I'm actually using OpenOffice Writer

I use OO Writer for large complex manuscripts. The Styles and project management features are good and make it pretty easy. For littler jobs I use KWord or a text editor.

Quoting: I like to see typographical "smart" quotes. OpenOffice does that.

Smart quotes must die, because dumb editors let them leak onto Web pages, where they don't render correctly.

Quoting: Since I've been writing a weekly print column for the Los Angeles Daily News called Tech Talk (on Page 2 of the B section on Saturdays), our editorial production system likes to see files in Microsoft Word's .doc format. And I've been generating those files with OpenOffice 2.4's Writer application.

OO's .doc compatibility is great. Yay and woohoo. I used it on my two books because the publishing industry is still shamefully enslaved to MS and Adobe, and they just don't understand why their worldviews should be broader than that. Still, I wish more reviewers liked it for its own merits, rather than as a poor but useful cousin to MS Word.

lulu.com accepts PDF at least. That means I can self-publish with OpenOffice.org (and btw.... aren't there public specifications for PDF anyway?).

Quoting:Smart quotes must die, because dumb editors let them leak onto Web pages, where they don't render correctly.

Don't blame smart quotes. Blame Microsoft (as usual). Their stupid non-standard Windows Codepages encoding of text is what makes smart quotes render badly on the web. Use plane jane utf-8 and you're fine (well... maybe not in IE but I've given up on that).

I don't use OO for Web documents. For the Web, I use text editors.

Tuxchick has a point, though. While my print publishing system does set smart quotes, it doesn't take the information from the .doc document to render them when the files are sent into the system.

No, it just does the first quote it sees as an open-quote, the next one as a closed-quote, the next open, etc. ... so if for some reason you're missing a quote mark, they all come out backward.

So since the "smart" quotes in word-processor documents are only for my own edification, I could be using Abiword or even KWord (which turns all initial smart quotes in the wrong direction when the quote mark is the first character on the line ... hopefully something fixed in the newest version, though I won't hold my breath).

In addition to .doc files, the system can also process text files. I would use a text editor for this purpose, but I can't have an extra linefeed between the paragraphs, because I get that extra, unneeded linefeed in my print copy. So I like to have the automatic indent rendered by by the word-processing software, because the extra spaces or tabs inserted to make indents in standard text editors also show up in my for-print documents.

So a little experimentation is in order. I might be able to get away with a text editor instead of a word-processing program.