Using Free Software to Prepare Legal Documents
LibreOffice rocks and it doesn't render you a hostage
Back in March we pointed out the FSF was outsourcing legal work to a firm which used a lot of Microsoft. (FSF Amicus Brief: Aspose.PDF for .NET 24.2.0, OOXML (.docx), and Microsoft Word (Proprietary))
This should not be necessary.
From personal experience, having just filed a lawsuit against the dangerously violent Serial Strangler from Microsoft, I know that LibreOffice (with OpenDocument Format) can get the job done. This time I didn't use LATEX, as it's mostly suitable for scientific papers with lots of maths and citations.
Throughout the process LibreOffice crashed not even once. Its management of RAM was modest, the output looked good, and the interface was easy to use.
The Microsofters seem willing to spend about a million dollars on some Windows shop that sends us kilograms of papers prepared in Microsoft Word. It doesn't quite work for them. It does not scale because for each dollar they spend we only need to spend pennies (stamps, landline bills, sometimes court fees). And the Masters (Judges) still take my side. Sooner or later they will realise that it also results in public embarrassment for them and puts in the public record (court record) the sorts of things they try hard to censor/suppress. The EPO learned it the hard way... from mistakes and flukes. We're not a "conventional" target, we don't surrender to extortion artists. We never did and we never will.
LibreOffice has worked well for me not only in Writer "mode" but also for handling spreadsheets and making charts, as I did many times to visualise statCounter data in ways statCounter cannot and does not.
I remember when Microsoft Office came on floppy disks. I remember using it in Windows 3.11. It ran OK on a few megabytes of RAM and produced more or less the same letters people now need gigabytes (GBs) of RAM to produce. From what I've been told, bloat has gotten so bad that Apple and Microsoft operating systems would simply not cope with 2 GBs of RAM. LibreOffice would. LibreOffice on GNU/Linux can even run on a machine with less than one gigabyte, provided the desktop environment isn't very bloated.
LibreOffice is increasingly being adopted by countries or cities that dump Microsoft. LibreOffice is openly complaining about OOXML as an obstacle. █