SoftMaker.com

My office uses M$Word as a standard. There are 4000 professional staff in about 50 offices in the company. My department has about 10 engineers and scientists and we produce long, complex technical reports for important clients, with tables, bit-map and vector graphics, and a lot of cross-referencing.

I alone have switched to TextMaker for all my report writing because I can't live with the dreadful user interface of M$Word2007 and I don't want to do the retrograde step of re-installing M$Word 2003. Colleagues disapprove of my use of 'non-standard' sotware because of reasonable worries about potential document incompatibiities, so I have an ongoing to convince them that they don't need to worry because TM2010 and M$Word can both create, read, edit and save the same documents seamlessly with nothing in the document to show which editor was used.

I'm having a bit of aggro with graphic images in text boxes, or text in text boxes - I'm not yet sure which - where it sometimes happens in a document saved with TM that the box becomes misplaced horizontally when reopemed with M$Word, but I don't yet have quite enough info about this problem so I'll post something later if and when I do.

What is proving to be a KILLER PROBLEM for me, though, is that whenever someone else opens my TM xxxx.doc document files, to read, sub-edit, print or add more text to them using M$Word2003, all of the cross references I've put into them are broken. People using my documents are regularly having to spend 30 or 40 minutes working through the document with one of my print-outs for reference, re-inserting all the cross-refs in M$Word. These are busy people doing fee-earning work in a competitive commercial world and they take this very badly. If I re-open in TM, the cross refs are all still intact, but this isn't enough, and I am coming under huge pressure from colleagues and even my junior staff to STOP USING TEXTMAKER.

For each cross-ref in TM, I am placing the cursor without highlighting any text, then inserting bookmark, then, from somewhere else in the document, inserting either a paragraph number or page number cross-reference.

I really like TM and I don't want to stop using it but I am not succeeding. Please, please, SoftMaker, try to look at this quickly; either advise me how to do it differently, fix it with a service update, or ask me for whatever else you might need me to tell you so that you can then fix it.
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John

That's interesting, because I never had any such problems, even though my framework was more or less identical as yours, with MS 2000 in those days being the standard at work but I was using TM. I was using a handheld device in those days that allowed me to leave behind the 7-pounder notebook and use a handheld device instead, hence the reason why SMO for Handheld PC was crucial for me.

I'm sure that the SoftMaker folks will be much interested to work this out with you; but in the meantime, I was have a question for you: when you save a document, what format do you use?

I'm retired now, so this is a non issue for me. But when I was active, I would make doubly sure that any documents destined for the office would be waved in the MS formart instead of SMO. Prior to sending a document to the office, I would always open it in Word or Excel, to make sure that the conversion from TM/PM was perfect. Give or take a few adjustments here and there, by and large, I always found that the conversion to MS format was excellent, not perfect, but excellent.

My two cents.

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Uncle Ben

I save as M$Word2003.

I agree - not perfect, but generally excellent compatibility with the Micro$oft-dictated 'standard', and I like the program a lot. I thought the .DOC similarity was close enough for me to silence my opposition but this prob with broken cross-refs is setting me back a lot.
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John

Can you explain what you mean exactly by broken cross-refs... Are you talking about cross references within a document? Or cross references to other documents and attachments that are not necessarily part of your document per se but cross-referenced (i.e. linked)?

TOC, Index, footnotes ... do all these copy OK?

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Uncle Ben

I mean, instead of my text reading , for example,

"...as explained in paragraph 43 above, new turf dies unless laid green side up,"

M$Word throws an error, thus:

"...as explained in paragraph Target not found! above, new turf dies unless laid green side up,"

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John

Reel Jeem -
in relation to your query, I note for TOCs in original docs from Word2003 are navigable (i.e., cross-linked to page numbers) when opened in TM, but once saved in TM2010 - in whatever format - have their links broken. Otherwise no problems with TOCs. I concur with John that this hiccup in TM could be a real deal-breaker. It needs urgent attention.

SUGGESTION: I wonder whether TM's in-text bibliography tool suffers the same problem although I have not attempted it myself. That is, I assume that in draft mode, in-text citation codes may be clicked on and taken to the full citation in the bibliography, for cross-checking purposes as may occur with editing collaborative documents. It would be a very handy aid indeed if so.

Cheers

I haven't attempted to test compatibility of auto-genn'ed ToC with M$ but I'm not hopeful that it will work well. It would be great if it did.

What I really really need to work is CROSS-REFS !
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J.

I agree with your concern with cross-refs, John - I was assuming that your requirement for linking text within sections of a given document, and the autogeneration of a 'clickable' TOC (plus my frivolous suggestion of clickable in-text links between citations and a bibliography table - otherwise similar to an automatic indexing function) were two sides of the same coin, being that a HTML-like hyperlinking is probably used for such reference coding. Thus I assume this is the nub of the problem overlooked by the SoftMaker development team. I had no intention of diluting your pressing request with MicroSoft compatibility, and I apologize if that occurred.

Completely no need to apologise. I never thought for a moment that you were diverting attention from the main problem, and thanks for the support.
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J.

Thank you for reporting these problems. I've informed our developers. Can you please send us a example file which looks good in TM but not in MS Word?

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Sven Leßmann
SoftMaker Software GmbH