First I had to install it. It's free so getting it was easy. Then during the install it asked for a Java runtime. Instead of feeding it an old one I decided I should upgrade Java on my machine. I have not done this for a year because Sun's installers require service pack 6 on NT and I only had SP 3. Frankly I was scared of installing an OS service pack. I had heard rumors that people who had installed SP6 had not been able to boot their computers afterwards. Also, I was afraid it might have spyware components. When I found out it was released in 1999, well before the spyware craze set in, I decided to risk it and it went ok. Only a couple of printer drivers were blown away. Then I installed the newest Java JRE, yeah, at last. Final step: installing OpenOffice which went without a hitch.

Then I start flyering away. Sure enough it had a snap grid and free-form layout that worked pretty much as well as Corel Draw and the text formatting was better of course. It smoothly loaded all the graphics I wanted to use and was good at cropping and scaling the graphics. There was little or no performance problem other than the help was pokey to come up. Output to PDF and Word formats worked seemlessly and judge for yourself the result:

OPeNDAP Data Connector conference flyer (version 2.34)

After that success I even tried writing this web page in Writer but that effort failed because Writer does not support HTML text editing. It insists on automatically loading and changing the content of the document so you cannot work directly with HTML source. So I had to switch back to HomeSite, my normal HTML editor.