I just installed the latest Mac-native version of LibreOffice, and found that the HTML import is now mostly usable, not only correctly handling encodings and most CSS-based layout, but even recognizing Word-specific CSS and flagging it using the document-review functionality (sadly, it still ignores ruby tagging for furigana, but ruby is basically broken anyway). Also, the Draw module imports CorelDraw documents back to version 7, with most features intact (I still need version 3 and 4, but I can work around that with an old copy of 7 that I have running in a virtual).

The basic functionality has been there for a while, but quirkiness, lack of stability, and iffy interoperability were always problems, and it looks like the Libre team is serious about addressing them, which didn’t seem to be the case in the OpenOffice days.

Not safe for bikini-unfriendly workplaces…

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Maybe you should Think a little less Different, and put some checkout counters back in your stores. Then perhaps you wouldn’t need to have undercover security constantly scanning the crowd for incomplete PoS transactions that may or may not be shoplifting.

Arresting a customer because you can’t manage basic retail sales technology is not the work of a Genius.

In Frank Sinatra’s 1985 Tokyo concert at Budokan, the very first time he sings the title line of “Luck Be A Lady”, he clearly sings it as “ruck be a rady”.

How to make money at a Steve Perlman company: be Steve Perlman.

How to get screwed at a Steve Perlman company: not be Steve Perlman.

The now-former employees of OnLive are the latest to learn this lesson.

[Update: this explains a lot: “If you’ve got 8,000 servers and 1,600 users, how could we ever get to cash flow positive, right?”]

World Tools Pro enables most of the hidden Japanese typography functionality in InDesign, but as I discovered the moment I tried to really use it, they left out the ability to add custom ranges to composite fonts. The fix is to create the composite font as usual, then open the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit, paste in the following snippet of code, edit as needed, and run it:

app.compositeFonts.item(1).compositeFontEntries.add({
    name:"Macron",
    customCharacters:"āĀēĒīĪōŌūŪ",
    appliedFont:"Minion Pro",
    fontStyle:"Regular",
    relativeSize:100,
    baselineShift:0,
    verticalScale:100,
    horizontalScale:100,
    scaleOption:false
  });

Set the value of item() based on font’s position in the pulldown list; the meaning of the rest should be obvious.

Kim has two new novels available on the Kindle: Creative License and Prime Target.