From: Alan Horkan (horkana@maths.tcd.ie)
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 08:59:03 EDT
On 10 Jun 2003, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> Date: 10 Jun 2003 11:57:56 +0000
> From: Rui Miguel Seabra <rms@1407.org>
> To: AbiWord Developers <abiword-dev@abisource.com>
> Subject: Re: ATTN: Steal me some artwork!
>
> On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 14:08, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> > Sooo.... Ximian just released OpenOffice and a few
> > thousand new icons with it. What I would like is for
> > someone to "steal" any icons of theirs that map back
> > onto us. I think they have a new "Bullets and
> > Numbering" toolbar icon, indent/unindent, ... It would
> > be *really* cool to grab these, especially before
> > GUADEC (so that Martin and I can show off some
> > ueber-slick looking demos).
>
>
> And they deserve so! Stupidly enough, Ximian's OO.o saves by default
> in... Microsoft Office's formats.
I agree that it is less than ideal but you have to admit that it is
perfectly understandable from a commerical point of view. If their
customers are going to want to change it anyway they may as well give them
what they want.
Just consider how many people ask about changing the default save format
in Abiword.
I read an article about a small business using StarOffice and that the
author provides/gives away free copies of OpenOffice to ensure that people
can read the documents he is sending out.
A small OpenOffice Viewer program would be nice (Abiword 3?). (There is
already an ActiveX based OpenOffice plugin for the Internet Explorer
browser, but that requires that you install most of OpenOffice)
It will be a massive task to "reeducate" users, or in most cases even
getting them to care about different file formats. The fact that the
OASIS group are helping to make the OpenOffice.org file formats a standard
should be a big help.
OpenOffice users who are trying to strike a compromise and still keep
things simple prefer to send PDF documents, which is more appropriate
for most situtations except collaboration on a shared document.
It is not ideal either but frankly Ximians decision is understandable at
least in the short term, hopefully they have some sort of longer term
plan.
You have made it clear in your mail signature that you dislike msword
attachments, and although attachments are far less sensible than sending a
link to a file I think it is time for some guerilla marketing, time to
send out some Abiword documents and OpenOffice documents!
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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