"...Early observers of OpenOffice might remember that
many of the features from StarOffice 5.2 were cut out of the first
builds of OpenOffice, such as the Help system and spell checking.
This was done because these tools were initially third-party
applications. The Help system has been completely revamped and,
while the interface is identical to StarOffice 6.0's, it seems that
build 638 of OpenOffice has slightly more help entries than than
its counterpart. Spell-checking, in case you were wondering, is
back as well.
As you can see in the screenshot I took for this column, the
interfaces are almost identical for StarOffice and OpenOffice. But
there is one significant difference: font-handling. In this,
OpenOffice appears to lag behind just a bit. In the screenshot, I
have opened a Word document that deliberately has fonts not loaded
yet on my Linux machine. While both interfaces give the Courier
font a "scrunched" look, StarOffice seems to handle the nonnative
font a little bit better. Also, if you look closely at the
application's own fonts, OpenOffice's menu and window contents have
a jagged look.
Is this enough to kill off any chance of using this application?
Certainly not. In fact, based on what I have seen with these two
applications, I am more inclined to recommend OpenOffice over
StarOffice, especially for home and small business users."
