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Linux Office Suites
Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
Just as important, the lack of EXPORT filters! If you're going to send a document to other people, they need to read it too.
I'd think that the whole point of an exercise like this was not to ape all of Microsoft's features but to produce a compatible alternative. Without file compatibility these remain purely academic exercises. Besides, haven't all versions of Office since 2000 used an XML derivative for file storage?
I think StarOffice got off to a wonderful start. I'm very concerned about their progress. The next major version will really be a turning point in the industry one way or the other. If it's solid, and it rocks, with great compatability, then there is a great alternative to office. If it's buggy, or doesn't work well with office formats (especially Excel, where it's the weakest), then MS will win. And I'm going off to live on a deserted south pacific island.
Sigh... If I had to bet, it's depressing where I'd probably put my money... Sun's dropped the ball a few times lately.
Tip to the folks working on it: cool object oriented design is neat, but it's usability, stability, and compatability that will make StarOffice a success. Don't try to do things beyond MS Office, just match it on all fronts! Anything else is an esoteric waste of time.
-me-
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
what about wordperfect's filters? when wordperfect for linux was first released it had a fairly exhaustive set of filters. anyone know if those filters have been updated (eg for ms office xp)?
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Let's trust the moderation system gets rid of crap like this, so we can deal with the issues.
-me-
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The only thing that ties me into M$ office is exchange server. IT doesnt have the web gui or pop enabled. Im almost ready to install VNC and run exchange under it.
From my BeOS days I remember Gobe Productive having pretty good Microsoft Office Filters.
Complete filters don't do too much good if the program doesn't support all the features. Footnotes, for example, are missing from some of these.
Filters are certainly important, but we won't have truly won the battle for open standards until proprietary closed formats like Office are no longer the de-facto format that everyone expects. I want these programs to stand on their own merit.
Office suites are commodity software that everyone needs, and Open Source offerings in this area are increasingly impressive. So I think there's hope.
The lack of import filters is regrettable, but hardly surprising - as soon as they do work properly, Microsoft will make bloody sure to change the format again.
.html or .rtf anyway - even if you rename the extension to .doc. So the poor lusers don't even know it's not MS word format...
.rtf to .doc , and "pretty graph" style applications need something more powerful.
:-)
The other factor is that even if the word/excel/powerpoint import is working, people act all surprised if their embedded Viso drawings/ autofcad dxfs etc don't work. It's pretty silly to expect them to work too, unless you've got some magical linux version of autocad (come home to unix autocad!) or visio installed. KDE's KParts framework is as capable as OLE on windows (although I wish they hadn't dropped CORBA), but it can't embed applications that don't exist.
Export filters are pretty irrelevant for the majority of word or excel documents -
MS Word will silently load files saved as
Excel loads CSV fine, even CSV with embedded formulae in standard enough infix notation. Once again, this covers a large number of cases, although it's not as transparent as just renaming a
Powerpoint is more problematic - although I've noticed that the flashier and more advanced the powerpoint presentation, the less likely it is that it's saying anything useful.
It's amazing that nobody even tries to make something a little different than the well known MS Office. Even that name Office appears almost everywhere. What office? A law office, a construction company office or a municipality office? I bet all of them have different needs. Why MS put all that programs in a single package? Perhaps because, as usual, they earn more money due to this model? Then why everybody needs to clone it?
Don't say No, say May be
My experience with StarOffice wasn't very good. I didn't get a chance to really look around it alot because it was so slow on my K6 @ 266mhz with 64mb of RAM. I believe it's coded in Java (which would make sense, since StarOffice is made my Sun). Hopefully this new release is a little speedier, I'll give it a try when it becomes stable.
void women (int money, time_t time);
It's obviously pretty essential for users to be able to transfer between the office suites in question and MS Office, if the others are to gain any kind of mainstream acceptance. However, most MS Office users don't actually use something like 90% of the functionality. It's the other 10% that's important.
Further, the only really important Microsoft Office applications are Word, Excel and Access. There isn't the same volume of existing data that must be readily accessible for the other applications.
Now, suppose you could get a solid intermediate format covering those basics (something XML-based, perhaps) adopted as some sort of standard by the free software/open source guys, and have all these office suites using it. It then just needs someone to write a single filter for, say, MS Word docs, to convert to and from the intermediate format, and then all the other Office suites can do it.
I can't believe no-one's thought of or attempted this before, but I don't know of any actual examples. Does anyone else? It must be technically possible; at least, if it's not, you haven't got a hope of converting to the format used by any individual free/open source office suite either.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I know that this is common knowledge, but perhaps an example of why this is so fscking important will help.
I worked as a sysadmin for the 2600 linux desktop rollout for the supreme court of Wisc. The only reason that roll out failed was because of lack of filtering from Word Perfect/M$ Word.
If we had those filters, the Circut Courts Automation Process (a derivative of Supreme Court) would be all linux desktops. That would have been an amazing advance in the world of linux to the desktop.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
People where I work are fond of mailing around single-table Access databases. WHY?? grrr....
Word processors dating back to the DOS days can read Rich Text Format. If you're sending it to a windows newbie who panicks when it doesn't say ".doc", tell him to open it anyway -- word will understand it.
The fact is also that StarOffice is an all around office suite. One program with many integrated features, the biggest being able to read and use M$ Office2K programs. It is the one office suite that allows M$ and *nix machine to comunicate on a .doc(ument) level. And A big PLUS is that the icon setup is much like office which allows easy converstion from M$ to a *nix system.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
-- snip --
If it's buggy, or doesn't work well with office formats (especially Excel, where it's the weakest), then MS will win. And I'm going off to live on a deserted south pacific island.
--
You can't move to a deserted south pacific island. Microsoft already bought them all.
They've never seen any other mail clients, and don't understand why people outside the company can't read their HTML mail with embedded OLE objects and attached vCard files. I play games with them... they send me Rich Text email, I change it to plain text and send it back. Their client is set to send Rich Text by default, so it gets changed back. Then if I reply again, I change it back to plain text. They must wonder what the hell is going on.
Many people could get by just fine with an "alternative" office suite, if they didn't have to exchange files with the computer illiterate.
My biggest concern (having implemented Star Schedule server for 30 people so far in a 50-employee company) is that no regard at all has been given to the groupware functionality in OpenOffice. I have very few gripes with Star Schedule, but will need to explain why the newest verions of Star Office cannot be used with the Schedule Server.
If someone were to start a project to make a newer better groupware tool for open office (or some other open-source cross-platform tool), I would find a way to contribute (as I think quite a few others would).
Unfortunately it seems as if ogsproject has died.
Maybe if someone took action and said "All groupware discussions will take place on groupware@openoffice.org" or similar, then at least it wouldn't appear on discuss.
Does Sun not care that there are customers of their software who will be left stranded with data in an obsolete server and egg on their face. I hope not.
Don't even try to match it on all fronts, IMHO. As much as MS would have it otherwise, most Office users are only using a very small subset of the functionality available.
If you can support bulletproof import/export of simple Word documents, with basic things like the formatting, cross-references, tables and so on working reliably, you've got 99% of the portability problems solved. The big issue is the number of documents that already exist in Word format, which people will continue to need to read/edit in whatever new format they're stored. Most of those documents don't use super-advanced VBA scripts, half a million text boxes and WordArt.
Now, if you can go one better, and fix the terminally annoying bugs in Word -- cross-references not updating properly and woefully broken bullets and numbering spring to mind -- then you've also got a technically superior product that solves real problems that MS Word doesn't. Add in the silly omissions -- genuine three-part headers and footers, as used by many, many business documents, for example -- and you're clearly winning.
Of course, similar arguments apply to other Office applications, particularly Excel and Access. I'm simply highlighting Word because the issues are likely to be more widely understood.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No, it's not coded in Java. It does have a Java API so you can interface to it from Java, though.
I must say.. I recently switched to using StarOffice even in windows, just for consistency.
Everyone says 'it's not the same as office'. no. It's not. And it doesnt' have every last feature, but it has it's own unique features, and is a deadly office suite nontheless.
The only real hurdles I've come across so far, that prevent me from converting the entire office, are a) embedded VB (important in some sheets... very important) and b) I can't figure out how to open Password-protected Excel sheets.
Didn't the format just change again? .. and from what I can tell the MS corp store in Redmond no longer carries Office 2000 ..
Dude, StarOffice sucks. There is no other way to say it. Why does my Office Suite need it's own start button and desktop? WTF were they thinking?
Apparently, it doesn't use the standard Windows Open/Save dialogs, so you get some confusing thing instead. There is no file tree! If I'm six directories deep and I want to save something on the desktop, I have to click "up", "up", "up" six times. If I want to save to a network drive, I have to go up to the desktop, then my computer, then the network drive. Why don't they use the regular Windows popdown which shows all your network drives, etc?
I could go on and on about all the shit that's wrong with it. I wish they would just hire ONE interface designer to work with the 100 programmers. PLEASE. This is not hard, this is stuff anyone can observe in the first 5 minutes of using it.
like embedded VB and stuff....
Sometimes, as a business, you have to fit what you do to the tools you have. There will never be a perfect replacement for office, but there will be things just as good (Like staroffice). You will always have to change the way you do certain things.
Wrong! HancomOffice has an excellent set of MS Office import/export filters. It looks to be a very complete and mature product and I'm looking forward to seeing what it can do. Especially with Hancom's recent alliance with theKompany, giving it Kivio (Envision), Aethra (QuickSilver), Quanta+ (WebBuilder), and reKall (easyDB) to add to the HancomOffice package (story on the Dot). Of course, I'm still rooting for KOffice though :-)
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
But Office is a cumbersome dinosaur. Office-based business applications are flaky, difficult to use, and unreliable. Office can be dethroned.
What we really need to do is to figure out how to get the same jobs done with something that is compellingly better: software that enables web-based collaboration, software consisting of small, specialized, downloadable applications, software that's much easier than Office to extend and program, even for non-programmers.
Amen brother man... BIIIIG Amen.
i agree, the staroffice start button is an incredibly bad design idea. however, you can turn it off rather easily. i was able to when i last user staroffice approx. 8 months ago.
complex
Gobe actually has great import/export filters, but they're even better: They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to linux (which they are apparently doing), then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the M$ formats that Gobe supports.
BTW, this functionality is based on how BeOS does translation for other formats, too, mainly graphics. Linux could really use to take a lesson from this, because it was one of the coolest and best functionalities of BeOS. Hopefully Gobe will port the full API over, not just the filters themselves.
Star office's integrated environment is a strong counter move to the monopolistic anti-competitive OS/Application integration that MS is famous for. But to their implicit and explicit bundling aspects, you *can't* compete with Office with just your application; you need a desktop environment, too, to pull everything together to a greater degree.
Using StarOffice as indendant word processing/spreadsheet/presentation applications under X just wouldn't come anywhere near as close to competing with Office, as StarOffice does. If X had stronger (and non-competing) application standards, this would be far less of an issue.
-me-
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Go pull the latest build of Open Office. They did away with the separate desktop concept.
Once a good set of filters are out there, Microsoft WILL change the file formats, guaranteed. Ask the OS/2 people what maintaining compatibility with M$ was like, and how much it helped them.
We really need to be saying "Linux office suites are very powerful, and aren't horrible buggy feature landfills like M$ Awfulest. Moreover, they exchange data really well WITH EACH OTHER."
I agree that the M$ filters are necessary, but I don't think in the long run they'll be a selling point. Less bugs and fewer crashes will be the real selling points.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Huh? We ALREADY have a start button, and we already know how to use it. Just add yourself to "Start/Program Files/Star Office" and everyone will be fine.
So, how long do you guess it will take M$ to introduce a default-encrypting-scheme on .doc and all their other proprietary formats and starts haunting all the Word-et-al-filter-authors for breaking the DMCA?
Please i am waiting for these feature for a long time!
Will include mysql driver for accesing Mysql databases directly using StarOffice Base.
It has been for a long time in TODO list, in Openoffice homepage:
"You can connect indirectly to a MySQL database using the existing ODBC and JDBC database drivers. This project could benefit from an driver that accesses a MySQL database directly"
Come on MySQL, Openoffice developers give us a good notice, It will be great.
As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
... say MS-Access?? Lots of small businessess can use that kind of thing.
Or some db development thingy like ehm
Sun's dropped the ball a few times lately.
If you tried, just a bit harder, you could possibly be about 3% more vague.
How has 'Sun's [sic] dropped the ball...'?
"I play games with them...They must wonder what the hell is going on."
Good for you, your doing business the way everyone should.
You should be proud.
I thought Applixware Office Suite had a pretty good set of filters. I used it a few years ago and was quite impressed.
The problem with open-source bloatware seems to be even more severe than with closed-source bloatware. Look at how slow Mozilla is compared to IE. (Okay, YMMV, let's not start a flamewar -- that's just what I found recently when I compared performances on my system.) And complexity is the enemy of open-source projects -- it raises the barrier to entry for people who want to contribute.
I also don't know what you do about lusers who send one-page text e-mails as Word attachments. Even if a certain version of Star Office can read Word 98, it'll be broken when Word 2004 comes out. Are the same lusers really going to be clueful enough to realize they need to convert back to Word 98 before they send it?
Probably a better solution is to convince everyone who currently e-mails Word attachments to start e-mailing PDF attachments. It could still be used inappropriately, but at least everyone could read it with open-source software.
Find free books.
I see all these screenshots of all these people running word and office on linux with wine (flawlessley, they say). As a user of Worperfect Office for linux and windows, I would say that wordprocessing for linux has definately arrived, but with spreadsheets and presentations, there is a long way to go (there is progress, though). As a linux novice who sees the task of tweaking with WINE as daunting, if not impossible, i would like to see an easy-to-use version of wine that installs MS office and all the pre-tweaked wine stuff automatically when supplied with an MS office CD (allowing users to point to a windows partition to use the original windows .dlls). Many companies/users who might consider linux allready own licences to MS office, so such a program would greatly simplify migration to linux. Oh well, that's just my two cents-- please don't flame me 'cause this is my first post.
According to this article, the integrated desktop and probably the start button will be gone in version 6.0.
quote
OpenOffice, and its predecessor StarOffice, are integrated office packages and include a word processor, web browser, and spreadsheet tools. In fact, StarOffice 5.2 contained just about everything a desktop user could need, including an integrated desktop. But with the adoption of desktop environments such as GNOME and KDE, future releases of StarOffice and OpenOffice will no longer carry the integrated desktop.
end quote
The above quote is from the following source:
LWN.net
Female Prison Rape in NY
What if MS adds some light security/encryption to there file formats and then anyone who writes an importer for them gets busted under the DMCA?
That would suck.
There is a post by a guy who said "it's slow on my K6 266mhz, but I'll try it again when the new version comes out" and you moderated him as a "-1, troll"?
I pointed out that it was dumb of them to not use the standard Windows file Open/Save dialog boxes because it confuses users, and you hammered me as "-1, flamebait".
You are missing an important guideline for moderating - not to let your feelings get in the way. What a joke. How would you feel if some Microsoft flunky got mod points and moderated up everything that said "Linux sucks!" - probably not good, yet what you have done is the same thing.
If you want to see people's REAL experiences with StarOffice, you should read this article at a threshold of "0", otherwise you aren't getting the whole picture, which is that it's a good alternative, but also that it has a lot of problems. Thanks for reading.
Developers can write better and better office software, they spend hours, days, and months to make it more stable, more powerfull, and more user friendly, but all you need is import/export .doc files.
.doc file with pure text (sometime with different fonts and bolds).Am I the only one who is happy with LyX (yes, without learning LaTeX) ?
So Microsoft is safe, he will have office monopoly forever, becouse users don't need features, they just need to open and save
Don't want to leave THEM out either....
Also, the macro virus support of rtf isn't as complete as in doc.
I for one would like to put aside the KDE & GNOME bias that pushes many to adopt this word processor or that.
Our fundamental problem to be solved is a lack of UNIVERSAL and fully functional MS-Office import *and* export filters. At this point, I would say it's the biggest problem Linux users must struggle with (emphasis on "users" here... the administrators must still struggle with Linux's crappy font management, etc).
RTF, HTML, and the "other" semi-formatted languages don't support popular features very well, such as tables and frames. Would YOU export your resume from a Linux app as HTML or RTF, and leave it to Office to render correctly? HR people are the most "clingy to Office types", and if your resume looks shitty - it's YOUR fault not theirs (world is not fair).
If your RTF resume looks bad in Office, *obviously* you are not a good candidate. You show little attention to detail to allow your resume to overlap characters and corrupt text. I've seen Office mangle some RTF docs that look PERFECT elsewhere -- it's an anti-competitive feature of MS Office. RTF documents from Office, re-import perfectly.
SO... to get to my point, we need good filters. The KDE Office and AbiWord folks should get together on the OpenOffice mailing list, and work to make sure the OpenOffice filters are exactly what they need. There's NO EXCUSE for not standardizing our I/O filters now.
As a great example of co-operation between KDE and GNOME applications, look at gPhoto. This started as a Gnome digital camera app, but the code became something better... a standard Linux API for cameras. Now there's a ton of KDE and Gnome apps, all of which run on top of gPhoto.
Just because KDE and GNOME use fundamentally incompatible desktop libraries, does not forgive these folks for not working together on EXTENSIONS to the desktop. We need more success stories like gPhoto, in areas like Printing, Font Management, pretty Wizards for Samba, etc.
I think about the lack of such examples in Linux, and the thought depresses me...
_Scott
When is Slashdot moderation going to favor less frequent "signal" posts, over "dozen posts a day" noise accounts?
Or...go study the market and find out what people really want to do with a computer and build something that does exactly that.
Remember, Linux is Unix, and Unix has been around for a quarter century. If we really want Ordinary Mortals (i.e., people who don't care what OS they use) to use Linux, or any other "free" OS, we're going to have to give them a very, very good reason.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Ever wonder what Office XP would look like as an emoticon? or more precisely, what that XP really stood for? ... tilt your head left...
Maki
I was recently exploring a change of job opportunity. Most people I talked to said, "Send me your resume in Word format." Even for a Linux sysadmin position. At one point, I told the recruiter, "I don't have access to Microsoft Office but I have my resume in HTML form which you can load in Word with no trouble." His (her?) response was, "Well, you can hardly call yourself a professional if you don't use Office, now can you?" and the conversation dropped.
Another place sent me a job application form in Excel. I tried loading it in StarOffice and it sort of loaded, but I couldn't actually fill it out -- the StarOffice loader choked on protected fields and so on.
ps. I'm still half-heartedly looking for work. My resume can be seen here.
Did you say tables? Do you have the slightnest notion how hard it is to implement table support for one format? And transparent dual-format support is at least an order of magnitude harder.
One of the major problems with Staroffice is the fact that few people know that is exists.
Beside, you have to get a good connection like cable or ADSL to download it in a nice, non-frustrating way.
I don't know if you can buy Staroffice in shops in the US but you certainly can't here in Belgium.
They should spread it like Linux is spread (the non online way), cheap CD's.
This will be the most effective way to make it a success. People will not complain about the money, and they can make legal copies out of purchased CD.
42 + 1 = 42
Filters (importing/exporting) are only a temporary solution. If only maybe for the sole reason that MS will break it's format to make them useless again.
But for the reason that we need to create an open file format. I know there is some work going on with the OpenOffice project to do so, but it needs to have the support of all office suites and applications.
I greatly applaud, and welcome, the Gobe production suite, but all we need are more proprietary file formats.
If we could get everyone...WordPerfect, StarOffice, Hancom, Gobe, KOffice, Gnome, etc. to band together to create an "Open File Foundation" to create a standard to which each could build file formats that could be shared accross platforms and applications suites the magnatude of such a collaboration would be huge!
It would be(or is) my dream that one day an office could theoretically have each of it's employee's using their office suite of choice and be able to seemlessly share documents amoung co-workers and others outside the office!
This could be the very straw that broke the camels back, so to say. If MS did not want to comply with the Open Standards it faces incompatability with the rest of the world. In this day and age of the internet, p2p infrastructure, and the like, it's a common compatibilty, not only across platforms but across applications, that is going to be needed. People will eventually see this and if MS dosn't want to play...so be it, alternatives abound!
This not only goes for File formats but also to other formats such as audio, video, and other streaming media. Ogg is a nice place to start and I pray it takes hold.
The days of closed formats and single platform narrow mindedness are coming to and end!
So for the time being...and unfortunatly a requirement to even get into the door to create such standards...yes we do need decent filters! but only for a temporary solution!
--- Brad (http://www.LinuxReview.net)
linux sucks anyway. real men use solaris x86-talk about office suites for that, b/c linux is useless.
"The new version will also begin a switch to new, nonproprietary XML-based file formats that anyone can emulate."
3rd paragraph from the bottom in the ZDNet article.
Reading your resumme, one could see that you have done a _LOT_ of work using MS tools (like Visual C++..). How could you pretend that you don't have access to MS Word?
In my last job I used StarOffice 5.1 to retrieve Excel files corrupted in MS Excel. True, it didn't keep everything from Excel, but at least the data was retrievable.
I also use StarOffice to save Word files to HTML because the code is much cleaner and not 20x too big.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc
Blue Neon Head brings up a good point: HTML with CSS does support about everything you mentioned and adds hyperlinks, which a print-medium user agent can translate into footnotes, endnotes, or (as Slashdot is starting to do) parenthetical citations.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Another thing these are missing is a Mac verison. Is there any Linux-Mac word processors available. "Cross-platform" word processors are either, Windows-Mac(MS Word) or Windows-Linux(Abiword, StarOffice,WordPerfect). If Abiword came out for the Mac I would probably switch to it and suggest it to everyone I know.
haven't all versions of Office since 2000 used an XML derivative for file storage?
Office 2000 uses Office 97 formats. Office XP, on the other hand, may use XML, but this doesn't imply that Microsoft will publish a schema, DTD, or other documentation. For example, <uudata>(2000 lines of uuencoded data)</uudata> is XML (save administrivia such as a DOCTYPE), but if you don't have enough information to decode the contents of an entity into something readable, it's still useless.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Someone pleeeaasse setup a site dedicated to writing really _good_ MS Word 97+ serialization routines in ANSI c. I would but I'm alread sidetracked on a tangent of a subproject and the stack is just too high right now. This is not hard folks. I know it sounds like a boring project but it's not!
Are you familar with the principle of Recursive Composition (a.k.a The Composite Pattern)? This is without a doubt my favorate programming construct. The key here is that you define an object that can be a child as well as potentially contain children itself. If you can uniformly parameterize the properties common to a set of these objects you can use the priciple of Recursive Composition to build a tree of these objects and then serialize it back using preorder depth first search tree traversal.
For example, a binary networking protocol might have a header, some parameters, and a data payload area. The header has an arbitrary block of security information, which in turn might have a DES encrypted key and an integer describing the length of the payload. So to encode this message using Recursive Composition, define a packet_t type that has the three sub components such as the arbitrary security block, which in turn has an encrypted DES block as a child component. See the tree? Now, if you can parameterize the temporal properties of these objects you can delegate the responsibilty of encoding certain areas of the network message to functions like: enc_security_block(struct security_block *sb, char *dst, size_t off, size_t len) would then call enc_des_key(struct des_key *dk, char *dst, size_t off, si ....
The classic example of Recusive Composition is that of GUI components. You have an abstract object called say Component. Components can contain other components. Sub types would be ButtonComponent, TextComponent, TableComponent, etc. These components might contain subcomponents as well (e.g. ButtonComponent might have a TextComponent for it's label). See the tree again? Now, when it comes time to draw these components you don't have one big block of speggetti code that considers all of the different component types but rather delegate that responsibility to method of the component itself. This greatly reduces the complexity of the problem (actually making it feasable whereas it was not before). Again, we just have to parameterize *where* these components are to draw themselves such as FrameComponent_draw(Window *win, int x, int y ...etxc.
So what does this have to do with writing serialization and deserialization routines for Word documents? Microsoft Words format (and the format of just about every other sophisticated document format out there) is flattend by serializing an internal tree of nodes (like the GUI Components and more so the network packet encoding described above). The tree of nodes is no different from the trees used above to describe Recursive Composition. So by recusively delegating the resonsibilty of encoding/decoding a region of a MS Word document you can parse it into a tree and then do preorder dfs tree traversal to serialize it into any format including .doc.
The hardest problem here by far is determining what the primative types of the document are (e.g. like the security_block and the payload length integer in the network packet). If you don't know what the leaves of the tree look like you cannot start to write a lexer. Find out everything you can about the format of each of Word's elements. There are several projects that claim to have decoded the format to a certain degree. These would be a great start. However I have spoken to these guys and the problem is they are only interested in supporting their own product (Abiword and the KOffice guys talked about a calaborative effort but got hung up on choosing libraries and language and other trite crap). An group independant from these organizations should be established so that the library is not tied to one product.
Once you have a good idea of the bits and bytes behind the layout of nodes in the format you can write a (at first crude) lexer or Lexical analyser. This is simply a peice of c that will break the format into tokens. It's simple in the respect that it doesn't have to worry about the logical layout of elements at all. It's only concerned with nibbling off the primative elements (tokens) themselves. The interface might be as simple as init(char *filename), gettoken(struct lexer *lex).
Now you have to write a parser. This is what bison/yacc is for. This is non trivial but theres a great book called _lex & yacc_ by John R. Levine that can describe how to write a yacc grammer in 200 lines that in convential c would take several thousand lines, take twice as long, and still not work. Ahh yacc grammers to me are like dougnuts to Homer Simpson.
Once you have a working lexer and parser (probably a 1000 lines of code), you can start to build a tree. You need a tree structure. The W3C has written a specification for representing documents as a tree of nodes in memory called the Document Object Model (DOM). Mozilla uses the DOM. It's XML and HTML centric but it's really totally arbitrary. A DOM tree could easily be constructed by adding createNode, appendChild, etc calls to the yacc parser. It just so happends that I have written a DOM implementation in ANSI c. Its called DOMC and it would be perfect for this task.
If you do this much you are sitting pretty. You can just traverse the tree and spit out whatever the analigous elements are for say ps, html, sgml, xml etc.
Did you say tables? Do you have the slightnest notion how hard it is to implement table support for one format?
Mozilla, Konqueror, etc. handle HTML tables just fine. Just get Office to export legacy documents in conforming XHTML, provide an XHTML input filter, and you'll be fine.
Off-topic: My original subject was "<table>...</table>" but Slashcode escapes & into & and produces "<table>...</table>". However, when I just type <table>...</table>, Slashcode just strips the HTML. There seems to be NO way to get a < sign into a subject.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think it could help to fight against the M$ monopoly as well..
After all Mac has a greater marketshare into the desktop world than linux and the other *nixes!
...import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
Surely not Wordperfect! It's not a Microsoft product!!!
The DMCA is an american issue. What if the format is hacked outside america and this hack can be downloaded ?
Then the developers of the software will be trapped in their home countries, unable to fly over the airspace of countries who have allied with the United States. Just ask Dmitry Sklyarov.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The first question in every case is "can it read my word/word perfect/excel/powerpoint files? Even when I tell them yes, many of them balk. Oh thee of little faith.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
>SO... to get to my point, we need good >filters. The KDE Office and AbiWord folks >should get together on the OpenOffice >mailing list, and work to make sure the >OpenOffice filters are exactly what they >need. There's NO EXCUSE for not >standardizing our I/O filters now.
The AbiWord and KWord people are working together on a new generation of MS Word filters at:
wvware.sf.net
in the wv2 subdirectory. Note that none of the existing Word filter codebases were designed to be used as a library (though the KWord one was half-designed with that in mind), hence the need for a new codebase.
Why not join in and help?
Unless Microsoft starts hiding copyright notices in the doc format
Not as far-fetched as you may think. The Sega Dreamcast console requires a 14 KB block of copyrighted code to appear in the boot track of every Dreamcast title, and the BIOS checks it bit-for-bit against a copy in ROM. The code displays the text "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" next to a nice big blue SEGA® logo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
HTML might be fine if all you want to do is send a picture with an explanation of what it is. But even HTML isn't necessarily modifiable the way you want. For instance, equations and line art have to be converted to hard-to-edit bitmaps. Personally, I find HTML in e-mail a big nuisance; for instance, it can have web bugs in it. And I suspect the reason a lot of people in the bidness world send Word attachments is that they want it to look snazzier -- HTML generally looks pretty awful by comparison, e.g. many browsers don't support justified text.
The real issue is that HTML, PDF, and LaTeX are all open formats, and don't have the problem Word has with earlier versions of the software being unable to read files written by later versions.
Find free books.
There was one by HP (I actually ran it in a corporate lab for a while) - but HP killed it.
You can still get support for it, but I'm sure MS will kill the ability to use it with XP or a future revision of Outlook.
http://www.openmail.com/cyc/om/00/100-1624.pdf
http://windows.scares.us
dude, its all out there. you can use COM to read any doc. live and learn
In that case, where can I download COM for BeOS? Where can I download COM for Mac? Where can I download COM for Linux? The developer of this 'COM' thing must have a pretty lousy sense of marketing, as Google treats 'com' as a Really Common Word.
> Dude, StarOffice sucks. There is no other way to say it.
> Why does my Office Suite need it's own start button and
> desktop? WTF were they thinking?
I think that The original developers at StarDivision (6 years
ago or so) wanted to write an office suite that could be run
on many platforms with a consistent interface.
The integrated desktop was intended to hide the user
interface of the underlying operating system.
At that time, StarOffice ran under OS/2 too.
Said that, I must agree with you that I'd like to be able to
turn off (and avoid loading) all the stuff I don't use,
unneeded modules and start button+desktop included.
And I also agree about the dialogs: they must be
redesigned from scratch.
However, the program works well for me: I write my
resume with it, and they hire me; I write my documents
at work with it, and they accept them; finally I write all
my bills with it, and they pay me.
From my point of view, StarOffice is a valuable software
I can work with, though it could be improved a lot more.
What I mean is, if format was so important, Microsoft word would have never caught on, because its wordperfect->word filters were terrible. Even its word 5-> word 95 -> word 97 -> word on mac filters were terrible. Everytime I would look at a document in a new version, things would move around. Same goes for Lotus/Quattro->Excel. They even changed fundamental syntax for the spreadsheet! (in quattro, functions begin with an @ sign, whereas in excel, an =; a number of the function names are different as well, I believe.)
My point is that compatability isn't everything. Platform can be even more important. One of the major reason's MS Office is a 'standard' is because Microsoft moved the industry to Windows with 3.1, and the industry leaders (WP, Lotus, etc.) on the dos-based platform understood only too late that slow adaption to Windows meant their death.
So, StarOffice might stand a chance, even if they are not 100% compatable, because other considerations can be more powerful. For instance, with Microsoft pushing increasingly restrictive licensing, and the emminent maturing of many linux desktop and business apps, this may give enough of a toehold for real market penetration. By the same logic, even if the conversion filters are flawless, they might not capture the attention of the business world, many of whom won't likely even consider Star Office as an alternative.
Well its easy enough to say all this about filters, but with the DMCA can one legally actually do this, at least in the States?
Reading the data is not the big problem. Figuring
out how to render it on the screen so that it
looks and acts like it looked and acted on Word is the problem. If you figure it out good, but MS keeps changing how they show it and what they do with it, you don't have squat.
to buy Bloated Office. But it's flaky and crashes
more than enough. Also many signs of a slapdash "me-too" effort so that they can sell some machines, not real development of good features. The database dropped out about a year back and was supposed to come back. Is it there?
Example: If you save a CSV from Star Office, it will put quotes around the fields that have commas in them, so that the commas don't look like separators. But when you read it back in, Star Office won't take off the quotes that it added. Edit a CSV a few times and you've got more quotes than Bartlett, and a pretty sick file, too, if that does anything for you.
Two things prevent most people and businesses from moving from Microsoft products to other products:
.DOC or .XLS file to a business partner's secretary, and s/he will be able to load it effortlessly, and it will look the same.
1. Application Lock-In, and
2. FUD
1. Application Lock-In
Everybody and their brother, nearly every business, and all of their strategic partners, not to mention schools and government - all of them use to some extent Microsoft tools, day in, and day out. People have had YEARS to learn the nuances and problems, how to get around them, and what the applications can do. All of them know that they can email a
A Linux Office suite? How are these people to be certain that it will work - plus how are they to cope with the differences that are sure to be in place between the Linux Office Suite and the MS Office Suite? How do they know they will be able to send this exported XLS file to their friend, and it will open in MS Excel properly?
2. FUD
Which leads us to the second issue, that of FUD - if they don't know, they will be full of fear, uncertainty, and doubt as to whether to use the office suite for Linux, because these files they are trading down the hall or across the city may represent a potential deal - if the presentation software doesn't go a smoothly as Microsoft's, it may mean loss of money - maybe a job! If the XLS or DOC file is mangled (either by the Linux Office Suite, or by the MS Office Suite reading the Linux version), time and money will be lost trying to figure out what happened, or at least getting it loaded and converted using "standard" MS Office.
These are the two problems a Linux Office Suite has to overcome (actually, two problems any MS Office competitor has to overcome). Because MS has such a huge lock-in, and the FUD is raging - companies won't switch - because their partners aren't switching (and their partner's partners aren't, etc).
It is a tough situation, and will be hard to overcome. Education to override the FUD will help, but even if you had perfect compatibility, all MS would have to do is introduce a "new" format that Office would default to, and you will end up holding up and vindicating the FUD. People will then be doubly uncertain to try the Linux stuff, even though it would be MS who broke the compatibility! I don't know what the answer to this is, but if Linux is ever to really gain on the desktop, those two issues will have to be addressed...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
All bar (at last count) presentation files.
I've acually used StarOffice 5.2 (for Linux) to read a large MS-Word 2000 file and write a Word 97 file that didn't crash MS-Word 97 (which was something that MS-Word 2000 couldn't do with this file, even in (and see below) RTF). So you could say that StarOffice exports Office files better than MS Office itself does.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have switched to using PDF format to send documents to people. This works really well for letters, quotes and so forth, but is obviously less useful for collaborative work where I have still stuck with RTF.
PDF works well, giving excellent print characteristics, everyone ends up with some sort of PDF reader installed - I can produce it entirely with libre tools and still depend on it being readable by my clients. It even includes compression and encryption, and being a read-only format is sometimes an advantage.
Abiword too is coming along nicely. Now that it supports styles, the only thing missing for me to use it for all my (fairly limited) WP needs is to support tables.
As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
There's a real good reason we haven't seen this yet. It's the chicken in the egg problem. Before you can have fully capable import filters, you must first impliment the feature set of the app you're inputing from. For example, Microsoft Word has a bunch of features that do not yet appear in most other "word processors". If your word processor doesn't impliment these features, a filter that does is quite useless for your application (except in regards of ignoring things your application doesn't understand).
Unfortunately, before those features are implimented in your own application, you're going to need some more acceptance (to bring more developers on the project). Unless you can say you do what the mainstream needs/wants, you're still an obscur project. *sigh*
Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?
Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.
Why bother.
HTML + CSS support all of the above, including (AFAICT) everything static that MS-Word can do. Doesn't support StarWriter's greater ability with tables, though, or passing spreadsheet formulae, or MS-Office's reknowned virus SDK (AKA macros). StarWriter does export actual believable XML, which is a start, and infinitely better than the botch that MS-Office adds to its HTML exports.
Of course, if people weren't so much in love with pointless `futzing' to get the layout `right,' we could use one of the Unix press standards liky LyX that have been around and stable for decades... I can't begin to imagine the horror which a Word plugin to export this would have to go through...
I think the ultimate solution is World Domination. When MS-Office is no longer relevant, we can forget about supporting it as a special format. Until then, there must be some emulation.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not being flip just curious, At work i just downloaded and installed 5.2 because I was curious how it would live in a microsoft 95 environment.
.doc file and .xls under Microsoft Office XP. The files were saved in several formats from XP native .doc and .xls and then backwords in several of the preceding versions format.
Don't laugh, I have to use the same software the rest of the company uses. We don't suffer from version itus, but lately it has become more of a pain to deal with newer file formats that peolple tend to send documents in. FWIW, all the machines run word version 7? on Windows 95.
So to test the conversion capabilities in a rather unofficial and quick manner I created a
Star Office opened every file with out a problem. It then was able to save the file in a format that our existing MS office products could handle.
I havn't used the product enough to tell if it can replace our existing installed base but I got the go-ahead for a short term usability test. ie. I get to use it as my primary Office Suite for the next month or so in an evaluation mode..
If it works out we will have saved approx 40x300=$12,000 in upgrade fees.
Figuring out how to render it on the screen so that it looks and acts like it looked and acted on Word is the problem.
Well, I'm not talking about rendering or actually editing (implied by the "acted" word). At the very least you could convert it fairly well to just about any format (e.g. postscript). But presumably the Office suite using the "filter" would have rendering capability that is flexible enough to render a word document as it would appear in word. If this is indeed true then the real problem is generating a suitable document tree for the viewer in question. This is simply a matter of traversing the tree generated by the filter and translating it into the tree the viewer uses. You don't need to do any rendering at all. You just have to get your node-for-node translation routines to tweek it's attributes in the translation. If the viewer doesn't do a perfect job it should still be quite functional. If the veiwer doesn't support some OLE mumbo jumbo you can quitely skip those nodes in the tree and you still have a functional document. You could then edit it and reverse the translation.
I have StarOffice 5.2 and generally like itbut it is just way too big to go on my laptop which is where most of my writing takes place. When I write something simple, something that doesn't need citations, I use kword. If I am writing something serious, I use lyx. Why? Because ONLY lyx can do citations.
My IMPORTANT writing is scientific, for publication. That means references. In the windoze/mac world, you can use wordperfect or word in combination with endnote and do wonderful citations with autogeneration of your references page. NO wordprocessor in linux, currently OR planned, can do this and the makers of endnote aren't going to write a linux-native version. This leaves lyx.
It took a lot of getting used to because it doesn't look or behave the way ANY other wordprocessors do. But now that I am familiar with it, I use pybliographic or sixpack (two very nice reference managers that can pipe into lyx) with lyx. The result is a complete solution. I can write scientific papers, easily add references, and the reference page is handled for me.
Koffice, Gnome Office, Abiword, StarOffice, Gobe, Papyrus, etc, etc, etc cannot do this, period. You can ONLY use them if you write documents that require no citations - unless you are a freak and LIKE to manually organize your references, add them by hand, and type out your reference pages manually.
Soon, so I am told, Lyx will incorporate a simple reference manager capability like that provided by pybliograhic and sixpack - nice and ABOUT FRICKIN' TIME that SOME linux wordprocessor (or in the case of lyx, wordprocessor-like) contain the ability to deal properly with bibliographies and citations. Sheesh. Are there NO scientists among linux users who create these apps? As far as I can tell, scientists from many different areas ALL use lyx for this reason (among a few others). Until this capability is added to any or all of the other linux office suites, they wont be used by scientists for real writing.
Scientific data analysis: can use kspread ONLY for data entry. When I actually want to plot it out and do analyses, I export the spreadsheet containing my data to a textfile and import it into Grace. I can then do regression/curve fitting and just about any other scientific analysis on my data that I could want. Kspread cannot, and kspread in combination with kchart cannot (let alone that kchart is still buggy as hell).
Please, SOME developer working on ANY of these wordprocessor/office suites, think about more than secretaries and business types. Think, just once, about SCIENTISTS. Hell, if you are a college student in a scientific field of study, you cannot do serious scientific work with ANY linux office suite or wordprocessor EXCEPT lyx. Most of the statistics available are not very robust (or are terribly non-intuitive or buggy) for scientific purposes. The spreadsheets and charting apps can't handle your scientific needs (error bars, regressions, extrapolation, other curve fitting needs). Why is that? None of you are from scientific backgrounds? You're ALL business/mgt clowns?
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I don't know about StarOffice being the only worthy competitor here. Particularly when you argue, correctly, that we need more choice in the industry. But that's quibbling.
Right. When people claim Microsoft's dominance in the industry is due to their OS monopoly, I think they are missing an important point. People buy Microsoft to run applications. Microsoft applications. Until competitors can read/write Microsoft binary files without problems, nothing will change.
Therefore, the proper remedy (IMHO) to impose on Microsoft, as punishment for their abuse of monopoly power, is to make it easier for competitors to compete with Microsoft on their own turf. Microsoft should be compelled to openly publish the specifications for all binary data formats they use. Publishing API's is insufficient. Worse, misguided. Using MS API's implies, of course, that you are using Microsoft products. Some punishment. No, the remedy must make it possible for competitors to avoid the enormous time and expense, not to mention possible legal entanglements, of reverse engineering Microsoft binary data.
Then instead of asking "How well does StarOffice (et al.) import/export MS files?", we can ask "Does StarOffice provide the features I would like in an Office suite?". That would be progress.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
It's always impressive when you go to a site recently mentioned on /., and they can still saturate a Cable modem connection at close to 250K/s... ;-)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
"Therefore, the proper remedy (IMHO) to impose on Microsoft, as punishment for their abuse of monopoly power, is to make it easier for competitors to compete with Microsoft on their own turf. Microsoft should be compelled to openly publish the specifications for all binary data formats they use."
Yep. This would be SO much more effective than a breakup. A breakup would create two monopolies, and if they're careful about how they collaborate, nothing would change.
Publishing the file formats would instantly force them to compete on merits or lose a tremendous marketshare to - well just about anyone!
"I could go on and on about all the shit that's wrong with it."
Or, you could actually look at a recent build and judge it on its real merits. None of your complaints exist in the current builds.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I just downloaded and installed it 2 DAYS AGO. I can assure you, it still has the screwed up dialogs.
I used Gobe Productive on BeOS, and I've got to tell you if it is coming to Linux, then Linux is going to be a SERIOUS competitor for office use! This is GREAT news!
OpenOffice is the Mozilla of StarOffice 6.
I like OpenOffice much better than StarOffice 5 (so far) because it can use my X fonts and it's pretty (anti-aliased). But I haven't used it enough to know if it's more stable than StarOffice 5 yet. Perhaps others can offer some knowledge. Also what's the deal with the inbuilt web browser? Did the developers write a new one (since the original one was stripped out with the release of the source to staroffice)?
Got friends?
Dude, StarOffice sucks. There is no other way to say it. Why does my Office Suite need it's own start button and desktop? WTF were they thinking?
If i am not mistaken this is one of the problems / issues that SO 6 will solve. If i remember correctly SO 6 will have seperated the applications so that if you want to use StarWriter you can without loading all that memory hogging ugliness. I can not actually confirm this as i am not going to d/l SO 6 over a 33.6 modem, if it is not the full release.
Do the following really mean anything? SCSA MCP CCSA CCNA
--I'm not actually after an answer!
In my experience, you are both right. It is possible to recover from pulling the plug in Windows.
But, Microsoft Word has always seemed quirky and buggy to me. Every time I have tried to use it for an extensive project, it has done something unpredictable that caused hours of lost time.
Microsoft products seem to me to be built with the idea that they need to be buggy so that there will be a reason to upgrade.
My experience with Open Source software and Linux is that they are built with the idea that they should work well. There's no conflict of interest.
Each paradigm achieves its goal. It's just that the Microsoft goal is not something the customer could like.
It is not the autobackup system that fails. It is just that Word often munges its own files.
Bush's education improvements were
And I am looking at build 638 of OpenOffice which has STANDARD Windows file open dialogs. I don't know about the version Sun distributes, but the current build of the open codebase doesn't have these problems. Note the quote another poster posted about OpenOffice and its "predecessor" StarOffice. If you've got beefs with the interface, at least check with the most current build of the current codebase. Since you're looking for problems and there are so many, you should also be able to find a myriad of problems with the OpenOffice codebase as well, but don't drag in bugs that are gone as current.
I had never heard of Gobe and Hancom prior to this article, yet they appear to have Office suites far superior to KOffice, Gnome Office, and OpenOffice, and which were developed quite rapidly. Both companies appear to be small and efficient with tight-knit programming teams. Both companies focus on Linux and receive all the benefits therein. Both companies are *selling* their products as proprietary closed software, but for very reasonable prices compared to Microsoft Office and with far more flexible licensing.
This tells me two things:
1.) Open Source development in office suites is not working as it stands today. Progress is slow and the results are mostly crap. I'm sorry, but I've had far too many crashes and frankly, that is entirely unacceptable. It is not that damn hard to write a stable piece of software. StarOffice is perhaps an exception, but remember that StarOffice started out as a commercial product and was then bought and given away to the community by Sun as a means of undermining their biggest competitor. The fact that the Open Source office suites are largely failing means that the experienced programmers are not being supported enough to work on them full time.
2.) Gobe and Hancom are meeting their operating costs by charging reasonable licensing fees for their software. I venture to bet they are only marginally profitable, yet they are stable businesses at the moment. In return, their programmers get paid to write Linux software full-time -- software that appears thus far to be superior to free open source offerings. In other words, their development model is working for them. While these two companies have every right to choose their means of business, it is my belief that true open source companies could do at least as well. The problem is a lack of open source entrepreneurs. There are dozens of business models that have not been explored for making money from writing free software. There are dozens more not even dreamed up yet. What we need as a community is creativity. Eric Raymond's list of business models in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is a good start, but it is by no means complete.
Open Source is a powerful idea, but it must be exploited wisely. Whining has never solved any of the world's problems. Nor has complacence. Open Source programmers, look at yourselves and believe that you can change the world, for you can if you will only believe. You are intelligent, you are capable, you are innovative. Go make a difference while you have a chance. I certainly plan to.
Whatever happens, Microsoft must be compelled by the courts to use ONLY published file formats. Otherwise any judicial remedy is a joke.
Bush's education improvements were
Ever heard of TeX? or LaTeX? In the math department, LaTeX is *THE* format, whatever platform. xfig does well with figures. Plus, if you are fast at typing, *TeX is much faster for typing up papers, tests, asignments, silabii, and general usage.
None of these 'office suites' (linux, windows, or mac) come with nearly the features or control. It goes out to PostScript, and then print. (Several professors have a modified gvim, with menus and options (make dvi file, make ps file, print ps file, etc), and there might even be one of the unreformed who uses emacs. Of course lpr is easy enough for most people.
I personally think Lyx has gone the right way- make the best thing available to more people.
Suffice to say, office suites should be renamed 'business' office suites. Especially funny when someone (administration, etc) sends a word, excel, etc document, if you get to read some of the people's response letters, they are rather nasty.)
Stuff such as maple, mathmatica, and matlab (and yes, I know one of those doesn't, cant remember which one, tho.) run faster on linux.
As for interfaces, 'intuitve' depends on what you have seen- depends on YOUR experence. I think that say emacs is completely counter-intuative, *vi* doesn't seem that way to me, then again people say that *vi* isn't.
btw, yes, I do know what is going on. Look around, there are plenty of linux programs to do that, it has a (depending on the person) learning curve that is about the same (some take better to linux, some to windows), but the people who know linux can do stuff faster at about the same time (in learning).
Please excuse my rambling on.
The MS Office application (after Word) that gets used the most (and gives the most in productivity gains) is Access. We've made quick databases with nice input forms and spiffy reports that have made our jobs so much easier, and did it all from the desktop. This is the only area that I have seen OpenOffice fail for me.
The OpenOffice 633 release is darn nice, and for doing word processing and slide presentations, apart from being able to recognize all my true type fonts. This is (for now) a minor quibble, one that I'm sure will be fixed, or maybe already is and I just don't know how to get to it.
Regardless, some sort of user-level database tool with the ability to quickly create forms and reports would be the finishing touch and only real request I could make of the OpenOffice team. The average user doesn't understand SQL syntax, but can lay a table out with a grid and drag columns to form links. Slap that in, and MS Office users have nothing to miss.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
The primary reason I run Windows on my machine is so that I can run Word. If there was a viable alternative to word for Linux I would probably switch my main OS to Linux.
The biggest problem I have with Linux word processors is the ability to do spelling and grammar checking.
Spelling and grammar may not be important to some people but with my dyslexia it's almost required in order to write things that other people will be able to find acceptable.
I don't really care about filters or being able to share files. All I want to do is be able to write something and have my grammar be checked by the word processor.
The only program I know that does this with Linux is Wordperfect and the last time I tried that it was very unstable on my Linux install.
So I stay with Win2k until there is another alternative. I am also considering Mac OSX because I really don't want to consider eventually having to move to Windows XP. At this point in time I really can't give up Word and it's very nice grammar checking ability.
Chris (krafter@zilla.net)
Problem 2: Even without all that active content malarkey, if rendering was unambiguous, pages would look the same on IE and Netscape, and if rendering was easy, Mozilla might be done because it wouldn't have started with a codebase that included a recursive chain of 110 function calls.
Too bad some dumb VC didn't give SourceGear umpteen millions to complete AbiSuite. AbiWord (now part of Gnome Office AFAIK) is quite nice, and runs on just about everywhere a semi-modern GUI is available.
And you know how Word does it? Recusive Composition. Meaning Word doesn't do it at all! It delegates the resposibilty of playing that sound to another component. Within the document that sound is probably represented as some arbitrary chunk of bytes flagged as 0x52{media-unknown/joebobssoundformat[TGS%%@Y@*(SJ ESIEW&*EY...]} which Word plucks out and creates a node in the tree for, and passes it to some subsystem function to return a OLE component to satisfy the blob. Do you think they completely refactor the .doc format to accomodate an anamation? No! This is well known information guys, comon someone back me up here!
Well this is a different issue. They render stuff differently because the specifications for stuff like CSS where just getting started when NS4 was released. It's been a while. I believe Mozilla and IE should render things exactly the same way minus font metrics. That is if they both conform to the standards established by the W3C and friends. And I think they do. But this is incedental and I'm not talking about rendering (see other response to this thread).
So, whatever happened to the Star Portal project? (Web-enabling Star Office). Anyone? From what I can tell it died a quiet death somewhere...
Fuckers
Excellent idea. We should tell this to our elected representatives, not just in the U.S., but world-wide.
Bush's education improvements were
Even that is moot, since both KDE and Gnome have "start" buttons. CDE doesn't, but its just as idiot proof as anything else (point, click, ugh. cant find? point, click, browse until find. ugh).
And thank whatever gods that may be for the loss of the integration. What a mistake that bit of contrivance was.
Derek
jchristopher, it amazes me that your post was moderated as Off Topic.
Bush's education improvements were
XP stands for eXtra Pain.
Bush's education improvements were
Glad you mentioned this.
Bush's education improvements were
Just cos you've never heard of it doesn't mean no one uses it. Hancom Office has been under development for 10 years now and already has a huge installed base in Asia because MS were very slow off the mark at supporting Asian languages.
It was also an MS-Windows only product, but then got ported to Linux using Wine. That didn't work out too well, so now they are doing a native port to Qt3 along with theKompany.
When finished it could make StarOffice irrelevant, as it will compete or surpass it on features, and will also run on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X !
It will be nice for users to have a real cross platform alternative to StarOffice.
You are not mistaken. I have sampled s few of OpenOffice builds, including build 638 which is the latest. For several iterations now the "do everything in one place" pseudo desktop has been abolished in favor of separate applications. The latest build also has antialiased fonts, and basically it's looking really good.
I was worrying about what I'd have to do to get my fonts antialiased after hearing that openoffice638 supported them. I was surprised to discover that OpenOffice requires no fiddling to enable the AA fonts --for all of the fonts on my system. StarOffice 6.0 and OpenOffice are going to be more than just adequate software, they will finally make reports enjoyable on Unix, not to mention FREE on Windows, Unix and hopefully Mac OS-X as well.
Johnny Quest has two Daddies.
If you really want your file to look the way you intended it, use PDF!
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
"They send me Rich Text email, I change it to plain text and send it back. Their client is set to send Rich Text by default, so it gets changed back. Then if I reply again, I change it back to plain text." Fuck! What's your address? How much volume can you handle? Are you running SSH? Can you decrypt / encrypt pgp on the fly? Can you handle classified documents? You've SOLVED my fucking filter problem!
No. Kword and AbiWord are cooperating to produce state of the art MS Word filters. We can do this because we're producing GPL'd code to match our GPL'd application. OO can't accept pure GPL code coz they need to able to integrate proprietry code.
Cheers
Martin Sevior
AbiWord, Word Processing for everyone.
> RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc.
.rtf to a .doc
Wrong. RTF supports tables (and im fairly sure it supports headers and footers too)
Microsoft Vordpad even supports RTF tables, it just does not allow you to create them.
> Completely unacceptable for most companies
Most companies wont ever notice if you rename a
It works every time.
read some documentation http://www.wotsit.org/search.asp?page=3&s=text
then show some proof, just because your favorite app does not have a good rtf exporter does not mean that the format does not support it.
XML will probably provide the basis for the next standard that will replace RTF but an XML file is as generic as a binary file and MS Word can easily produce a file just as incompatible as it has done before.
Hopefully open source projects like OpenOffice KOffice and others will get together and and agree on a standardisded file xml based document format.
Yes, Adobe behaved badly, but that doesn't make their format ritually unclean. You can read and write PDF without putting any money in their pockets, since PDF is well supported in free software.
And I haven't seen any evidence that Adobe is trying to manipulate the format to screw other people up. Heck, Apple felt secure enough to base their entire MacOS X GUI on PDF.
Find free books.
PDF provides what RTF does but also gaurantees layout and fonts (by giving very detailed absolute instructions and embedding almost everything you want)
Im not sure how open the PDF format is, i suspect Adobe holds patents to some small parts of the system.
Annoyingly there are not very many freely available PDF editors (converters maybe but not editors), it may as well be a closed format.
If you want portable consistant layout then you have DVI (DeVice Independant) which is TeX based, so LyX, LaTeX, TeX and whatever else all support DVI.
I think KOffice is the next best chance after Open Office of a decent opensource office suite for windows.
I think people like Miguel de Icaza have hindered Gnome apps from being more cross platform. Its one thing to say we dont support windows, its another to act all superior and condescending and say we wont support windows.
i a big fan of the idea everything as a component/module/library/whatever/etc. but if you dont have good orthagonal seperability. it is going to cause problems.
Much of Gnome is tightly integrated and to port stuff to windows even with gtk and cygwin (and ming win) porting stuff is still not very easy.
Of course Miguel does seem to care about non unix systems but portable software is good for everyone. Its heresy to say so but Linux may not be so popular (or even reconiseable) in 10 years so its wiser to make all you software as portable as possible
.
Read the Mythical Man Month by Brooks, it will explain the importance of the longterm better than i can.
To the jerk with moderator points who has gone through this article and moderated down everyone who said anything bad about StarOffice, FUCK YOU.
There is a post by a guy who said "it's slow on my K6 266mhz, but I'll try it again when the new version comes out" and you moderated him as a "-1, troll"?
I pointed out that it was dumb of them to not use the standard Windows file Open/Save dialog boxes because it confuses users, and you hammered me as "-1, flamebait".
You are missing an important guideline for moderating - not to let your feelings get in the way. What a joke. How would you feel if some Microsoft flunky got mod points and moderated up everything that said "Linux sucks!" - probably not good, yet what you have done is the same thing.
If you want to see people's REAL experiences with StarOffice, you should read this article at a threshold of "0", otherwise you aren't getting the whole picture, which is that it's a good alternative, but also that it has a lot of problems. Thanks for reading.
you're funny
Fuck you too.
:P
Star/OpenOffice is still the best near-term shot at displacing some MSOffice installations.
I doubt it, since Open Office is Open Source (dual-licensed under the GPL & SISSL). What license is Hancom Office under?
Yes, I said tables . . . I'm unconvinced by your arguments about how hard they are to support, though. What is so difficult?
Well, try importing some Word tables into various office suites and see what happens. Many suites will put the right text into the right boxes, but the formating isn't exactly the same, so the table runs off the page margins or stuff that is supposed to be on one line breaks up and makes the table look like hell.
Now export that table back to Word (for your colleague who is a Microsoft-only guy) and repeat. The table turns into a hard to re-format mess.
And this happens with the *good* export/import filters. The problem is that WYSISYG word processors have delicate rules for formating. In text paragraphs, this is not so bad, as you can always re-align the "soft" line and page breaks. But in a table, that can really mess up the results.
Whether or not the export filter (and import filter too!) is available is indeed important, BUT, the thing is available doesn't mean it works !
Take for instant, the Staroffice Export Filter to M$ Powerpoint - yes, it IS available, but it ONLY works if your Powerpoint slides containing graphics AND ASCII.
If you ever put ANY type of NON-ASCII thing out in the file, the StarOffice will NOT save those NON-ASCII thing FOR YOU !
Yep, Staroffice WILL PRETEND that it saved EVERYTHING, with no hint of anything gone wrong... only that, after HOURS of rearranging the layout, and key-in the NON-ASCII texts, and THEN saving the whole thing via Staroffice will you find that NOTHING - except the ASCII and the graphics - is saved.
Boy, I've been bitten by these type of "features" once too many.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is where I part ways with the FSF. I agree that it makes sense to have source code. I think that one should have access to the source code for any app on one's computer. I think that one should be able to distribute of the software, or even sell them. I even believe that software copyrights should be shorter than normal ones--perh. 3 years. Look at GhostScript. Those guys make money, and they support Free Software (not just Open Source).
Programmers need to make money. They are highly trained, and their labour is valuable. The methods that the FSF suggests do not seem to cut it for me. We don't need a computer tax to pay the enlightened to program--it would fall prey to all the pitfalls of any other brain-dead socialist programme. Saying `just write for industry' sidesteps the question. I really like the idea of short-term copyright; allow the producers to make money, but then allow for freedom.
The FSF is big on freedom, but short on realism.
I just hope that these Gobe fellows do well; I really do. They look like a nice bunch, and their product looks great. I'd hate to see it and their dreams die.
Even MS Office can't read all MS Word/MS Office documents, so why should anyone else be expected to? (And of course others mentioned the MS Word file incompatibilities...)
The original poster states that the biggest problem for the Linux office suites is (has been) the lack of MS import/export filters. Personally, I've always found the filters in StarOffice 5.2 pretty good. A bigger problem (IMHO) is that there is no universal import/export filter engine. I've used Macs for a long time and the XTND system where any app can use a common set of filters is very useful. This brings me to Gobe. It appears that Gobe is being devloped by the team that developed ClarisWorks.... This means that GobeOffice will probably be very good for general day-to-day stuff, but useless for anything scientific! Strangely, GobeOffice will be for Windows and Linux but not Mac. Is this a plot against Apple? Anyway, would then the Gobe developers be in a position to promote the devlopment of OS independent system-wide import/export filters?? I hope so. As a starting point they could do a lot worse than using the filters from OpenOffice (assuming the filters in OpenOffice are from StarOffice).
return 0; }
It is interest to note in the Hancom WebSite that the Hancom 2.0 is using:
Quata as HancomWebBuilder 2.0
Kivio as HancomEnvision 2.0
Rekall as HancomEasyDB 2.0
Aethera as HancomQuicksilver 2.0
A little look up into the Kompany page talks about the patnership.
Anyways, just watch out for not buy the same app twice.
Email is easy to substitute. We use Outlook just as much for scheduling meetings and keeping track of where people are. I know of at least one site where they installed Outlook purely for calender (they forbid staff to use it as an MUA).
And despite my aversion to things from Bill, I use the calender/scheduling because it works painlessly.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
aps isnt a compressed format, is it? I thought it was just 28mm film, as opposed to 35 or whatever. theres no compression though.
>If you really want your file to look the way you intended it, use PDF!
This does not ALWAYS work. Ghostscript can produce PDF files that cannot be read in Acrobat, or xpdf. And vice-versa.
If I generate a PDF (and I have many times, I ALWAYS proof the file by rebooting to Windows and using Win Acrobat. Even then... it's possible my file will be opened on a Mac.
You raise a good point tho. Gnumeric (Excel clone for GNOME) has an "Export as PDF" option. PDF is very useful, and should be standard in any document software.
>OO can't accept pure GPL code coz they need to able to integrate proprietry code.
So? Wouldn't you want as many projects as possible using these filters? Accomodate them and offer the MS Word filters as LGPL... seems perfect from my angle.