Large Flaw in Kingsoft Office Writer!

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 19:36:06 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

VanguardLH has written on 2/10/2014 5:02 PM:
Rodney Pont wrote:

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:20:51 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

Somehow I think that typing

Name: _______________________________[SPACE][ENTER]

is a lot easier.

Doesn't it do underscore?

Name: turn underscore on[spaces ]underscore off[ENTER]

Apparently he wants or needs a contiguous series of underscore
*characters* instead of a bunch of underLINED space characters. If he
is using a non-monospaced (proportional) font, N underscores will be
wider than N spaces that are underlined.


Ah. Now I see what he means. Underlined spaces would work for a form to
be printed.

I used this method in the past, with Uniplex if anyone remembers that,
because underscore characters were not low enough on the line but
underlined spaces were.

--
Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2
and built in 5 years;
UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 19:34:44 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

Rodney Pont has written on 2/10/2014 4:31 PM:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:20:51 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

Somehow I think that typing

Name: _______________________________[SPACE][ENTER]

is a lot easier.

Doesn't it do underscore?

Name: turn underscore on[spaces ]underscore off[ENTER]


How do you turn underscore on?

Since I don't have Kingsoft Office I don't know.

--
Faster, cheaper, quieter than HS2
and built in 5 years;
UKUltraspeed http://www.500kmh.com/

On 11/02/2014 01:50, Brian Gregory wrote:
What's the attraction of Kingsoft Office over something free like
OpenOffice.org or LIbreOffice ?

Kingsoft Writer appears almost identical to Word before the accursed
Ribbon appeared. And, unlike Microsoft, Kingsoft gives you the option
of using it or the classic layout. It is a simple matter of toggling
between the two to use whichever you prefer.

There are some fairly important omissions in the free version, though.
No labels and envelopes, no thesaurus, no macros.

--

Jeff

On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:39:59 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

If you're a fan of Kingsoft Office, beware.

If you type _________________________ and hit [Enter], your line of
underscores will be transformed to a "paragraph border" -- a bold black
line from margin to margin!!!

actually a regular 'feature' of Apache Office and LibreOffice. I have it
turned off somehow, I believe through auto-correct, which may work in
Kingsoft.

also a ctrl-z may restore your dashes.

Felmon

On 2/10/2014 11:46 PM, Rodney Pont wrote:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 19:34:44 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

Rodney Pont has written on 2/10/2014 4:31 PM:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 15:20:51 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

Somehow I think that typing

Name: _______________________________[SPACE][ENTER]

is a lot easier.

Doesn't it do underscore?

Name: turn underscore on[spaces ]underscore off[ENTER]

How do you turn underscore on?

Since I don't have Kingsoft Office I don't know.

Like most word processors, CTRL-U is the toggle.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v24.3.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 7 Home SP1

On 2/11/2014 5:00 AM, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 11/02/2014 01:50, Brian Gregory wrote:
What's the attraction of Kingsoft Office over something free like
OpenOffice.org or LIbreOffice ?

Kingsoft Writer appears almost identical to Word before the accursed
Ribbon appeared. And, unlike Microsoft, Kingsoft gives you the option
of using it or the classic layout. It is a simple matter of toggling
between the two to use whichever you prefer.

There are some fairly important omissions in the free version, though.
No labels and envelopes, no thesaurus, no macros.

What? I don't have any of those and this is supposed to be the Pro version!

Wait a minute! I have so many computers, maybe the Pro version is on
another machine. And I threw a free one on this machine to save money.
Now which machine would I install it on?

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v24.3.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 7 Home SP1

Brian Gregory wrote:

What's the attraction of Kingsoft Office over something free like
OpenOffice.org or LIbreOffice ?

For one, it loads/opens a hell of a lot faster. While Open/LibreOffice
have slowly improved their load time, it is still slow. If you leave
the program loaded all the time then you won't noticed the load time but
who leave a word processor open all the time? I also don't leave
hanging in the background processes that are running all the time in
trying to compensate for a slow-loading program. I have better uses for
my system memory. Even what users consider a bloated suite with MS
Office loads much faster than Open/LibreOffice.

I wish I could remember the function that I was trying to accomplish in
OpenOffice (can't search Google Groups anymore since Google destroyed
its searchs for that Usenet archive) but required a rather ridiculous
workaround. It was doable but clumsy and non-intuitive (I had to
research how others did it). In MS Office and Kingsoft, it was a menu
entry so easy to do.

Kingsoft Office has a GUI far more reminiscent to Office 2003 than
Open/LibreOffice who decided to go their own way with what they thought
was a good GUI. If you're used to using pre-2007 versions of Windows
then Kingsoft is familiar. You don't spend a lot of time trying to
learn the program versus actually using it. Even if you continue using
MS Office pre-2007, you might want to have a free program that looks
like it at home to work at home on work docs.

I have MS Office 2010 on my home PC but just recently migrated from
Office 2003. There is no bang for the buck to MS Office 2010 for me but
I got it free as an OEM version that came on a used computer that I got
for free because it was broke and I had to fix it (replace PSU, use
software to override a bad thermal sensor, replace the video card,
replace CD/DVD_RW drive that could no longer read DVDs, and replace a
dead hard disk). I got Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 as OEMs with the
hardware. Yet I've use pre-2007 versions of MS Office for a long time
and need to get work done, not waste time trying to find the same
features somewhere else in the GUI. Instead of losing all of what MS
Office could do, I installed the add-on to give me back the classic
menus. If I spend more than 5 seconds clicking around the ribbon (seems
like I click a lot more with the ribbon than with menus), I use the
classic menus (http://addintools.com/office2010/menutoolbar/index.html,
free only for the Home & Student edition which I have). Because I
didn't care to spend more money for licenses of MS Office but wanted a
similar GUI, I put Kingsoft on my laptop. My sister's kids computer
broke so I sent them my laptop and the kids, who were used to MS Office
XP, were using Kingsoft immediately. No learning curve. My aunt, who
is MS Office certified, wanted something on her laptop and netbook but
wasn't going to buy more MS Office licenses. She was up to speed on
Kingsoft in half an hour (mostly because she wanted to play around with
the program) and said it does everything she needs to do at home (she's
retired).

I haven't played with Softmaker's FreeOffice to know how similar or
dissimilar is its GUI to pre-2007 versions of MS Office but it does look
to have a few more features than Kingsoft's Office. If I get some time
and the inclination, I'll play with FreeOffice to see if is is any
better. There is not much difference between the freeware and payware
versions of Kingsoft hence not a lot of impetus by its users to upgrade
to the payware version. Not a lot of end users care about macros
(http://kingsoftstore.com/windows/pro...ice-difference) in
trying to make one product work like it's something else, like making
Word into an accounting & inventory system frontend. Most of what I've
seen written for macros by end users is for convenience. FreeOffice, on
the other hand, has enough additional features in the payware versions
(http://www.softmaker.net/down/officecomparison_en.pdf) that its
freeware users may get lured into buying the payware version.

I trialed OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I didn't care for them. For a
freebie, I went with Kingsoft on my other hosts. So I looked at both
and chose Kingsoft. Have you trialed more than just Open/LibreOffice to
know for yourself that your initial and limited choice of Open/Libre
Office was the right one for you? No, I'm not done trialing
alternatives to MS Office but, at least, I have trialed a few and not
just stuck on the first one that gotten bigger publicity.

Rodney Pont wrote:

Juan Wei wrote:

Rodney Pont:

Doesn't it do underscore?
Name: turn underscore on[spaces ]underscore off[ENTER]

How do you turn underscore on?

Since I don't have Kingsoft Office I don't know.

"Underscore on" (or off) really should've been stated as underline mode.

Since Kingsoft and other MS Office alternatives attempt to emulate the
GUI of the pre-2007 versions of MS Office, my guess it is just like
other shortcut keys for formatting:

Ctrl+B = bold on/off
Ctrl+I = italics on/off
Ctrl+U = underline on/off

Or use the limited set of toolbar buttons for the most common text
formatting controls (which include the above 3 since they're most used).

I could go look and tell the page in the online copy of their manual for
Writer 2012 but Juan already has the help file in which he can search on
"underline" or just look at the toolbar buttons. Plus I don't know if
Juan configured Writer to use the classic or ribbon-like GUI.

Juan Wei wrote:

VanguardLH:

Juan Wei wrote:

VanguardLH:

So it is after inputting exactly 25 underscores that you get a
horizontal rule HR line (what I suspect you are really getting)?
Or do you get a HR line after entering only 2 or 5 underscores and
hitting the Enter key?

Even just one underscore becomes the bold black line. (Not sure
whether it is an HR or a paragraph border).

Sure looks like a glaring and rather ridiculous bug. A single
underscore followed by a newline should not be equated to a
horizontal rule or paragraph marker or anything other than just a
single underscore. Odd that no one has reported this bug to them
before.

Can you see a list of what reports have been made?

Chineseware doesn't often have a publicly accessible tracking system
where you can do searches. Lots of freeware doesn't, especially when it
is not open sourced.

The 2 ways I see to find out about past or existing bugs or deficiencies
with Kingsoft's software is to e-mail them a report (and see what they
say in a reply) or dig through their forums. There's no shame in asking
about a bug or deficieny using either communication venue for a new user
(except forum users might prefer you search first so not to harp on a
topic that keeps getting re-asked by newbie users).

BTW: A search on "underscore" yielded no hits in their forums. Others
reported the behavior is absent in 8.x versions so it could very well be
a bug that showed in the 9.x version -- and you might be the very first
person to discover it and should report it. If you e-mail them, make
sure they issue a ticket number. Someone at a help desk acknowledging
the defect doesn't mean the developers are going to hear about it.

On 2/11/2014 6:58 AM, VanguardLH wrote:
Rodney Pont wrote:

Juan Wei wrote:

Rodney Pont:

Doesn't it do underscore?
Name: turn underscore on[spaces ]underscore off[ENTER]

How do you turn underscore on?

Since I don't have Kingsoft Office I don't know.

"Underscore on" (or off) really should've been stated as underline mode.

Since Kingsoft and other MS Office alternatives attempt to emulate the
GUI of the pre-2007 versions of MS Office, my guess it is just like
other shortcut keys for formatting:

Ctrl+B = bold on/off
Ctrl+I = italics on/off
Ctrl+U = underline on/off

Or use the limited set of toolbar buttons for the most common text
formatting controls (which include the above 3 since they're most used).

I could go look and tell the page in the online copy of their manual for
Writer 2012 but Juan already has the help file in which he can search on
"underline" or just look at the toolbar buttons. Plus I don't know if
Juan configured Writer to use the classic or ribbon-like GUI.

Did you notice how many different types of underline you can use under
Kingsoft Writer? There is eight of them, plus color choices, and more.
Although Word has about 16 different ones, colors, and more. Atlantis
also has sixteen choices.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v24.3.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 4GB - Windows 7 Home SP1

On Tue, 11 Feb 2014 07:49:52 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

Brian Gregory wrote:

What's the attraction of Kingsoft Office over something free like
OpenOffice.org or LIbreOffice ?

For one, it loads/opens a hell of a lot faster. While Open/LibreOffice
have slowly improved their load time, it is still slow. If you leave
the program loaded all the time then you won't noticed the load time but
who leave a word processor open all the time? I also don't leave
hanging in the background processes that are running all the time in
trying to compensate for a slow-loading program. I have better uses for
my system memory. Even what users consider a bloated suite with MS
Office loads much faster than Open/LibreOffice.

I wish I could remember the function that I was trying to accomplish in
OpenOffice (can't search Google Groups anymore since Google destroyed
its searchs for that Usenet archive) but required a rather ridiculous
workaround. It was doable but clumsy and non-intuitive (I had to
research how others did it). In MS Office and Kingsoft, it was a menu
entry so easy to do.

Kingsoft Office has a GUI far more reminiscent to Office 2003 than
Open/LibreOffice who decided to go their own way with what they thought
was a good GUI. If you're used to using pre-2007 versions of Windows
then Kingsoft is familiar. You don't spend a lot of time trying to
learn the program versus actually using it. Even if you continue using
MS Office pre-2007, you might want to have a free program that looks
like it at home to work at home on work docs.

I have MS Office 2010 on my home PC but just recently migrated from
Office 2003. There is no bang for the buck to MS Office 2010 for me but
I got it free as an OEM version that came on a used computer that I got
for free because it was broke and I had to fix it (replace PSU, use
software to override a bad thermal sensor, replace the video card,
replace CD/DVD_RW drive that could no longer read DVDs, and replace a
dead hard disk). I got Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 as OEMs with the
hardware. Yet I've use pre-2007 versions of MS Office for a long time
and need to get work done, not waste time trying to find the same
features somewhere else in the GUI. Instead of losing all of what MS
Office could do, I installed the add-on to give me back the classic
menus. If I spend more than 5 seconds clicking around the ribbon (seems
like I click a lot more with the ribbon than with menus), I use the
classic menus (http://addintools.com/office2010/menutoolbar/index.html,
free only for the Home & Student edition which I have). Because I
didn't care to spend more money for licenses of MS Office but wanted a
similar GUI, I put Kingsoft on my laptop. My sister's kids computer
broke so I sent them my laptop and the kids, who were used to MS Office
XP, were using Kingsoft immediately. No learning curve. My aunt, who
is MS Office certified, wanted something on her laptop and netbook but
wasn't going to buy more MS Office licenses. She was up to speed on
Kingsoft in half an hour (mostly because she wanted to play around with
the program) and said it does everything she needs to do at home (she's
retired).

I haven't played with Softmaker's FreeOffice to know how similar or
dissimilar is its GUI to pre-2007 versions of MS Office but it does look
to have a few more features than Kingsoft's Office. If I get some time
and the inclination, I'll play with FreeOffice to see if is is any
better. There is not much difference between the freeware and payware
versions of Kingsoft hence not a lot of impetus by its users to upgrade
to the payware version. Not a lot of end users care about macros
(http://kingsoftstore.com/windows/pro...ice-difference) in
trying to make one product work like it's something else, like making
Word into an accounting & inventory system frontend. Most of what I've
seen written for macros by end users is for convenience. FreeOffice, on
the other hand, has enough additional features in the payware versions
(http://www.softmaker.net/down/officecomparison_en.pdf) that its
freeware users may get lured into buying the payware version.

I trialed OpenOffice and LibreOffice. I didn't care for them. For a
freebie, I went with Kingsoft on my other hosts. So I looked at both
and chose Kingsoft. Have you trialed more than just Open/LibreOffice to
know for yourself that your initial and limited choice of Open/Libre
Office was the right one for you? No, I'm not done trialing
alternatives to MS Office but, at least, I have trialed a few and not
just stuck on the first one that gotten bigger publicity.

I like Kingsoft and Softmaker's approach to their product. They give it to
you for free, all of the features you'd need are there, you get a good
feel of how the product is and if you choose to, you can upgrade and get
additional features. That's unbelievably fair and encourages people with
the means to do so to actually pay for the software. It's one of my gripes
with open-source: the free program essentially has everything the program
will EVER have so there is truly no 'reward' for donating to the project.
Open-source users, no matter what they say, tend not to pay for anything
OR donate so you can imagine how profitable it might be to produce an
open-source product or improve it in any kind of way.

For my taste, Softmaker is excellent. It loads fast, it has every feature
I need AND it allows me to make .ODT the default format in the word
processor (I believe in open formats). That right there is perfect and I
will indeed pay for the Standard Suite in the future to support the
developers.
--
Silver Slimer
GNU/Linux is a duct-taped form of Communism

On 11/02/2014 12:48, BillW50 wrote:
On 2/11/2014 5:00 AM, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 11/02/2014 01:50, Brian Gregory wrote:
What's the attraction of Kingsoft Office over something free like
OpenOffice.org or LIbreOffice ?

Kingsoft Writer appears almost identical to Word before the accursed
Ribbon appeared. And, unlike Microsoft, Kingsoft gives you the option
of using it or the classic layout. It is a simple matter of toggling
between the two to use whichever you prefer.

There are some fairly important omissions in the free version, though.
No labels and envelopes, no thesaurus, no macros.

What? I don't have any of those and this is supposed to be the Pro version!

Wait a minute! I have so many computers, maybe the Pro version is on
another machine. And I threw a free one on this machine to save money.
Now which machine would I install it on?

http://www.ksosoft.com/product/compare
http://www.ksosoft.com/office/222-ki...noffice-4.html

--

Jeff

felmon has written on 2/11/2014 6:03 AM:
On Mon, 10 Feb 2014 12:39:59 -0500, Juan Wei wrote:

If you're a fan of Kingsoft Office, beware.

If you type _________________________ and hit [Enter], your line of
underscores will be transformed to a "paragraph border" -- a bold black
line from margin to margin!!!

actually a regular 'feature' of Apache Office and LibreOffice. I have it
turned off somehow, I believe through auto-correct, which may work in
Kingsoft.

KSO's autocorrect doesn't have this.

also a ctrl-z may restore your dashes.

Alas, it does not.

VanguardLH has written on 2/11/2014 7:58 AM:

I could go look and tell the page in the online copy of their manual for
Writer 2012 but Juan already has the help file in which he can search on
"underline" or just look at the toolbar buttons. Plus I don't know if
Juan configured Writer to use the classic or ribbon-like GUI.

There's no help file; just online help. help.kingsoftstore.com Not the
obvious place!!

BillW50 has written on 2/11/2014 8:19 AM:

Did you notice how many different types of underline you can use under
Kingsoft Writer? There is eight of them, plus color choices, and more.
Although Word has about 16 different ones, colors, and more. Atlantis
also has sixteen choices.


Wow! Who would need so many???