OpenOffice Writer and LibreOffice Writer have their proper bugs of their own, to the point that it's very frustrating to work with a non-trivial document. Many of these include some aspects of formatting not being saved to file and not restored when re-loading the file. And this is saving to .odt and not .doc or .docx. The Calcs have many bugs too. I have reported some but have since given up. For serious work I return to Word.
The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.
My guess is same argument as adding blood type to ID: it could help you in situations like emergency or accident (checking blood type is a few seconds anyway, but there might be situation where a test kit is not available when needed).
Wow, I wonder how you got by. I'm useless when I had -2 or -3 myopia: couldn't recognize people's faces, couldn't read signs. With -3 I think your computer screen even looks blurry.
With significant difficulty! I was very bought into the idea that glasses make your vision worse. By the time I got my glasses, I couldn't read the menus that fast food restaurants post overhead or enjoy board games with friends (requires reading small text on the playing pieces).
There's also a Perl script with the same name since 2009, written by Audrey Tang (of pugs fame) and then rewritten by Ricardo Signes (of Dist::Zilla fame). I've used this script for years, not realizing there were other implementations of it. Nice to know.
By the way, how should one measure language difficulty objectively? I think one proxy can be: the number of years a non-native learner typically requires before reaching a certain level.
Yup, typically what a native Indonesian would say about how easy their language is. But foreigners are often tripped with other aspects of the grammar, which the native take for granted, such as those tikwidd mentions: noun classifiers, morphological derivation, a high number of prefixes/suffixes/infixes and their combination, lack of cue on how to pronounce the different "e" vowels, etc.
I wouldn't quite say "equally". Jakarta is a melting pot and the most significant portion of the population there is of Javanese descent. But many many people who are of Javanese descent don't even speak Javanese, especially if they were born in Jakarta or in the western part of Java.
It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans). I would presume so, but that makes me wonder what the source of that larger vocabulary -- Malay? Javanese? English? Other languages native to the Indonesian archipelago? All of the above?
> It seems likely to me that people who are speaking Indonesian as a first language (e.g. Jakartans) have a substantially larger vocabulary than those that are speaking it as a second language (e.g. Yogyakartans).
They are speaking Indonesian as a second native language, they will acquire Javanese and Indonesian at the same time but use Javanese in conversation and Indonesian when consuming TV, books and in school. So their grasp of formal Indonesian is going to depend mostly on education level.
As for colloquial Indonesian, due to the internet new colloquialisms spread much more rapidly to other parts of Indonesia. So it probably depends on how old said Yogyakartan is.
Malay and Indonesian language are like British and American English, except with far more difference in vocabulary and far more false cognates. Although not nearly as different as, say, Portuguese and Spanish.
Yes, a typical Malaysian or Singaporean (especially if he has native or near native Malay language skill) will be able to order food at restaurants, buy stuffs, ask for directions, and even converse with an Indonesian speaker, albeit with awkwardness every so often. But for serious or technical discussion, the conversers might as well switch to English for better communication, even if they both only have moderate level of English.
Yeah malay does my head in (I speak ok Behasa Baku, and I can usually make sense of dialecty Behasa Indonesia). However with malay it's like you can be having a totally intelligible conversation, except every 7th word you say is entirely wrong.
The other alternatives are not better. A couple of weeks ago I needed to create a catalog of products that is just a few pages long. Calligra couldn't even show the image I added; there was bounding box which could be moved around but no images were shown. Abiword got glacially slow when adding a ~4MB image.