[OT] Migrating from non-free programs to LibreOffice (was: "More About Unicode in Python 2 and 3")

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Maybe it's the better way, but like trying to get people to switch
>> from MS Word onto an open system, it's far easier to push for Open
>> Office than for LaTeX.
>
> If you're going to be pushing people to a free software system,
> OpenOffice is no longer the one to choose; its owners several years ago
> shunted it to a dead end where very little active development can
> happen, and its development community have moved to more productive
> ground.

Handwave, handwave. The FOSS office suite that comes conveniently in
the Debian repositories. It was OO a while ago, it's now LO, but same
difference. If LO ever renames and becomes FreeOffice or ZOffice or
anything else under the sun, it would still be the easier option for
MS Word users to switch to.

(And actually, I haven't been pushing people off MS Word so much as
off DeScribe Word Processor. But since most people here won't have
heard of that, I went for the more accessible analogy.)

>> Getting your head around a whole new way of thinking about your data
>> is work, and people want to be lazy. (That's not a bad thing, by the
>> way. Laziness means schedules get met.)
>
> Right. I think shifting people to LibreOffice is an excellent and
> realistic step toward imcreasing people's software and data freedom.

Yeah. Which is why I do it. But the other night, my mum was trying to
lay out her book in LO, and was having some problems with the system
of having each chapter in a separate file. (Among other things, styles
weren't shared across them all, so a tweak to a style means opening up
every chapter and either doing a parallel edit or figuring out how to
import styles.) So yes, it's a realistic and worthwhile step, but it's
not a magic solution to all problems. She doesn't have time to learn a
whole new system. Maybe - in the long term - LaTeX would actually save
her time, but it's certainly a much harder 'sell' than LO.

ChrisA