Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Raymond Wan writes:

 > But, I'm not talking about just technical power...Microsoft Word
 > just makes it look "nice" where you have each author's comments
 > colored and you can right click on each and Accept or Reject
 > Changes.

Emacs has several merge modes that allow this in any plaintext source
(programs or LaTeX or markdown or YAML or JSON), although Word is
probably prettier in some sense for pure documents.

 > I don't know how many authors it supports, but surely at least 3
 > (i.e., comes down to number of coloring schemes).

I believe it works for you, but it definitely doesn't for us.  I
suppose if somebody would go to the trouble of actually teaching all
the faculty how to avoid breaking each others' edits.... :-(  And both
LibreOffice and OpenOffice seem to crash more often on Mac when either
change logging or comments are enabled.

Comments do work, and that's kind of convenient.  But -- I don't like
them (why are you not surprised? ;-), because they go into a sidebar,
making the window much wider.  It would be easy enough in LaTeX to
define a \comment macro to be used like this:

\comment{steve}{I just don't believe this crap!}

that can be switched on or off in the preview output, and highlighting
and special commands for convenient use in Emacs or vim when editing
source.