Writing Papers in FreeBSD

[kagayaki]

Hey guys, dunno if I'm posting this in the right forum or not.. but here goes.
I'm a history major in college right now, so needless to say I have to type up A LOT of papers.

I love messing around with FreeBSD and I used my last "hardware malfunction" on my laptop (I hate the mediadirect button on my Dell Vostro) as an excuse to forget to install Windows and just use FreeBSD.

Here's the problem though.. using the default settings from Abiword or Openoffice (OO.org I've only experienced using in Linux, but i assume its largely the same with FreeBSD) causes some extreme weirdness when you try to open the same document in Windows. We're talking a 15 page paper turning into a 12 page paper.. because of margins, DPI, or whatever. I have to go to my school's library to print because I lack a printer at home.. so I'm wondering if anyone may have found a solution for making paper written in FreeBSD/Linux/etc look at least somewhat similiar to those written in Windows.

Any hep would be appreciated, thanks!

[Nightweaver]

Why not exporting your work into PDF from OpenOffice.org and printing that?:)

[kagayaki]

So simple I never thought about it!
Definitely a lot more viable than tweaking arcane settings whenever I need to write a paper to print out.

Thanks for the help, although if anyone knows what kind of settings I need to tweak for that teacher that wants a soft copy in Microsoft Doc format that'd be awesome. ;)

[TerryP]

I gave up on word processors because trying to get consistent results on different PCs, different word processors, and different operating systems, was giving my an earge to write in pencil again !



The solution?


Downloading TeX Lives DVD iso and installing the FreeBSD binaries,m and learning to use LaTeX for my typesetting needs -> I usually send PDF files to people even when using word processors because of the above reasons ^


(and .tex files for editing ^_^)

[drhowarddrfine]

He called settings "arcane".

You can see what you can do with Google docs. It's easy to open/save/edit as .doc/.odt/pdf