somewhat different from that seen in OpenOffice (strictly, LibreOffice these days) but often no different at all. The differences are usually (but not always) fairly minor – details of spacing around headers and footers and footnotes, that sort of thing.

But I have seen footnotes appearing on the wrong page occasionally.

But I have seen footnotes appearing on the wrong page occasionally.

One of the reasons I stopped using Word completely even before LibreOffice got so good (I think it might even have still been called Sun StarOffice when I switched…although I vaguely remember using Lotus SmartSuite for a bit…or was it AmiPro back then?) was because it always seemed to bork the formatting after a while. You’d create a big document and it was all fine, you save it come back to work the next day when you are supposed to print it out and give it to a committee or Inspector or something and bam! it suddenly has extra blank pages or bits missing or the tables are all wrong.

That was before I saw the light and discovered XML and XSLT (actually it was before I became a Technical Writer and was merely a lowly Technical Specialist…)

Edit: I just found out you can still buy Corel WordPerfect for £319….what?….why?….

Edit2: I had no idea there were still so many choices! Looks like TechWriter gets a notable mention as the only RISC OS one though and its not in the “historical” category as most people would probably insist… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_word_processors

Edit3: I just opened WordPad on Windows7 and am amazed at how capable it is compared to what I remember.

(also I feel I may be spending the rest of the day reading about obscure Word Processors…)

Edit2: I had no idea there were still so many choices!

You could also try SoftMaker Office, at least in Germany it has quite a following as a mostly-cross-platform-Office-but-not-from-MS solution.

http://www.softmaker.com/en/softmaker-office

You could also try SoftMaker Office, at least in Germany it has quite a following as a mostly-cross-platform-Office-but-not-from-MS solution.

Installed the 30 day trial on my Windows work computer and its quite impressive. I like the option you get at the start to choose a dark interface and to not use the awful ribbon interface that Microsoft decided everyone should use. The only problem is the presentation application wont start because its missing a DLL…but I wouldn’t be surprised if its just this computer which has been passed around a lot of engineers now and is starting to slowly die.

Not sure its quite enough to tempt me away from LibreOffice on the MacOS/Debian computers at home though but I can definitely see its appeal (and its prices are pretty good).

Also tried downloading the Corel WordPerfect suite trial but it crashed when it was trying to install…

Downloading LyX and Scrivener as well. The other one I might try is Mariner Write but its only on MacOS.

Edit: LyX is cool—I could see myself using it if I were still doing Technical Writing…I think I have used it in the past but can’t really remember. I like the default pink page colour…much easier on the eyes than white!

Edit2: Scrivener actually looks really interesting from the point of view of someone writing fiction. I can see how that would help quite a bit and I’m usually super-skeptical about software written to help writers write (the best thing that helped me finish my last story was actually to turn everything off and use a typewriter and I’m writing my current one in two notepads…one for each main character!) but the Scrivener interface definitely looks interesting! I will see how well it can cope with importing/exporting files…

Edit3: OK so I played with it for a bit and quickly got frustrated! Think I’ll stick with writing in notepads and then typing into something simple for now…

Might be a daft question, Glen, but have you tried running Fireworkz for Windows under Wine on MacOS?

Not a daft question at all!

I do remember being told that it ran well under Wine on Linux but haven’t ever tried anything in Wine on MacOS yet…

Will give it a go when I get my Mac fixed.