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Nov. 19th, 2008 04:42 pmThe problem with switcing between word processors is that each of them seems to have their own idiosyncracies. This morning at work I downloaded Open Office and installed it. This in itself was a bit of an adventure because a search on "Open Office" will net you a handful of sites that want to force you to pay to download a free product (if you want to donate money to the people making it, that's different). Once I got it installed it wanted to run plug-in updates and generally acted sluggish... my impression is that, for all its good points, it's still a pretty bloated piece of software. But I was able to upload my very large document and work on reformatting it. One thing I did, sadly enough, is work my way through almosst the entire document replacing all of my tabs for each new line. They were all gone, thanks to Word.
I also had to search and replace some atifacts that Word had introduced... anywhere I'd used three dots (an elipse) and then a period to end a sentence, Word had converted the three dots into a single character that still displayed as an elipse. In openOffice they displayed as little 1/4 symbols. Yay.
Also the text kept switching between Times New Roman and Arial fonts, and between 10 point and 12 point. What a mess. I tried to fix that too. When I was done, it looked good in openOffice, at least.
I only managed to write a few partial scenes, but openOffice tried to tell me that my entire document was 49,000 words long. This confused me, because I've been calculating my word count based on knowing that the original document was 22,500 words long when I started working on it this month. That would mean I've written 26,500 words... or 3,000 words since last night. I knew I'd done no such thing.
I closed it down and then fired it back up, and this time it said that my word count was 48,600 words. Hmm. I got the same number after a second shutdown/restart, so that seemed to be its final answer. Just for comparison I checked with Word; it said 48,500 words.
Where did all of those words come from?
When I got home I noticed that the file was 1,047 kbs. This was pretty alarming -- the WordPerfect file from my computer this morning was only about 650 kbs. I knew my file size would jump or shrink depending on if I'd saved it most recenlty from Word or from Wordperfect, but the difference was never THAT great. What had openOffice added to my file?
I checked with WordPerfect. The very first thing I noticed was a little paragraph marker at the beginning of every single new paragraph. I checked reveal codes, and found that my document was establishing font and format every time I tabbed in to start another paragraph.
I wondered if all of those paragraph and font codes were being counted in my word count. Strangely enough, WordPerfect said my actual word count was about 46,500 words, which is close to where I thought I was last night.
I also noticed a lot of artifacts where there should be quotes. Great, smart quote problems.
I loaded the file into Wordpad to try and fix some of the horrible formatting problems. For some reason it told me everything was in Arial but it was displaying as Courier (ie no font selected). I changed the font again. In Wordpad I could see the smart quotes and did some search and replaces to get rid of them all, then saved again.
When I reimported into WordPerfect, I was down to just over 46,000 words. How depressing. However, this was close to what I expected as my word count.
Reveal codes still showed that there were a lot of hidden switching between fonts, so I did more search and replacing until I got rid of all the junk codes. I think at this point I have a clean document, but I'm afraid to import it back into openOffice. But then, I either have to do that tomorrow at work, or use Wordpad. I think I'd rather use openOffice, but in that case I should probably use it at home too, instead of WordPerfect.
I just want a word processor that does things right. ^_^ I guess openOffice is the best option, but I can already tell it's not everything I was hoping it would be....
I also had to search and replace some atifacts that Word had introduced... anywhere I'd used three dots (an elipse) and then a period to end a sentence, Word had converted the three dots into a single character that still displayed as an elipse. In openOffice they displayed as little 1/4 symbols. Yay.
Also the text kept switching between Times New Roman and Arial fonts, and between 10 point and 12 point. What a mess. I tried to fix that too. When I was done, it looked good in openOffice, at least.
I only managed to write a few partial scenes, but openOffice tried to tell me that my entire document was 49,000 words long. This confused me, because I've been calculating my word count based on knowing that the original document was 22,500 words long when I started working on it this month. That would mean I've written 26,500 words... or 3,000 words since last night. I knew I'd done no such thing.
I closed it down and then fired it back up, and this time it said that my word count was 48,600 words. Hmm. I got the same number after a second shutdown/restart, so that seemed to be its final answer. Just for comparison I checked with Word; it said 48,500 words.
Where did all of those words come from?
When I got home I noticed that the file was 1,047 kbs. This was pretty alarming -- the WordPerfect file from my computer this morning was only about 650 kbs. I knew my file size would jump or shrink depending on if I'd saved it most recenlty from Word or from Wordperfect, but the difference was never THAT great. What had openOffice added to my file?
I checked with WordPerfect. The very first thing I noticed was a little paragraph marker at the beginning of every single new paragraph. I checked reveal codes, and found that my document was establishing font and format every time I tabbed in to start another paragraph.
I wondered if all of those paragraph and font codes were being counted in my word count. Strangely enough, WordPerfect said my actual word count was about 46,500 words, which is close to where I thought I was last night.
I also noticed a lot of artifacts where there should be quotes. Great, smart quote problems.
I loaded the file into Wordpad to try and fix some of the horrible formatting problems. For some reason it told me everything was in Arial but it was displaying as Courier (ie no font selected). I changed the font again. In Wordpad I could see the smart quotes and did some search and replaces to get rid of them all, then saved again.
When I reimported into WordPerfect, I was down to just over 46,000 words. How depressing. However, this was close to what I expected as my word count.
Reveal codes still showed that there were a lot of hidden switching between fonts, so I did more search and replacing until I got rid of all the junk codes. I think at this point I have a clean document, but I'm afraid to import it back into openOffice. But then, I either have to do that tomorrow at work, or use Wordpad. I think I'd rather use openOffice, but in that case I should probably use it at home too, instead of WordPerfect.
I just want a word processor that does things right. ^_^ I guess openOffice is the best option, but I can already tell it's not everything I was hoping it would be....
