Slashdot Mirror

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=341113

It's interesting that the overline examples they showed did not show overlines in equations, specifically over italic text. This is where the overline feature really fell down.

See: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=21486
And, for eye-gouging images: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=54058

For the record, Microsoft Word (equation editor) also doesn't get it right. But that's no excuse :)

...but they can hardly do worse than Sun, from what I've heard about their management of OO.o.

Sun's management of both OpenOffice and Java is lousy. They don't listen to their users -- the Java bug-tracking and voting system is bogus, and OpenOffice is "primitive".

Read the threads linked to above to get an idea of Sun's utter cluelessness.

It seems the Windows version of OOo can't open files that are on a Windows file server that happens to have a "_" character in it's name. In our case, there's only one such unlucky server in the entire site, but that's the one that our people most commonly use. MS Office users can click on those files with no issue, but nothing happens with OOo. That is, OOo just closes with no warnings, no error messages. The poor program just dies silently.

In http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53184, status says it's "fixed", but the activity log shows it's never been merged into the release version. This is the 3rd release since the bug was declared "fixed", but it's still not released. Scroll to the bottom of that bug report to see the story.

Related discussion here... http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=52413

Maybe I should just fix it muself...

I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.

I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.

I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there.

It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.

Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?

That's just inexcusible!

I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.

That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.

I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.

Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.

And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.

It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.

Frankly, I would have considered this a higher priority than 3D transitions for slide presentations...but I'm glad it's going to be fixed, only seven years after it was identified as an issue...

Openoffice still doesn't do good anti aliasing of vector graphics (for example, in a presentation). It seems idiotic to implement OpenGL "eye candy" before dealing with this half-decade old issue. Who is going to put up with crappy-looking drawings, just because they can now transition between them smoothly?
Here's one thread on the issue: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=33584

Actually I have reported 3 distinct problems with OO Calc (based on about an hour's usage).

Yes, yes. I understand that you don't like it, and I understand that it doesn't suit your needs particularly well at this time. Moving on...

And I can't help but wonder how many more nasty problems there are lurking given how quickly I found these 3.

And as it turns out, you have a point. There are code quality issues with the graphing package, and the graphing section is being re-written from the ground up, this time as a separate package. So it seems your concerns are already being addressed.

I suspect that the entire code base may be beyond repair given this kind of serious bug discovery rate on a supposedly "mature" application.

Another overly broad generalisation, I think. Just because one module is overdue for some refactoring, that doesn't mean the entire codebase is beyond redemption. In fact from the number of using OOo every day, I'd suspect that the graphing code is an anomaly rather than the rule. Otherwise I'd be using AbiWord and Gnumeric (which apparently has excellent graphing capabilities) for my day to day needs rather than OOo. And a lot of others like me too, I suspect.

Perhaps it is OK for poor college students, or for high school students (though the student edition of Office is only $149), but for business people who depend on their office tools, I think the $75 per seat license fee (according to the OP) is money well spent.

mmm... but I think that in these days of shrinking budgets, that proposition might become an increasingly hard sell to the CEOs and CIOs of this world. Especially when they see their competitors increasingly evading the Microsoft Tax by going open. Doubly so if they find there's an office package that works for 90-95% of the workforce. Still, best of luck and all that...

What, pray tell, do you envision usurping Office? Surely not OO, which is just a poor imitation. Perhaps Google Office will bump Microsoft off

You don't get it. It's not about which application gets to be the next king of the castle. ODF is going to blow Microsoft's office monopoly wide open. You'll have a choice of a couple of dozen apps, all of them with different interfaces, all optimised for different tasks, many of them free. Open Office is the vanguard, and by far the most visible, but what you're looking at here is a paradigm shift.

You never know, you might even like it.

"I actually use OOo all the time. It's still very annoying - when I need to layout some complex documents"

If you want to preserve layout don't use either msOffice or OO use LaTeX or LYX a GUI front end. Even transfering a word document between different machines is problematical as the formating changes depending on the installed printer.

"Calc doesn't have many features present in Excel - analysis, graphs, etc.... I mean, how hard could it be to add an interpolation feature?"

The one feeture it does have is it actually does the sums correctly, unlike Excel.

Browse OpenOffice forum, post top msg to slashdot.

was Re:my failed attempt to evangelize (Score:1)

You must edit the OOo registry as shown here: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=10 5239

This website has downloadable MSI packages that will integrate Firefox into AD and GPO, as well as a howto.

This thread will show you how to do the same for OO.o, but only for the 2.0 beta version.

You can find pretty good advice at the OpenOffice.org forum. Especially on this and this threads.

You can find pretty good advice at the OpenOffice.org forum. Especially on this and this threads.

You can find pretty good advice at the OpenOffice.org forum. Especially on this and this threads.

Gnome icons? I wish... :(

another openoffice 2.0 screenie

There should be a note on the submitter page for Slashdot reminding people to first read the question they're responding to and checking the top links google turns up, before claiming google has the answer.

Anyhow, the solution you point out has already been addressed as inadequate. "Ask Slashdot" fails again, responding without reading the question 24/7.

My RH 7.2 machine, (KDE 2.2, 124K, 10Gb, 1000MHz Celeron) came with KDE installed by default, so I used it for a couple of years. On a whim, I recently installed icewm. The difference was staggering: a much faster, cleaner interface; a large choice of one-key window operations; a vastly more comprehensible configuration. Apart from the following bizarre anomaly under icewm:

$ time kstart /usr/bin/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program/soffice -p file.doc

real 2m1.883s
user 0m0.220s
sys 0m0.040s

$ time /usr/bin/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program/soffice -p file.doc

real 35m23.703s
user 0m0.860s
sys 0m0.200s

Yes, I know the latest KDE is better than all its predecessors, but I want faster, smaller and less buggy, not more features. (I only briefly dabbled with gnome and it seemed to be little different.) There is a place for KDE et al, however, largely for those converting from Windows and out-and-out CLIphobes. Good luck to them, but let's celebrate the range of choices we have.

I get all my tech issues resolved by the friendly folk over there.

If the command line arguements for the independent utility are hard-coded into the OOo binary, doesn't it pretty much constitute 'linking'?

Under most people's notion of "linking", the answer is No.

You didn't bother to define "hard-coded". Let me give you a murky example of "hard-coded".

When you install OOo, it creates a number of configuration files. Obviously the installer (that is the installer executable combined with its "data" files) is hard-coded. The installer, works in several steps. First it dumps bunches of files in an organized tree structure into the target install directory. Then it creates these configuration files. Many of them have pathnames to other parts of the OOo installation. Other things in these configuration files are, well, configuration. Not all configuration settings are brought out into the User Interface. I have, for example, created macros in OOo which alter configuration data which cannot otherwise be altered via. OOo's user interface. See this example I posted to OOoForum.org.

Now suppose, the command line options to a BSD style command line tool were stored in the configuration data? Would you define this as "hard-coded"? After all, a stock, standard out of the box install of OOo would immediately work with this hypothetical command line tool.

Now suppose that the command line tool's options were in configuration data, but not brought out to OOo's user interface? Would you call this "hard-coded"?

If you said yes, then I would offer this argument. The size of the "recent files list" in OOo is hardcoded to four items. Yep, that's right, OOo's recent files list only shows four recently opened documents. This is "hard-coded". Yet my simple macro (linked above) changes that setting without altering anything that is stored as binary -- the configuration setting is stored as text.

So again, define "hard-coded"?

It seems to me that any decent sized, perhaps even small sized, open source program could use this definition of "hard-coded".

Adabas is just a database backend and not very important, though I admit it would be nice to bundle one of the existing open source backends just to remove the need to fetch and install one.

Backends that are currently supported by both StarOffice and OpenOffice include MySQL, Postgress, and any data source exposed by ODBC 3.0, JDBC, ADO, dBase, or if you want to go low tech flat CSV files.

When most people say they want an Access-like tool, they mean a frontend, something that OpenOffice and StarOffice already have.

To help you out, the main database section of OpenOffice.org has atips and tricks section.

Then, there are the forums that have some very interesting threads on the subject...

...such as this handy little link

I've used StarOffice before (when it was totally free), i didnt like it.. but i also had no use for it. It was too ugly and buggy .. i then got AbiWord which was nice looking but super buggy (random closes, unable to open files even though they arent corrupt)

A few weeks ago I began writing a screenplay and was looking for a free screenplay writing application.. Thanks to google I found a nice screenplay macro package (forum about it) for OpenOffice.org. I downloaded OOe and its really great. I havent found any bugs and it looks better than staroffice =P

There are two issues here.

The headless box. Run soffice -help to get a list of command line options. Or go here to see a list of command line options. On Windows running soffice -help brings up a window showing command line options.

OOo can be programmed from Basic, Java, and Python. I have done all three. On Windows, you can use any Windows Automatation language, such as Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Delphi. I personally have used Visual FoxPro to script OOo. Someone on OOoForum has used Ruby on Windows to script OOo.

The API has a steep learning curve, but it is very powerful and capable. I have run a java program that can be run on one computer, and connect to an OOo running on another computer to create drawings of mazes. The two computers don't have to be running the same OS. Or you can run both the java program and OOo on the same computer.

If you download the SDK, there is a Java example called DocumentConverter.java. There is also a document converter Servlet in the SDK examples.

Here are a few places to start.

Deloper's Guide

Online API reference

OOo Developer

api.openoffice.org

udk.openoffice.org

Software Developer's Kit

Finally, go hang out on OOoForum.org in the Macro's and API section. I frequent that and answer a lot of questioons and post code fragments and examples there.

Anyone got experience with multi-user install under Win2k? I know about the net install thingy, but that still requires each user to manually do the mini-workstation install after the net install.
Some idea of the problem can be found here: oooforum

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).

The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.

In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.

So, what kind of developmet does Open Office allow?

Read all about it. api.openoffice.org udk.openoffice.org

Go over to OOoForum.org , go into the Macros and API section and read what people are doing.

Go over to OOoDocs.org , they also have a Macros and devlopment section.

You can write StarBasic code directly into OOo documents. You can write programs in Java to drive a running OOo, even on a different computer. (For example, a Java program on, say, Windows, telling an OOo running on Linux what to do.) You can write components in C++ or Java or Python.

The Python UNO bridge is new. I haven't tried it yet. I believe you can do anything with Python that you could do with Java or C++ in OOo. StarBasic is limited in that you cannot create new components, it lacks sophisticated data structures, and you can only embed it within documents. The other languages cannot be embedded within documents (yet). I'm hoping to someday be able to embed Java classes or Python within an OOo document, just like I can with StarBasic macros.

Be sure to download the SDK. Read the documentation, especially the developer's guide. The first big learning curve is to understand UNO. This is pretty much a prerequisite for everything else. Once you do though, you're on your way.

Oh yeah, on languages that can access OOo. If you're on Windows, you can use Windows Automation. This means you can access it from, say, Visual Basic. I have seen OpenOffice.org programmed from Visual FoxPro.