[Techtalk] Report on CrossOver Office

[Marian Routh]

On Thu June 20 2002 7:06 am, you wrote:

> You mentioned that the font support was excellent. Does CrossOver
> Office handle installing all of them for you?

CXOffice provides several extra MS fonts and you are able to install 
them during initial setup (it is a good idea to do this).  Also, during 
the intial setup you can point CXO at a Windows fonts directory and it 
will use those fonts, too.  For instance, on this box I have 3 hard 
drives - one for WinXP (NTFS), one for just data (FAT32), and one for 
Linux.  Linux interaction with NTFS isn't too safe, so rather than 
point CXO at the XP font directory, I created a TrueTypeFont folder in 
my home directory and copied the fonts I wanted into it.  They work 
amazingly.  The font-handling issue was one of my main reasons for 
wanting to run Word in Linux.  I want to use certain fonts and I just 
wasn't able to while using Linux word processors.  Believe me, I tried.  
In Word under CXO, the on-screen documents and printed results look 
exactly as they did under Windows.  Perfect.

> Have you had a chance to work with any fairly large documents? What's
> performance like? Can you compare the response speed of CrossOver
> Office to using MS Office natively on a Windows box? How about under
> VMWare (which is my current setup)?

I haven't worked with any large documents.  I'm usually using Word for 
letters, business correspondence, the business mailing list (not overly 
large) and the like.  No Great American Novels.  However, I seem to 
recall that Word itself has difficulties with huge documents.  I would 
imagine that if there are limits under Windows, they would be 
duplicated under Linux.  I'm not a Word expert, and you probably should 
look online for advanced Word information.

As for response speed, I don't see any difference from Windows at all.  
This is a fairly fast box, 1.2GHz Athlon T-bird with 512 MB RAM, so it 
certainly is up for word processing.  When I'm in Word, it doesn't 
"feel" like I'm running a program inside of a program inside of an 
operating system, if you know what I mean.  It just feels like Word.

> I'm thrilled to hear such a good review. I may just buy this (with my
> own money, if necessary) for work!

Another factor, as I mentioned before, is the excellence of the 
CodeWeavers tech support.  I've never had such wonderful help before.  
CodeWeavers is completely committed to having a flawless product and to 
helping the user.  So if you _do_ run into problems, you are not lost.

HTH,

Malke
-- 
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"