Perhaps of greater interest will be the fact that I’ve been writing a couple of these notes of late in OpenOffice 2.0’s version of Writer. This is a direct descendant of Sun’s StarOffice productivity suite, designed for the Solaris operating system. Sun Microsystems donated the code to the open source community a couple of years ago when it was thinking of Linux as a Microsoft-killer. One major difference between OpenOffice & Writely is that the former is a complete productivity suite.

It’s not perfect by any means &, as with Writely, I’ve had to go into Word in order to handle certain details. But it shows a lot of promise &, even if I don’t end up using it for the blog, I will probably keep it around on my somewhat cramped hard drive, simply because it enables me to convert Word (or Word-like) files into PDF format. That offers great possibilities in avoiding the problems of Word converting pages into slightly different results because the Microsoft program is configured differently on different PCs, a risk one runs with publishers in general.