I read a lot more documents than I produce, especially Word documents and powerpoints. I’d estimate I might write one new document for each 25 I read, at best. Thus I need a good viewer much more than I need an editor.
An editor interface is filled with clutter that’s useless for reading. For reading a much more optimized user interface would be very welcome. See, for example, evince which is pretty nice already.
…but it can’t handle Word documents :-/
On the bright side there seems to be Powerpoint support for Evince coming along. I haven’t had the time to test run it, but I like the sound of it 🙂
In the meantime I’ll just use OpenOffice.org, especially the 2.0 series has been pretty good in handling all the files I’ve thrown at it so far. And with this little hack I can get all documents open for reading by default:
perl -pi -e 's,1\.9 -,1.9 -view -, if /^Exec/' /opt/openoffice.org1.9.104/share/xdg/*.desktop
It’s still bloated and not fully optimized for reading, but still better than the editing mode.
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