Slashdot Mirror

Try this:

LibreOffice
Apache OpenOffice
Softmaker FreeOffice
WPS Office
(they have a whole office suite, not just the word processor)
Abiword
SoftMaker Office
(again, they have a whole suite, not just the word processor)
Pages (for Mac)
(Apple does other office apps, too, but they don't seem to
market a unified suite)
Atlantis Word Processor

An office suite can't be "small" and "lightweight" and have all "the pro features I might need, too." You sound just like Agnes in Simpson Safari: you want all your groceries in one bag, but you don't want the bag to be heavy.

You can get lightweight, fast office software; for example, you can use AbiWord for your word processing needs. But it doesn't have every feature under the sun, and if it did have every pro feature anybody "might need" it wouldn't be lightweight.

What the fuck? "To see the contents of this list you should enable Javascript." Well fuck no! I don't trust you evil Google, and so I don't enable JS for you!

A simple table, or list, and it requires JavaScript? That's fucked up. Progressive enhancement, or graceful degradation (whichever one of these you prefer) is essential to providing an accessible, usable, and useful web. Two different design philosophies, that amount, in this case, to the same thing. If the browser is not JavaScript aware, capable, or has it turned off, the browser should still be able to access the information!

Anyway, from the first link, I can see that AbiWord, a great, fast, and cross-platform word processor, is on the list. I use it all the time, 'cause it opens up so much faster than OOo.

(On the list, some kind soul pasted it too: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=tmw4JCFU. Though it's in CSV format.)

I can see from the list, that DokuWiki, DragonFly BSD, Freenet, LibreOffice, MoinMoin (another wiki system...) and QEMU also got listed. There are a lot of other good projects there too. I don't use most of the projects, but knowing they are there, is good.

A free word processor (GPL) that aims to support Microsoft Word documents: Download

I just want something that works, is NOT from MS, and is dirt cheap or FREE (even better!). When it comes to Word Processing and reading/editing .doc files which everyone still seems to use, I found OO to be cumbersome and not always 100% compatible with .doc/.docx files created in MS Word. I found Abiword and never looked back.

Abiword can sufficiently handle most all of the documents you want to manage (pdf support is better but could still use improvement) and you can mark them up and collaborate via abicollab.net. The best part about abiword is that is portable to a large number of platforms including handheld devices (maemo), portableapps.com (for win32 on usb), mac and most *-nix as a package

http://abicollab.net/

http://abisource.com/

This article talks a little -- but not too much -- about how it works:
http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab
It seems to use "gocollab", or that was a previous name?

In 2005: http://gnomejournal.org/article/31/gocollab----peer-to-peer-document-collaboration

The next major version of GNOME Office will introduce a new way of handling the problem, called GOCollab. GOCollab will basically marry the already built-in revision systems of Abiword and Gnumeric with a P2P network comparable to file sharing applications like Gnutella or eMule. This means that neither Bob nor Jane nor anybody else needs a central server to be set up and run, and most of their changes to a document will be merged together automatically.

I am sure you can replace AbiCollab.net with your own server. Would be nice though if the websites code was Open Source.

Here are some screenshots of the website in action: http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.8.0.phtml

This article talks a little -- but not too much -- about how it works:
http://www.abisource.com/wiki/AbiCollab
It seems to use "gocollab", or that was a previous name?

In 2005: http://gnomejournal.org/article/31/gocollab----peer-to-peer-document-collaboration

The next major version of GNOME Office will introduce a new way of handling the problem, called GOCollab. GOCollab will basically marry the already built-in revision systems of Abiword and Gnumeric with a P2P network comparable to file sharing applications like Gnutella or eMule. This means that neither Bob nor Jane nor anybody else needs a central server to be set up and run, and most of their changes to a document will be merged together automatically.

I am sure you can replace AbiCollab.net with your own server. Would be nice though if the websites code was Open Source.

Here are some screenshots of the website in action: http://abisource.com/release-notes/2.8.0.phtml

Not only that, but check the first two "other references" in the patent:

Ayers, Larry, "AbiWord's Potential", Linux Gazette, Issue 43, Jul. 1999, pp. 1-4. cited by examiner .
"XML Schema for AbiWord Markup Language", downloaded from http://www.abisource.com/awml.xsd, May 27, 2000, pp. 1-3. cited by examiner .

They specifically reference an article on AbiWord and AbiWord's XML schema! And it's cited by the examiner, so surely that means they found the prior art and said "this is relevant". Did they get confused by it having "Word" in the app name and assume it was an MS product?

AbiWord uses an XML based format, and it was mature enough to win awards in 1999, 2000, and 2001.

Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.

- First as you said yourself in your follow-up : KOffice is part of the KDE software that can be installed on Windows with their package manager.

- OpenOffice.org
Installs on Windows with a very standard installer.
The only minor problem in my opinion is getting the plugins. It uses the kind of plugin manager as the older versions of FireFox (you can't directly search and browse the installable plugins from there, you have to go to a website first). Also the plugin manager doesn't help you to restart the "quicklaunch" if a restart is needed.
It cool be great if I could install LanguageTool with a simple click from within the manager, the same way as AdBlock+ in recent versions of Firefox. But I'm nit-picking. Back to the subject.

- Gnome Office :
It's not an actual suite, its a lose collection of separate software that cover the needs of an Office suit. All use the same library underneath (GTK+) which has been ported to windows since ages (back at the begining of the GIMP on Windows port). As such you can find installers for :
- AbiWord (word processing)
- Gnumeric (spreadsheet whose accurate statistic formula are done in collaboration with R projet)
(and probably other GTK stuff if you need them).
In fact, as they are small separate software with a very small footprint (compared to behemoths like OO.o), they are quite popular and often recommended for people wanting to build for free small lightweight Windows installation on underpowered hardware.

- For the VI vs. Emacs flamewar combatant out there (the kind who'll immediately scream that they don't need an actual office suite as every needed function and even more is available in some Emacs mode/Vim plugin), both softwares are also available for Windows, if that's your kick. (And yes, I'm not sarcastic. I'm definitely sure that here on /. you'll find at least a dozen of people who can be more productive with a complex emacs-based stack).

So as we can see, the three major players of Linux/BSD's office suites (and the two editors behind most holy wars) are installable on Windows (and on Mac OS X for that matters too).
Yes they are indeed cross-platform.

KOffice was more of a problem until recently the whole KDE switched to Qt4 during is 4.x branch and took opportunity of the major overhaul to be rebuilt with cross-platfrom portability in mind.

How well does OpenOffice.org do this?

OpenOffice doesn't do TeX-style markup, since the sole reason for OpenOffice existing is to feel familiar for users of Microsoft Office (pre 2007), and since Word doesn't do it (yet) then neither can OOo.

If you don't care about Microsoft Office then you're free to use anything. I use LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ ), a GUI word processor which outputs to TeX, when I'm doing large projects or anything scientific. I use Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ ) for creating quick throwaway documents, and I use leafpad (GUI, http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad ) and Nano (commandline, http://www.nano-editor.org/ ) for writing down anything that doesn't need any formatting.

You can make things even easier by using AbiWord, the multi-platform word processor.

AbiWord has a collaboration plug-in that allows multiple authors to simultaneously work on a document. It also has a LaTeX exporter that will preserve most formatting and document elements, including MathML equations (which are converted to LaTeX ones during export). You could also save in OpenDocument format, open the .odt file in OpenOffice, and then use its LaTeX exporter, if you find that its LaTeX output is better.

Either way, you should be able to handle collaboration and LaTeX export with easy-to-use, open source word processors instead of (potentially) confusing tools.

You can make things even easier by using AbiWord, the multi-platform word processor.

AbiWord has a collaboration plug-in that allows multiple authors to simultaneously work on a document. It also has a LaTeX exporter that will preserve most formatting and document elements, including MathML equations (which are converted to LaTeX ones during export). You could also save in OpenDocument format, open the .odt file in OpenOffice, and then use its LaTeX exporter, if you find that its LaTeX output is better.

Either way, you should be able to handle collaboration and LaTeX export with easy-to-use, open source word processors instead of (potentially) confusing tools.

You can make things even easier by using AbiWord, the multi-platform word processor.

AbiWord has a collaboration plug-in that allows multiple authors to simultaneously work on a document. It also has a LaTeX exporter that will preserve most formatting and document elements, including MathML equations (which are converted to LaTeX ones during export). You could also save in OpenDocument format, open the .odt file in OpenOffice, and then use its LaTeX exporter, if you find that its LaTeX output is better.

Either way, you should be able to handle collaboration and LaTeX export with easy-to-use, open source word processors instead of (potentially) confusing tools.

But as a word processor and a spreadsheet I find them irritating and clunky to use. I vastly prefer to use Abiword for anything where I don't care whether or not I can work with MS Office format files. And I prefer gnumeric for a spreadsheet.

I don't like Office. I don't like how it's all one big gigantic tool. I want separate tools that I can pull out and replace if something better comes along.

OpenDocument plus things like Abiword and gnumeric are what I want.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

Google documents or Zoho or some other gratis (but typically proprietary) "cloud" solution might be reasonable.

If you're fine with text-only, you have a lot of options. VIM and EMACS both allow collaborative editing, you can share a screen session, or you can get a specialized collaborative editor (such as Gobby and ACE) or a specialized framework, such as DocSynch

If you need light-weight word processing, Abiword has a plugin for real-time collaboration.

Heavier weight word processing of DOCX can be done with Plutext.

If you need more graphical documents & the above doesn't seem to fit AND if you have a small group of friends who you trust, I'd just go "simple" & host with VNC or some other remote desktop protocol.

As far as other pieces, there is a lot of good F/OSS voice/IM/whiteboard software. Coccinella and ekiga are good examples.

I looked at http://www.lyx.org/ a few years ago, and it was alright. It wasn't what I wanted though, not needing or knowing LaTeX.

However, you already use TeX, so it might just what you want.

Or alternatively, have a look at AbiWord from http://www.abisource.com/ it is simple, and shouldn't screw things up if you use the native file format (an XML based thingy).

I use AbiWord all the time for quick loading WP without too many fancy things. One caveat, it sometimes crashes for no explicable reason, and then causes you to have to re-write everything that you hadn't saved.

Why don't you try Abiword instead, then? OO.o, like MS Office itself, aims to be an "everything but the kitchen sink"-style suite, whereas Abiword (and Gnumeric, for spreadsheets) try only to be a good word processor.

Personally though, I prefer LaTeX. Faster and more intuitive once you get the hang of it, and *much*, *MUCH* better than Word or anything else like it when you have to deal with mathematical formulas, which in my case is "most of the time", being a math student and all that.

I'm aware of at least one - see AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237.

Both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org support hidden text. According to the ODF spec, if you say 'text:display="true"', you're supposed to see the text. However, OpenOffice.org uses "true" to mean "hide the text" and "none" to mean "show the text". Or, the inverse of its correct meaning (or what you'd expect from the CSS && specs). This will supposedly be corrected in OO.o 3.0, which is due out soonish. However, this leaves a problem with a bunch of documents that won't render "as intended" (either by the user or by the ODF spec).

The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.

Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type.

<m:degHide m:val="on"/> where "val's" values are supposed to be "true|false".

[snip]

Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)

abiword

What makes you think that web apps are the only ones capable of having document sharing? Adding that ability to regular OpenOffice would be really cool, and then this VNC method of accessing it would gain that ability too, would it not? Personally I find OOo overkill for what I use so I generally use Abiword (if not Gedit :P), which has collaboration facilities (although I haven't used them yet) http://collaborate.abisource.com/ , thus adding such things to OOo isn't an insurmountable obstacle. As for the story, sounds good for those times I'm at a cut-down browser-only machine (although I have figured out how to start up GNOME on my University's supposedly Firefox-only machines :P ) but I'd rather use it natively (either installed or from PortableApps) if I am able to. A nice bonus though, is that I won't have to find my way around a whole new UI when I go from one to the other.

Many of the major free GPL licensed programs are now available in both Windows and Linux versions. In the past they were only available for Linux/Unix users. If a small business wanted to they could replace Microsoft Office and most of their other commercial applications with free GPL licensed alternatives and still keep Windows. Here are a few examples:

• OpenOffice
• KOffice will soon be cross platform
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• GIMP for Windows
• AbiWord

I don't know.. Here's what I'm looking at:

Lotus word processor (ugly tables and charts, and the fabulous "Star" clipart. Definitely "retro"): http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/product_ss_wpe.jspa

AbiWord screenshots (simple and clean): http://www.abisource.com/screenshots/

Apple iWork08 'Pages' (fancy page layout): http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/

Of course, now I'm on OS X, and the Mac port is fugly, so I haven't touched it in a while.

Share & edit Works Word Processor and Spreadsheet files with Microsoft® Office Word and Microsoft® Office Excel and vice versa. *MS Office versions 97-2007 Microsoft Works 9

There is absolutely no good reason to continue using this crap, even if it's free.

There can be a reason if you are unfamiliar with - or uncomfortable with - what passes for home user support in open source.

When you are Microsoft you can afford to put up a bright, colorful, Works home page, post a quarterly newsletter, create unique, customized, tutorials, templates, clip art, fonts, etc.

There will no geek-speak, not the faintest whiff of the patronizing attitude that pisses off the "luser."

In open source, the public face of your project tends to look more like this or this.

Is there an Open Source project like Apple's 'Pages'? This, I think, would be closer to useful and a lot more fun.

I haven't used Pages, but AbiWord is a good basic word processor, so that might be to your liking.

I know what I mainly need from an "office suite" is just a good word processor, one that doesnt lag 10 keystrokes behind me typing a simple letter.

I don't want to buy or install a whole office suite, just the apps I need. Why does it all have to be bundled with junk I dont care about?

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.

Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.

There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.

• Neooffice
• Mariner Write, Mariner Calc
• Abiword
• NisusWriter
• ThinkFree
• Mellel
• OpenOffice.org (still needs X11, I'm fine with that myself since I use X11 anyway, but others may not be)
• iWork (includes Keynote)

That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.

... doesn't have a single decent image-browser ...

Gwenview, Picasa...

... dc++ client ...

Is in production. Check the CVS for latest builds.

... office suite ...

I really don't understand why you included this. OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord; all more than comparable to MS Word.

... Not to mention decent looking fonts ...

In Debian based distros, sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts. Rather simple. Other distros have packages of their own.

In short, I'm under the impression that you haven't really tried to use a modern Linux distro for more than the five minutes it took you to stereotype it, say, "This sucks because it's not what I'm used to!", and go back to Windows.

Abiword
OpenOffice
LaTeX

umm... AbiWord ?

Older versions are about 1meg.

http://www.abisource.com/

help distribute the OpenOffice.org office suite starting with less fortunate school districts It will take the full class period just to load. Just imagine the latest cut of OpenOffice on five-year-old surplus hardware. How about some old copies of Office 97 instead? That still runs snappy on my mid-1990's Toshiba laptop...

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

We have a Pango renderer in the development (2.5.x, will become 2.6.x) version, if you know Hebrew please help us test it out! http://www.abisource.com/ and http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Thanks so much!

We have a Pango renderer in the development (2.5.x, will become 2.6.x) version, if you know Hebrew please help us test it out! http://www.abisource.com/ and http://bugzilla.abisource.com/

Thanks so much!

The other point is that without the wireless mesh, an access-point and an internet connected server on the other end of the radio link its functionality would be serverely compromised.

Get AbiWord CVS HEAD (see http://www.abisource.com/developers/), and compile with --enable-libabiword. The get the abiword python bindings from our CVS as well (module pyabiword). Compile and install those as well. Finally, in the pythons module, there is an example directory. Look at that. As for the OLPC AbiWord activity, it is in OLPC's git repository: http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=projects/abiword-ol pc;a=summary

If capable word processor is all you need (and you don't feel like installing an entire office suite just to get it), I'd also suggest AbiWord.

There is a lot to like about AbiWord: it's open-source, cross-platform, lightweight, feature-rich, stable, and able to read and write MS Word documents.

They could also use OpenOffice instead, at least temporarily. There are also other free alternatives such as using Abiword to view Word documents that they receive from customers. Abiword a well known alternative for Linux computers, but I see they also have Windows and Mac versions too. I also see that Word 97 isn't on their list of affected software so perhaps businesses could also consider just use their old copies of Office 97 to view incoming documents for the next few weeks (or did they just neglect to mention any version of Word that old).

At home, I use OpenOffice running under Ubuntu Linux, so I should still be able to view Word documents safely.

As an aside, I use AbiWord. It's free, and it has a passable MS Word import/export facility.

And out of curiosity, how many of those jobs where you created your resume in Abiword have you actually gotten?

I think you should read this (as already posted by someone else): http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/Fa qMicrosoftWordDocuments

"AbiWord can currently save in an MS Word compatible ".doc" format. This is done by saving as Rich Text Format (.rtf) but with a .doc extension. (...) There are no plans to support binary MS Word export."

Nevertheless, KWord's inability to export to MS Word format is a dealbreaker... so I reluctantly installed AbiWord

Abiword doesn't really export to doc either, they just save as rtf and give it a .doc extension (see here. KWord can easily save to rtf, and even lists it as "RTF Document (Microsoft Word Compatible)" in the save-as dialog. Maybe you can request that the developers add an option to automatically save as rtf with a doc extension, just like Abiword, although I don't personally consider having to change a document extension manually a "dealbreaker."

"OO Writer tries to do everything on all platforms, and it became heavily bloated"

What about Abiword?