211–220 of 263 posts
Word, powerpoint, Teams... can't all these just run in the browser now? Why futz with Libreoffice?
Also a lawyer here, I think the biggest hurdle is MS Word. MS word is the defacto IDE of the law world. We spend most of our time in Word. The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client. But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track chan…
I’m glad this is working for him, but it’s only been three months. The most important thing Word gets me is an excuse. If someone sends me a Word doc and I open it in Word and something is screwed up, I can say “oh, um, maybe something is wrong on your end.” If I’m using anything else—LibreOffice, Pages, Google Docs, anything—then there’s a possibility that it’s the software’s fault. I can’t be messing around with th…
The real question here is how does Linux scale video? Is it bicubic or nearest neighbor?
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Wiki is marked up text. So it would be translated into a document guaranteed to meet those guidelines with no extra effort. That is exactly what a wiki is for.
A template in Microsft Word already has the formatting without extra effort. Word is pretty cheap, especially for a successful law firm. Why would anyone switch?
Law firms often charge by the hour, right? If my law firm switches to Linux, would they bill me more hours if they run into technical issues?
Nothing like paying a $500/hr lawyer for debugging a Word table (how can I center text in a table?) or an autonumbered nested list.
Not to mention trying to figure out why a whole section doesn't appear in the ToC because "Update Table of Contents" only changed page numbers (Styles weren't used for that section).
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> If everything you’re doing is in the VM, what’s the point? "Your honor, with all of the evidence we've leveled today, my client would like to motio- hold on, what's this? Wait, no I didn't tell you to install updates now! Cancel, cancel, does anyone here know how to stop a Windows update?"
It happens all the time. In the middle of medical malpractice cases, divorce cases, murder cases - a virus update, an acrobat update, an email notification, etc. Everybody deals.
Also a lawyer here, I think the biggest hurdle is MS Word. MS word is the defacto IDE of the law world. We spend most of our time in Word. The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client. But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track chan…
Interesting. I know back in the 80s, law firms were in love with WordPerfect for some reason. When did the switch occur from WP to Word, and why?
When my then-law firm was switching from MS-DOS to Windows, I was on the committee that was deciding: WordPerfect for Windows, or Microsoft Word? Some said "WP, of course, because it's the standard for law firms." My response: Who gives a [hoot] what other firms are doing - we exchange a lot of documents with clients, so what are they doing? That made the answer obvious: Word.
Also a lawyer here, I think the biggest hurdle is MS Word. MS word is the defacto IDE of the law world. We spend most of our time in Word. The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client. But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track chan…
I also would think that Libre Office just wouldn’t cut it with all the track changes. It’s a bit of a shame that the industry is so cemented to Word, git is 1000 times superior than track changes IMO. But I understand that git has a bit of a technical hurdle that a lot of lawyers might struggle with.
Also a lawyer here, I think the biggest hurdle is MS Word. MS word is the defacto IDE of the law world. We spend most of our time in Word. The drafting of documents won't be a problem with libre office. You can send a PDF to the client. But working with other lawyers/parties could be a challenge. I am not certain how Libreoffice could handle a 500 page memo being worked by 50+ people including thousands of track chan…
I know a group of lawyers who still operate using type writers and dictaphones.
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TeX and any derivatives aren't WYSIWYG. People (non-tech and even some in tech) don't want to write code to generate their document. They want to pull up Word, type some stuff, click the table button or something, and go on their merry way. If there's an issue on page 45 of the printed document, they know exactly where that is in Word due to it being WYSIWYG. In TeX, it's not that simple. TeX is extremely powerful. I…
LyX is available as a (almost) WYSIWYG editor for TeX. The developers actually describe it as WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) but the key point is that the user is not limited to writing raw TeX code. Fixed pagination is not guaranteed, even in Word. Especially when you consider features like change tracking. If you want fixed pages, export to PDF.