On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 10:31 PM Tim via users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
On Wed, 2022-05-11 at 21:37 -0600, home user wrote:
> I did some serious experimenting this past winter.  Writer could not
> adequately handle the word-2010 documents.  I even tried first
> converting the word-2010 documents to word-2016.  Writer could not
> adequately handle those.  Either way, I lose roughly half the text,
> plus some of the formatting other than fonts.  It seems the problem
> is the "frames" in the word documents.  There is a LibreOffice bug on
> this.  So I find my wisest option is to convert the files to
> LibreOffice now, even if it's somewhat manual.  And the conversion
> must be done on the windows box.

That makes sense, convert them before you're in a hurry to need them.
[...]

It sounds like you were using Word more as desktop publishing rather
than typing.  The fancier stuff isn't really the forté of word
processors, other applications may be more suitable.

LaTeX and ConTeXt source files are plain text, and with markup is intended
to convey structure.  The choices for fonts and "decorations" are provided
in "styles".  Publishers often provide their own styles to authors.  [There 
are, however, way too many internet sites advertising low-level hacks that
defeat the structural markup.]   These document formats allow font changes 
to be done through styles, so the same source document can be used with 
minimal changes with free fonts on author systems and then formatted 
for publication using the fonts provided by the publisher's production systems.

If you want documents to be useful in the distant future, LaTeX or
is more likely to be useful than vendor-specific formats.  ConTeXt is
maintained by a commercial company so is less concerned with 
preserving older documents than with supporting new products
(think of techincal manuals moving from print to DVD to tablet 
formats), while the LaTeX maintainers spend a great deal of effort
ensuring that legacy documents process correctly. 

--
George N. White III