Thanks for all the contributions. I am glad the thread moved also to the
lack of a mail merge capable word processor apart from SO. WP8 can do
merges but has no address book included, at least the download version I
have, but I forgot that merges are possible with the little data base
equivalent of *.dat files in WP. Of course WP has very fine and
controllable layout options and footnotes/endnotes that stick and do not
tumble all over the place like in Word which is important in scientific
writing.
However, what indeed lacks in Linux is a word processor that can pull
its addresses or references from a MySQL database. This plus some
satisfactory Word compatibility would be a strong argument in favor of
using such a word processor in the educational field. Just imagine
downloading Medline references into a library database from which your
word processor pulls them into footnotes. This is possbile with the
other OS but why not in Linux? I always thought myself this cannot be
too difficult to implement but I do not prgram myself, so I may be
misktaken.
Andreas