I wish I had a way to see office documents. Docs are kind of documents I guess. There must be a way to see thoses without installing office

Freeware Office viewers, attaching them to an email and viewing it from either Google or Outlook emails, https://office.live.com/start/Word.aspx?omkt=en-US, and so on...

for Word documents there is... Antiword. Not sure what the support level is for docx, though.
http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

ElBrunzy wrote:

I wish I had a way to see office documents. Docs are kind of documents I guess. There must be a way to see thoses without installing office

Is it that you don't want "MS"-Office or "Any"-Office program?
OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free. Run on MAC OSs, Linux and Windows, and should handle any common file format MS-Office uses.
.
There are also free doc and docx converters to PDF.
.

My bad. PDF attached for your free-viewing pleasure.

PCBONEZ wrote:

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free. Run on MAC OSs, Linux and Windows, and should handle any common file format MS-Office uses.

I had nothing but trouble with OpenOffice's DOC/DOCX support. At the university the professor that tutors my postgraduate studies insisted on using Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice when we (the students) used Windows and MS Word. Every time he would revise anything (a paper, a dissertation, a thesis) not only he would send back a bunch of complaints of missing pictures (that were not missing), but the file with the revised text lost most of our formatting. DOCX was specially bad, DOC was almost bearable. We then started not sending him DOCs at all, and just sent him the PDF, and then he had to send us a list of changes (which was good, since sometimes he made changes that whoever was the author did not agree). He eventually gave up and uses MS Word now. This was an year or two ago, so I don't know if the situation has improved.

alexanrs wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free. Run on MAC OSs, Linux and Windows, and should handle any common file format MS-Office uses.

I had nothing but trouble with OpenOffice's DOC/DOCX support. At the university the professor that tutors my postgraduate studies insisted on using Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice when we (the students) used Windows and MS Word. Every time he would revise anything (a paper, a dissertation, a thesis) not only he would send back a bunch of complaints of missing pictures (that were not missing), but the file with the revised text lost most of our formatting. DOCX was specially bad, DOC was almost bearable. We then started not sending him DOCs at all, and just sent him the PDF, and then he had to send us a list of changes (which was good, since sometimes he made changes that whoever was the author did not agree). He eventually gave up and uses MS Word now. This was an year or two ago, so I don't know if the situation has improved.

So start sending him everything in RTF. That'll fix'em.
.

And lose even more formatting. How enjoyable.

What Office does support is OpenDocument format - the same as LO does. Your mileage may vary, but it works well enough for simple stuff. Ultimately, if editing is not a concern, send a PDF and it'll render exactly the same in any viewer.

PCBONEZ wrote:

So start sending him everything in RTF. That'll fix'em.

calvin wrote:

And lose even more formatting. How enjoyable.

That is the goal. It's called paybacks.

alexanrs wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are free. Run on MAC OSs, Linux and Windows, and should handle any common file format MS-Office uses.

I had nothing but trouble with OpenOffice's DOC/DOCX support. At the university the professor that tutors my postgraduate studies insisted on using Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice when we (the students) used Windows and MS Word. Every time he would revise anything (a paper, a dissertation, a thesis) not only he would send back a bunch of complaints of missing pictures (that were not missing), but the file with the revised text lost most of our formatting. DOCX was specially bad, DOC was almost bearable. We then started not sending him DOCs at all, and just sent him the PDF, and then he had to send us a list of changes (which was good, since sometimes he made changes that whoever was the author did not agree). He eventually gave up and uses MS Word now. This was an year or two ago, so I don't know if the situation has improved.

I don't recall any problems like that but said with a grain of salt.
I don't do it often, probably simpler documents and almost never are there pictures involved.
.

calvin wrote:

What Office does support is OpenDocument format - the same as LO does. Your mileage may vary, but it works well enough for simple stuff. Ultimately, if editing is not a concern, send a PDF and it'll render exactly the same in any viewer.

Sending him PDFs is what we ended up doing anyway until he gave up xD

PCBONEZ wrote:

I don't recall any problems like that but said with a grain of salt.
I don't do it often, probably simpler documents and almost never are there pictures involved.

We did use some more advanced features, like automatic captions for images, tables and equations; automatic summaries; equations themselves; etc. Those were the first things to go boom.

PCBONEZ wrote:

That is the goal. It's called paybacks.

Thankfully that is not needed anymore. Anyway I guess sending him non-editable PDFs was payback enough - he had to write down every single change he wanted to make and then send us a big email about it instead of just editing it. Losing formatting was more of a burden on us (the students - who had to format it all over again or backport all changes we could detect into the original documents) than on him, who just wrecked the document and sent it back complaining that the document was bad to begin with.

About the original topic... I don't think you can do any better than an Athlon board with ISA slots as long as the board can take something like an Athlon XP.

alexanrs wrote:

We did use some more advanced features, like automatic captions for images, tables and equations; automatic summaries; equations themselves; etc. Those were the first things to go boom.

About the original topic... I don't think you can do any better than an Athlon board with ISA slots as long as the board can take something like an Athlon XP.

It bothers me when people use the wrong tool for the job. Word, OOWriter, or anything of the sort are really terrible for doing publishing work. If you want to bang off a quick letter to someone, it's fine, but word processors just don't maintain enough fidelity for documents where layout and presentation are critical.

As for hybrid machines, I do have a couple BX boards hanging around, but I just don't have many use cases for ISA beyond my Socket 7 time machine. My AXP/AK73 combo covers Win98 requirements.

gdjacobs wrote:

It bothers me when people use the wrong tool for the job. Word, OOWriter, or anything of the sort are really terrible for doing publishing work. If you want to bang off a quick letter to someone, it's fine, but word processors just don't maintain enough fidelity for documents where layout and presentation are critical.

So... What is the right tool?
A printing press?
.

He probably means LaTeX or something like that. I tried LaTeX once and it didn't go very well... And most papers I've published offer only DOC and LaTeX example files, so not a lot of freedom to choose your tools unless you wanna reinvent the wheel.

I don't know many people that actually publish anything to anyone but themselves.
ATM I can't think of any.
When I do it's usually in HTML.
.

alexanrs wrote:

He probably means LaTeX or something like that. I tried LaTeX once and it didn't go very well... And most papers I've published offer only DOC and LaTeX example files, so not a lot of freedom to choose your tools unless you wanna reinvent the wheel.

O I C
It's a terminology thing.
I don't consider things like school papers as publishing.
.

.
I actually had to come back to your OP because I forgot what was being crossbred. (Hybridized.)

ElBrunzy wrote:

I'm always landing my friend about oldskool computer to host my old soundcard and my music and demos collection. […]
Show full quote

I'm always landing my friend about oldskool computer to host my old soundcard and my music and demos collection.

Latelly I started a new project and my friend asked me "is this piece fit your project scope?" and I reply "damn dude, I dont know where to draw the line on this one..." but after some tought I found out :

Faster computer that can host an isa 16bit connector!

I'm thinking of the fastest and newest computer there is that can also hold the oldest expansion card. I'm thinking of a p3 1.4ghz cpu on a mobo with an isa 16 bit card 😁

What do you think ?

I think a Tualatin on a board with ISA is an excellent choice.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

So... What is the right tool?
A printing press?

LoL, no. For final delivery, PDF is really the best and most usable, but I would argue products like FrameMaker offer more stable intermediate handling. Even here, though, the environment pretty much must be cloned, or you get font substitutions happening and such. For some users, a product that offers the capability of marking up PDF documents with commentary is a good option.

alexanrs wrote:

He probably means LaTeX or something like that. I tried LaTeX once and it didn't go very well... And most papers I've published offer only DOC and LaTeX example files, so not a lot of freedom to choose your tools unless you wanna reinvent the wheel.

You're right, there. LaTeX is very good at what it does, but it can be intimidating when you first take it up. It's also not so popular in every academic discipline.

I would argue there are tools to make LaTeX more usable, and people do use them, but Word has become a standard by way of least resistance. Everyone has Word or quasi-Word and (sort of) knows how to use it, but it does mean either the author or publisher must do a pile of housekeeping to create a suitable end product.

PCBONEZ wrote:

I don't consider things like school papers as publishing.

I'm not talking about school papers - but academic papers published in periodics or congresses. Those usually have strict formatting standards you have to follow to get your paper published as it is meant to be part of a bigger publications. As a postgraduate student this is pretty much my job.

gdjacobs wrote:

I would argue there are tools to make LaTeX more usable, and people do use them, but Word has become a standard by way of least resistance. Everyone has Word or quasi-Word and (sort of) knows how to use it, but it does mean either the author or publisher must do a pile of housekeeping to create a suitable end product.

I know at least Springer journals offer a Word model filled with macros, so you just type the text without formatting and then just press a button to format it as a title, normal text, caption, whatever. It is the only place I've ever submitted stuff to that has such an elaborate model though. Most of the time its just a model file with a bogus paper (which might talk about the formatting itself) and we have to format our documents exactly like that. I should probably give LaTeX another chance eventually, but since I'm not always the main/only author its kindda hard to switch unless some of my colleagues do it with me.

alexanrs wrote:

I know at least Springer journals offer a Word model filled with macros, so you just type the text without formatting and then just press a button to format it as a title, normal text, caption, whatever. It is the only place I've ever submitted stuff to that has such an elaborate model though. Most of the time its just a model file with a bogus paper (which might talk about the formatting itself) and we have to format our documents exactly like that. I should probably give LaTeX another chance eventually, but since I'm not always the main/only author its kindda hard to switch unless some of my colleagues do it with me.

Springer's solution still suffers from the basic problem that document layout and display is variable, depending on software version, font, printer driver, phase of the moon, etc. You've hit the nail on the head, though. Whatever your field, in order to eat you have to follow everyone at chow time.