AbiWord, SOT Office, OpenOffice and LibreOffice

This piece is long.

I am a writer, Doctor by profession (off from medical registration register for 22 years) and lastly a University Teacher for over 15 years.

Never wanted to become a professor.

University is an institution and it owns the individual and his / her status, when one works for one and long after one's exit from the institute and has copyright ownership of all the writings one may wish write.

In my time, in Ceylon one had to pay over Rs.35,000/= to get a copy of a chapter you wrote for them but was published by its printing press.

University sometimes owns a printing press too.

My university did not and the printing press doing the printing was near our house.

It is no more and gone bust since practically every university is defunct after pandemic closure (delay in having university entrance examinations and also delay in opening the university for those who already qualified).

Many of them have given and few a lucky one found a place in a foreign university.

I joined University as a permanent member well past 55 years and was a hard nut to crack.

University discontinued me on false grounds three times and I fought back only by threatening to take them to courts of law.

University has a lawyer of low caliber and always fear litigation.

I am a freelance writer and I self publish my books at Amazon books.

I am currently doing 5 books at my leisure and in the book of unique personalities I met in my life, I have a chapter on a nice guy who was the assistant registrar (only one registrar and the rest are assistants to the registrar) of the medical faculty.

He was a very nice guy and he was unceremoniously discharged from the university because he did not bend the law to satisfy the then Dean or the Vice Chancellor.

Reason, I do not know and my guess is one of the dons wanted to adjust the pass marks or class marks of one of his student stooges, probably of the opposite sex.

Registrar records the marks on a register and once entered by hand the marks cannot be altered and this is done individually and later checked in the presence of board of examiners.

In the examination board the board collectively decide to allocate additional minimum marks to pass a guy or girl who has failed the subject 4 or 5 times.

I have failed only one guy (foreign) in pathology in all my 15 years in the University.

He was a very nice guy hopeless in pathology but we made him to change the course of studies and found him an alternative university in his mother country.

I have not heard about of him since then.

All these rules, regulations and bylaws come from British and lately we are relaxing them to mass produce medical guys for export.

This guy fought the university for over 16 years or more and he won with meagre compensations.
He was not allowed to step into or legally barred from his ulma mater for life for standing firm on right side of the law.

It an inhumane place and I am glad I am no longer a part to it.

When politicians get involved in academic matters, they ruin everything.

The current president started as a state ministe of education.

He dismissed, the principle of the Issipathana School, Mr.Alles who did not bend to his wishes on flimsy grounds.
He fought back and won but  started the first private school, Gateway International.

My daughter worked there and one of my middle school teachers became the director of this school after retirement.

He was a very sweet guy coming from a Catholic School.

Now my superior professor who recruited me was removed from University Grant Commission by the current president unceremoniously.

It was a political assignment made by Chandrika.

My professor had a grand plan for the entire University System and current president ruined it and appointed a political appointee as the Chair of the UGC.

My professor and his wife another professor left to Switzerland and never returned.

Current president's boss JRJ wanted to ruin all of the university education to introduce private universities.

We fought him head on against his attempts to ruin it, to keep the universities as semi-autonomous institutions (with a huge Senate to administer the independence of each, in academic matters of national interest).

In Ceylon teachers are recruited as puppets or prostitutes of the government in power.

Just now I hear the band playing and the teachers are paraded like school kids in the teacher training college by reserved Army Officers.

Training teachers to be Subservient to the Army.

We are a Police State currently will soon become an Army State.

Teaching is low priority and subsevience is the name of the game.

This is why I wish NOT to be born again in Ceylon.

I am far off the target and I will start with Abiwotd and OpenOffice.

It all started with my University Thesis which I did on my PC with 1MB VGA and 128 MB on RAM on all floppy disks.

Working on floppy is a pain.

Every few minutes one has to save the file and Microsoft Office 95 with Macros was a pain.

I decided to make a print ready pdf (portable document format) file of my Thesis.

I was a camera man and photography was my hobby (not anymore) and turning my photos to png (portable network graphic was my forte for file transfer, in the old days of the Internet) and sending it to a friend abroad, was my intention.

So portable documents is in my genes and Microsoft could not do it.
Accidentally I found Abiwotd and my first book on Introduction to Linux was done on Abiwotd long after my Thesis.

Our University had strict standard for the Thesis and Office 95 with Macros could not fullfil it.
I went through SOT Office, Open Office 1 and 2 and found that OpenOffice removed Windows Macros in a flash (AbiWord does it much better).

That was the beginning.

I opened my Thesis done on Windows Office 95 in OpenOffice and it warned me (this is to remove incompatibility of DOS and ODF - open document format and currently it is called ODT) and removed all the Macros in one fullsweep.

Then I could make my Thesis exactly to the University Requirements and not a single dot or comma or statistics image needed any editing in the final document.

By the way, I printed tons of pages after every editing session.

Photocoping was cheap then.
The faculty had several photocoping machines.

Now another point of conviction.

I did not want to give my copyrights to the University and gave them the minimum data needed to get my MPhil.

The PhD thesis which I did parallel with the MPhil was published as one of my own books named Human Placental Morphology.

I own it and it is a classic in this field.

I did a book on Microscope, too.

Microscope including digital microscope which I own, is one my childhood fantasy or dreams.

Looking at tiny microbes live or stained was more interesting than looking at them in two dimensional pictures in books.

Of course, I did a few books on Buddhism, too.

Let me finish with my simple Buddhist Outlook.

Buddha a human collosal lived a very simple life.

His forte was mental vigility.

I am trying hard to understand his teachings and being a scientist myself have had no luck so far.

All what I can say is, it is supermundane.

The science and Linux I am talking about are mundane stuff.

The AbiWord with about 28MB of footprint in which I did all my books of print ready pdf formats was an absolutely fantastic discovery by accident.

OpenOffice also had pdf facility.

I am currently doing my first book on LibreOffice 7.3 installed in my Debian 15.2.1. as the default office package.

I sometime do the rough copy in LibreOffice and fine tune last with AbiWord.

AbiWord's page formates are finely tuned in headers, footers and chapters.

I will report back when it is over.

It looks OK but I am in my steep learning curve and do not like it's English spelling (American bias and coming from France no wonder) talents.

I have my Oxford dictionary by my side always.

I will finish with a Chinese YouTube presentation on chip industry.

The guy said one need not overtake the arse in front and chose a different lane to overtake or go for new Innovations.

They are selling the Norwegian Lithographic machines and currently on course of their own printing machines.

Chinese character language has no limitation in vocabulary and most probably need one such machine of their own.

I do not blame them.

At least then the Chinese guys won't kill the Queen's Language.

The King Charles should look after his mother tongue and his own tongue twisting.

Excuse me for typos.

I will edit this later after my single meal (a day).

I can survive on a single meal simply because English Tea is my Engine of Drive.