[seb1204]

Changing infrastructure and software packages should not fail due to a missing or bad office template. Surely this can be made from scratch to suit the gov org and current standards/legislation within one work month by any skilled consultant. There are challenges yes, an office template should not be on the top list. Maybe I'm totally wrong...

[exceptione]

Step in the shoes of an average user. You have to create a good looking document. As usual, there is time pressure. You would have no idea where to look online for templates, let alone create it from scratch (master page, huh, what?). In powerpoint or word, just pick one template or theme and it looks slick.

Even when you import a template in Impress, you will find some weird bugs, like a slide insisting that it won't show the slide number. I found such random weird behavior that I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report for it, because they are impossible to reproduce.

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I know the stuff is built on top of some very ancient code. Sometimes I wish they would throw it all away and start from scratch in a modern managed, type safe language. It would be feasible if you forego backwards compatibility as I suppose a lot of the bugs have to do with trying to support the MS Office bugs. A consistent finding is that LO supports older office documents better than MS office itself.

[rurban]

> You have to create a good looking document.

Then any office product is horrible. I'm using emacs with markdown, and convert them to tex, pdf, blog posts automatically.

Tables look better. Images look better. Everything's looks better. And it's 10x easier to work with.

[exceptione]

Hey, you don't have to kill the average user!

I am sure your latex or custom pipeline produces better quality indeed. There has always been a gap between word processors and typesetting applications like Scribus and Indesign.