Aaaargh, I'd written a nice detailed response and an errant mouse click made it all go away. (Curse you, websites that don't use AJAX to silently save your draft as you type!)
Let's see how much I can reproduce without causing my RSI to flare up:
It's funny you should say that, because I very recently completed a ~50 page technical user manual in LibreOffice, with lots of tables, illustrations, etc. LO handled things like chapter indexing, keyword indexing (including the use of a concordance file), change tracking, external data linking, styling and formatting with remarkable ease. I was able to perform all the tasks typically associated with the creation of a technical manual without running into any issues, and I was extremely pleased with the polished results. It may be that your needs are more advanced, but LO Writer is more than good enough for my needs. I cannot escape the suspicion that you are making assumptions about limitations that are either not present, or have been overcome since you last used it.
I didn't say it was useless. It's just not as good. And there's no question that some things have been improved since the last time I tested it. But most of my complaints remain entirely unaddressed.
I'll be the first to admit, proudly, that I'm a very discerning, demanding user. Microsoft has managed to deliver a professional level program that meets my needs almost all of the time. LO reminds me of using ClarisWorks in the 1990s, which was awesome for middle school work, but would be woefully inadequate for my professional needs now.
I just reinstalled the latest LO to make sure I'm not talking out of my ass. The user interface is still a wreck, mostly a poor knockoff of Word 97. (I'm a trained UX designer and technical writer, so both the lousy choice and implementation of many UI elements, and the terrible wording of the UI text, both stand out to me like sore thumbs.)
Change tracking is still laughably primitive. It's now caught up with about the level of Word 97. It has only an annoying dialog to show a list of all changes, and even that is very barebones. (Word is much better at showing
what was changed and
how, not just
that it was changed.) At least it now can track changes within a table -- a few years ago, it handled the entire table as a monolithic inline image of sorts, and would only show you that
something in the table had been changed, but not
what!
Writer still lacks a great many automation features that Word has, which either save time right away, or correct poor formatting to good (for example, converting a tab added after-the-fact to the beginning of a line into a proper indent, thus converting
display markup into
semantic markup -- a huge win for document consistency). Nothing this automation does cannot be done manually in Writer, but most users don't know anything about that, and so will do crazy things like number all their paragraph headings by hand. Word helps by turning what you actually
did into what you
intended. (And if it guesses wrong, a simple Ctrl+Z reverts it and leaves it as entered.)
Also, on Windows (but not Mac, sadly) Word can autodetect the language of a sentence, which is very handy for multilingual documents. (In Writer or on Word for Mac, you must manually assign a language to a span of text.)
But I think my real point was this: LibreOffice is often paraded out as an example of how great OSS desktop apps can be. Yet frankly, it's not that great. If that's the
best, what's the
average?!?
Edit: Here is a feature comparison with MS Word 2016.
That's a laughably bad comparison, in that it doesn't actually really list many features. Totally useless.
Libre Office is great unless you have to collaborate with other people who use Word. Formating gets out of hand very quickly when multiple people edit a document using different programs.
Indeed, formatting can suffer tremendously when going round-trip between programs. One problem I've seen is that out of habit, lots of users continue using the .doc format to go between Word and Writer, even though it's arguably the
worst format for that. ODT and DOTX both fare far better. But ultimately, even if both programs can parse the file formats perfectly, it's intrinsically impossible for the document representation to be 100% faithful all of the time unless you faithfully and flawlessly reproduce
every single feature, behavior, and bug of the program whose file you're opening.
For example, did you know that an Excel spreadsheet internally uses one of two different date formats? One, the one for files originally created on a Mac, uses the January 1, 1904 epoch. The other is for files originally created on a PC, which use the January 0, 1900 epoch. Yes, January 0, because of a bug in Lotus 1-2-3's date handling. When Excel was first released, Lotus was the dominant spreadsheet, so Microsoft had to recreate that buggy routine to preserve file compatibility. This post is a fantastic read on the subject of file compatibility:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/02/19.htmlThe only way to not have formatting degradation is to use a lowest-common-denominator format and never attempt to use a feature that exceeds that. But neither Word nor Writer has some mode to limit you only to the LCD.
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