No, really.

I have recently been constructing a 100 page document going over a whole bunch of the details for the Monorail we’re building at Burning Man this year.

Apart from randomly freezing, and then suddenly not displaying images until I had restarted it – it’s also really slow.

The last straw was when leafing through the document before getting it printed. I had inserted a bunch of pages before this last section. But now, there was this empty page in the last section of the document.  The part that I hadn’t touched for days. If I tried to remove the blank page, all the images on nearby pages moved so that they were on top of each other.

I ended up just printing it. There is a blank page that I can’t get rid of.

It is a piece of software that worries me. Is this really meant to be an alternative? It has NEVER worked well for me. Basic tasks sure, but I continually find myself pining for Word 5.1a on the Mac (System 7 that is) or Nisus Writer or even ClarisWorks.

If opening Microsoft Word documents fairly accurately is your only good feature, how do you expect to survive in the free (software) world?

So, while my twitter stream may suggest desires for punning the developers in the face or their early demise through painful methods….. I really just wish that sometime in the past 10 years you had made it not shit me to tears.

Certainly another failure of Sun Microsystems and I don’t expect Oracle to do any better at all (especially considering recent actions).