Text to/from M$Word -- issues about "Notes" in tex

[CompilersPres]

I've just started to use 1.0.3 on my MacOS 10.2.6 machine. I previously had 1.0.1. I'm
doing some cooperative editing on a text document with someone who is using
"Micro$oft Word 97/2000/XP"
whereas I want to keep using the Writer application in OpenOffice.
They want me to insert mark-up/commentary "Notes" in the text. There seems to have
been at least one change in how that works between 1.0.1 and 1.0.3 that is a problem.
Can anyone comment, in general, about this topic?

The Writer-accessible Help topics on Notes had nothing to say about any of the below
issues, and I haven't found any earlier discussion about it among these forums.

Specifically:

- In 1.0.1 I could do a small amount of "vertical formatting" on a Note's text: I could wrap
a line using Return and indent lines using spaces. I didn't want any fancier formatting,
but having pseudo-paragraphs/ "verbatim" text layout, e.g., for programming language
code, was very useful. In 1.0.3, all of the Note's text is completely smushed together a la
web-browser behavior. I've lost all of the "formatting" I had carefully constructed.

- The Notes text-edit/insertion box *also* now has only a single-line of text for all of what
I had previously entered as multiple, hand-wrapped, lines. There is a horizontal scroll
bar, but it is fairly hard to read the text in such a small 'porthole'.

- Here is an issue that seems to be the same between 1.0.1 and 1.0.3: pointing the mouse
at a Note-insertion icon (a very small yellow rectangle or box on my display) to have
the note pop-up, is a very delicate hand-eye coordination problem. That is, there isn't
any obvious best place to put the mouse cursor to reliably have the note text display
itself. Is there some M$Word-dictated standard for that positioning? And is there some
reason why the actual "icon" in the text that is placed there cannot be selected or
customized as to its size and color (or even shape)?

Can anyone comment on how Notes behave in M$Word such that OpenOffice's Writer
may be doing the "same things" or possibly something either "better" or "worse"?

[OPENSTEP]

Boy, text notes...that's something I haven't personally used yet I do know, however, that the online help can suck nads at times...well, nearly all the time. Good news is that you can actually download the full manus for StarOffice 6.0 for free from Sun from the following URL:

http://docs.sun.com/db/coll/999.2?q=staroffice

On the whole, they do apply to OpenOffice.org 1.0.x. They may have some better indications as to text formatting within notes. The direct link to the free Sun documentation used to be here before, but the nuke module unfortunately had security loopholes I couldn't readily solve

ed

[CompilersPres]

I looked into the Star Office 6.0 User's Guide, but it didn't have anything at all to say
about inserting Notes in Writer (text) documents: just info about footnotes, endnotes,
notes in cells of spreadsheets and notes associated with presentations. But OpenOffice
definitely has an Insert Note command and a whole interface for editing, and seeing
them (or not).

I now think that the problem I encountered, that simple "hard Return", "sticky spaces",
"blank lines" -- i.e., simple text formatting that one could do with a non-rendering editor
and text browser (think emacs) -- all gets washed out when I load a file, happens after
I save and then re-load the file. I now don't think it was a problem that cropped up with
version 1.0.3, but I haven't gone back to 1.0.1 to prove that.

I should point out that I am saving all my files in .doc format (Microsoft Word 97/...)
because I am interacting with someone who has that program on a Windows platform.
(Yes, I can hear the derision in the background....) I am being paid to do this work with
that kind of file and I don't have a choice.

Again, does anyone know what the designed properties are for the Notes facility
in Writer? Is it supposed to be used for tiny snippets of only English text with no
internal formatting?

-- CompilersPres

[jakeOSX]

I pulled up Word on windows just for you. =)

I played with the comments in just Word (later I'll see about taking it to OO.o but one step at a time) and though i was able to format size and make bold, and italics in the bottom note dispay, when you moused over a note all formating was gone.

Hope that helps some

-jacob

* In Word when you insert comment, a window opens at the bottom of the document where all the comments can be seen. In the text, the part you highlighted becomes yellow to indicate there is a note.