| I deeply and honestly would love to agree with you but unfortunately I can't based on my experience. I write a lot of stuff in the legal area (articles, books, contracts, court documents, etc) and there's nothing that comes close to Word. For some time I had tried to switch to LibreOffice. My goal was to quit Word, which is the only software that still binds me to Windows/Mac (not interested in Wine). I hoped to finally be able to switch to Linux without any hiccups. Unfortunately LibreOffice is not quite as good as Word. I use many of the advanced features of Word, and the more you use these in LibreOffice, the more you encounter bugs. At one point I had a .odt file with tons of cross-references in footnotes pointing to other footnotes. When I was ready to ship the document I found out that all cross-references were messed up and I had to redo them all. Now it's true that LibreOffice has a huge and active community that works hard to improve the product, but as word processors are my main and most important tool for work, I need the most reliable software I can get. Unfortunately that is still Word... On top of that I must add that I do need to properly format documents 99% of the times, and also on this I find Word slightly superior, even if admittedly on this is quite comparable to FOSS solutions. The only quite big problem at this regard is interoperability. Since I know that most, if not all, my colleagues/counterparts use Word, whenever I send a document I need to send something that "will just work" for them, which is a docx. This means that using anything other than Word might give some problems in relation to formatting, which in same cases is pretty important. |