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New York Times Plugs OpenOffice Suite
MrNovember writes "The New York Times (registration blah blah) describes a new choice for office suites. The writer seems a bit slanted toward OpenOffice but it's a fair discussion of its pros and cons. The article has identified some interesting compatibility issues to those who aren't using OpenOffice but might. Again we see major media discussing open source as an actual alternative to a longstanding standard. The article concludes amusingly with 'Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for;' just tack on 'Open Source' to the beginning for the perfect sig." We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice.
'Open source every now and then, you get what you don't pay for'
;-P
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
this reminds me of an article that Nicolas Negroponte wrote back in 1995 in Wired. Once the initial cost of production is re-couped, the cost for another copy of software (or any digital artifact) is near zero. with colloborative software being written and distributed for almost nothing, I wonder how long proprietary software (or closed-source) can truly survive (and make money for the publisher). Open source gaming anyone?
Sometimes I derive great pleasure thinking of Microsoft lawyers running around saying, "Hey wait, who can we sue!?" and MS lackies running around going, "Hey wait, how can we run those Open Source people outta business!?"
Must be hard to compete with a good, free product minus draconian licensing. It's just beautiful man.
Can I bum a sig?
I like OpenOffice. I like the fact the files are just xml files in a zip file. The fileformat is easy to reverse engineer and use. I am a big fan.
rick hightower dot com
It seems like this would be a big help in moving to OpenOffice, and not that hard to do.
There is a word for that. It is prepend. If this were graded there would be a -1 Word Choice above that. Come on /. Editors.
Sorry if I'm being pedantic.
I find the compatibility to be great with the exception of bullets. A bulleted list in OpenOffice.org will not appear like one opened in Word. However, a bulleted list in Word will appear as a bulleted list in OpenOffice.org. Aside from bullets, OpenOffice.org performs great with tables, spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. I have not tested any documents that contain macros or advanced formulas, since I rarely use those features. OpenOffice.org is great for users with basic needs.
Since my resume contains bullets, I have not been able to uninstall Word. OpenOffice.org is my default application for all Office filetypes.
Regards,
javajeff
I think that this is one of the best ways to promote awareness of OSS. I know many people who are somewhat computer savvy, they know enough that they don't mind trying new things, but they don't seek this sort of stuff out. They don't read all sorts of tech sites, but they do read newspapers. If we could get more coverage of OSS in the tech sections of every day newspapers (most ones that I know have a small tech section in with the business section, or a once a week all-tech section), we could slowly increase awareness of stuff like OpenOffice and Linux.
My other sig is funny!
http://www.majcher.com/nytview.html
You're gonna see a hundred /. users with sigs such as:
--
"Look ma, I got the perfect sig!"
echo "'open source'" >> the\ beginning
dmarien
link (it fills out the form and refers you, it's not a trick)
I knew that I didn't install any office software for a reason, and this was it. Who needs the silly grammar checking anyways. Skwiggly green lines can bite it. Yay for open source, I can pay for groceries this month.
Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
This is close, but it's not quite right. The correct principle is: you get what the people you patronize want to provide.
We often forget this in a world that's interested in repeating the "customer is king" mantra.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
So far it starts up quicker than staroffice and there is no so desktop which is nice. It failed to recognize my jvm during the install, but I'm not that bothered by that just yet. I am using it on Linux and installed it as root, and ran into a problem with permissions it seems. I had to change ownership to (chown -R : ) to then run it as myself. It would start up and then crash right away until I did this. Or I could run it as root. Not sure why though, and now I dont care as it works. It does use lots of disk space but then so does MS office and SO 5.x. So far I am pleased with it, as it gives me yet another option to deaeling with MS docs and excel spread sheets... I give it a thumbs up ;-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
Businesses and people buy MS software mainly for the intergrated office applications, then are forced to buy Windows and networking applications to support it. If anyone could seriously dent this, then MS could be on its way out.
...
Remember, MS changes stripes each decade. 75-85 it was a languages company, then became an OS company, then became a business software company. Lotus, Word Perfect, and Harvard Graphics "owned" the business app sector before MS did. Now MS is trying to become a personal entertainment company- games, digital TV, ISP
It is a fact. I have helped almost all my family (no geeks in there) migrate from Windows + MSOffice to Linux + OpenOffice with no side effects. If you install a nice system, and add the OpenOffice icon to the KDE desktop, you are done.
How many times does your mom install a new printer? even when she had Windows and she got a new LaserJet she called me!. We all know all the people and institutions that are migrating towards Linux and OO, its just a matter of time to see it as a mainstream.
On the other hand, it would come handy if the WalMart Mandrake PCs come with StarOffice preinstalled and with a HUGE icon in the middle of the desktop for all users.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Well, I know this isn't bug fix central, but here it goes:
The Times article says "The word processor idiotically flags any phrase containing a dash -- like this -- as a spelling error."
Now, it doesn't seem like it is flagging it as a spelling error for me, otherwise it would just underline it; instead, as soon as I type a few letters after a dash, it turns the dash into a question mark. The way around it is to insert the dash into the text later (such as in the example above, type "like this," then go back and insert the dash). But this is really annoying when writing.
Anyone using OpenOffice know what causes this problem, or how to fix it? Or at least what causes it? Seems like solving this problem will be important in getting OpenOffice widely accepted since dashes are commonly used in writing.
Long and short, articles like this help my case that Open Office is becoming more mainstream. I love it!
Click here or here.
Interesting that the reviewer chose to focus on the OpenOffice flavor rather than the StarOffice flavor, given that large corporations (Sun's sugar daddies) would be much more likely to stampede for corporate support--and corporate name recognition.
.DOC format and then kvetch when Word 2008.323 can't read it. OpenOffice is trying to beat Word at its own game, but I frankly don't think all of that is sustainable. We will see encrypted document files, and even more draconian EULAs from Microsoft; I only hope that some corporations are willing to take the plunge and become vendor-independent.
I think OpenOffice shows a lot of promise in the windows world, but I wonder how long it'll take for Microsoft Word to obfuscate its file format (it's pretty obfuscated as is, but I get the feeling they have not yet begun to fight). Far too often, it's convenience that rules the day; despite the fact that RTF is still a darn good format, people save in Microsoft Word 2008.324
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.
Despite this user being slanted... Can anyone be TOO slanted toward Open Source?
I think not!
Spam: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
Pr0n: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for
Warez:every now and then, you get what you don't pay for...
We're a small tier OEM, and myself and another tech have convinced 'those that be' within our company to include Open Office on our low end systems instead of MS Worksuite 2002 OEM.
Unfortunately the systems still come with MS Windows XP Home on them, but at least it's a step in the right direction. All of us techs now have Open Office installed on our computers and use it for pretty much all of our office app needs except for a few Excel quote sheets that have embedded macros that don't seem to function properly.
So far we've had no complaints from any customers that have purchased these systems, but then again we've gotten no rave reviews either. I would definately say that it is an option though, at least for people who aren't tied directly into the MS specifics of the different file formats. Anyone who just wants to use a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation software and do thier work from scratch should be more than happy with this software.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
1. Ugly fonts
2. Can't read ALL the Word documents
3. Still a bit sluggish
Three! I mean three major gripes!
Seriously, font ugliness is a big problem under linux and it's all X's fault. You've seen the hundreds of people gawking at anti-aliased desktops, it just looks cooler.
I believe there are many articles on exactly why fonts are ugly in linux... I also believe that the lack of cool, MS-compatible fonts (let's face it guys, Truetype was one thing MS carried from Win 3.1 to Win XP for a reason) are because of licensing issues.
The next time a big company wants to donate money to open source, get them to design or fund fonts! That'll get Linux on the desktop. That'll cause secretaries to use OpenOffice and that'll make me happy.
'nuff said.
Defeating Linux and open source apps - strategy
- identify strengths and weaknesses of opponent (done)
- ???
- Defeat linux and open source!
They must be tearing their hair out. Nelson "Ha Ha".Maybe I'm an idiot but (I know that is asking for trouble), I have never gotten openoffice to install correctly on my linux box. I want the "network" install that way both myself and my wife can use it, however when I do that (using the switch from the command line like the instructions say) it always wants to install itself for the user EVERY time you try and run it!
I guess all I'm trying to say is I like it (use it on windows), but I dispise their linux installer! in my mind it would be best to install globaly for all users as a default, then for one user as an option (not the other way around)
Blink
here is a page I made showing how Windows/MSOffice, Windows/OO, Linux/OO, and Mac/MSOffice handle the same document--a document, as it happens, that comes straight from Microsoft.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.
From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"?
"We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice."
Hopefully some of those companies that are now saving many thousands of dollars by running OpenOffice (Especially the largeer firms/localities.) will consider hiring a developer to kick in some work on OpenOffice. Even if only a dozen companies worldwide did it, OpenOffice would suddenly get a huge boost of forward momentum.
One great trick I found for converting excel files to HTML files. Excel does an awful job, writing an html page 10 times the size it needs to be, and the code is IE-centric. However, openoffice can open .xls files, and then save as html, and it outputs nicely formatted, standard HTML at very respectable sizes.
Travis
I don't use Word much and I personally probably approach 5% of the potential functionality. I just recently was sharing a Word doc that I had added comments with (using their functionality for, not just writing them in). None of the recipients knew how to find my comments and they wanted to know why I had hilited some words (mousing over the hilite brings up my comment).
Working at a large Sun shop we have been evaluating Star Office 6, but even at a cheep $76 a copy price it still gets expensive when you are talking about 1000+ licences. Open Office 1.0 is looking like a better deal everyday.
------
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
"That's not to imply that the software isn't polished, stable and fast; it is."
OpenOffice fast? What OpenOffice exactly are they talking about? On my Duron 600 / 128 it takes 30 seconds just to get into it.
Open Office is everything we *need*, and nothing we don't like the notorious paper clip. I'm actually rather amazing just how well this program was made, there are no stupid frills that even its other open source counter parts tack on (like Star Offices virtual Desktop). It's fast and you can actually run the thing without needed to upgrade the entire office to account for all the cpu cycles the program wants to eat up. It's fantastic export functions allow you to have compatibility with those who are less technically inclined and use MS Office
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
I spent already a couple of times registring my legit copy of MS Word 2002 talking to MS droids on the phone to get a new activation key. The people were nice and all was done smoothly (for the exception of spelling 2 numbers of 50 digits each on the phone which took 10 minutes each time) but the pain it takes just to be able to reinstall a software I pay for is just one last drop I can think would move people to Open Source. It's this feeling of making me look like a thief begging for a new key that tells me that MS is not making it easy for people to stick with their products. Not to mention the time you have to waste each time just to be "granted" the right to you MS products.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
People are happy to claim OpenOffice as a successful Open Source project, but how many remember that the bulk of code in Open Office was produced as a closed source propritary program? I'm looking forward to the day KOffice becomes as usefully featured as MS word and a little more stable tham it is now. Same for KSpread, KPresenter etc. These are the OpenSource projects people need to get behind. Or perhaps the fact that a product can only be successful against entrenched competition if it has been spawned by a large commercial entity, or is living in the shadow of a product being sold by that entity, tells us alot about the willingness of the Great Unwashed to accept OpenSource software.
in fact, "blah blah" does not make the note shorter, which would really be the reason to say it! check it out:
"reg req'd" is all you need.
i don't understand when folks make it longer by adding "blah blah" onto the end. it's not like paraphrasing a EULA, where "blah blah" would really count!
To my fellow OOo users running under GNOME, you may have encountered a problem where the program will often fail to start properly. This is not a crash. OOo is simply being purged by the GNOME session manager due to its relatively long startup time. I was a bit surprised to encounter this problem in 1.0, having thought it an OO bug. However, this article led me to search Issuezilla for a solution, which thankfully was determined.
There are a couple ways around the purge. The easiest one is to add "unset SESSION_MANAGER" to the soffice startup script. One file, all GNOME users happy. A somewhat more intrusive and wide-ranging solution is to add "exec $PATH_TO_GNOME-SESSION/gnome-session --purge-delay=0" to ~/.gnomerc. Supposedly, this will solve a similar problem with Opera, according to the bug comments.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
It worked fine for me when I followed the instructions on the website to the letter using Red Hat 7.2. However, I have since upgraded to Red Hat 7.3, and now I have exactly the same problem as you.
This seems to be a fairly major problem, and Red Hat 7.3 has been out for a while now, so I can't understand why it hasn't been widely reported. Maybe it has nothing to with Red Hat 7.3 (what distro are you running?), maybe it's because we are both using NFS or something like that.
Let me know if you find a fix.
To be made in implementing, supporting, and customizing open source applications and frameworks, as in programming proprietary systems. I don't see proprietary software disappearing forever; but when there are free alternatives of equal (or equal enough) quality, free will win. I think we'll definitely see this in OS and certian server products (email systems, particularly, once an open source calendar server is available; no, none of the web based workgroup products count).
Someone will need to run that software, and there's always customization.
I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
One wonders why the high-priced lawyers and accountants at MS and the BSA gestapo haven't figured this out.
Econ 101 - consumers purchase things because they perceive value > total cost. If the VALUE of MS Office lies in its perceived ubiquity (since the software functions of the two products are practially the same), the moment that this "value" the opportunity or real costs of BSA Audits, harrassment, and the fear of that 'disgruntled employee' narc'ing sometime in the future, well DUH people are going to move away from these 'excessive costs' whenever they can.
It's my conviction that the widespread piracy of Win95 (and thus its widespread adoption) KILLED an arguably better competitor, OS/2. If every single copy of Win95 had to be paid for (the theoretical goal) it would not be the dominant OS. The tighter they squeeze, the more systems will slip through their fingers, indeed.
Sure piracy costs Microsoft; if IBM had recognized this at the time, and been handing out FREE OS/2 versions MS probably wouldn't have to spend the $$ to buy the Justice Dept today.
-Styopa
My OpenOffice runs with AA and Microsoft fonts in
Linux, but it's still ugly. So it could be a OO problem and
not X.
Martin
Finding God in a Dog
I find it amazing that people can be so blind about how the Internet/web is affecting the fundamental economics of the software industry.
I remember back when Microsoft were backslapping saying they had 'turned-on-a-dime' with regard to the Internet, and 'won' the browser wars by giving away IE. I remember thinking - this is the beginning of the end for you, mate. The day MS gave away IE was the start of a new epoch in the software industry which will result in the death of MS. Ironic.
Ok this is a big feature for me. It is the one thing all the open source word processors lack. I am willing to help code one, but have no idea how to start. I have tried google. Does anyone know about any open source projects presentlyworking on this, or even some reading to get me started?
That'll get Linux on the desktop.
How often have we heard this phrase.
The speed of time is one second per second.
Also, have you checked out nautilus? if you don't mind the occasional crash (it's improving) those fonts look nifty!
Overcaffeinated. Angry geeks.
We tried to use Star Office V5.2 When we tried to become "compliant", but with some of our older legacy machines, we found it troubling to run Lotus Notes R5 and Star Office at the same time. I have started them on 602 office suite and haven't looked back. It is a compatible tool free with a reg code, and runs much faster. The fact that each part of the program, ie spreadsheet, doc, and ppointish are all separate exe's. This saves tons of memory on these old 200's with 32-64 megs of ram. Make it not use 128 megs of ram and it will get better accepted I say. My .02 anyway.
"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
The article poses the question, "Who do you call for tech support?" if your office suite breaks.
That's the big bugaboo question with corporations: Who do we blame if something goes wrong? That's the question that MS wants to stick in your craw, to give the perception that open source software is unreliable.
However, if you're using Microsoft products, when is the last time you got tech support from Microsoft? I've been supporting Microsoft products in a Helpdesk environment for over six years now. I have never even thought of support from Microsoft as much of an option. Am I missing something?
I do know that every time I have submitted bug reports to Microsoft (which I've done on multiple occasions) the report seems to disappear into a black hole. I've never got even so much as an automatic confirmation or anything. And always, the suggestion to correct the bug has gone unanswered, with no bug fix. Yes, I rather resent the poor service back to me, when I was trying to help them.
Every open source project I've submitted bug fixes for have almost always sent feedback back to me. Usually in the form of a personal email from the author. Now how's that for service?
--Yekrats
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I found the OpenOffice documentation sorely lacking. It is otherwise a great package.
Figuring out where and how to change the key-bindings to emulate emacs was a bit tedious. And the format for the key-bindings is in binary, so you can't just edit a file. But I have it mostly working and it was a Huge improvement..
About the uglyness of the fonts. Im a (proud) Red Hat user and the fontserver that comes with it knows how to handle TrueType fonts. M$ distributes some TTF fonts for free (ms-webfonts something) plus you can use the TTF fonts from your windows install (you can technicly, but Im not sure legally). With this setup, I have the exact same fonts as the typical M$ user. Im typing this in Opera thats configured to use the TTF Helvetica font and it looks great.
Or ironically enough sometimes I do get what I don't pay for! :]
Your site seems to be the victim of a slashdotting. Since you're the one who posted the link to your site, would this be a self-slashdotting? Kinda like suicide by cop, heh.
:)
Thanks for trying.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
3. Still a bit sluggish
Last I looked, the Linux version of Microsoft Office didn't exist. When given the choice between "cake or death", most everyone will choose the cake.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Ack! My DSL is already glowing. Shoulda known better, even for such a lightweight page. OK, it's now mirrored on a real server.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I have seen numerious comments about how great OS products are and how much Closed Source are proned to problems. The truth is that A lot of OS projects are curently Inferior to there closed source counterparts. For main reasons that they are not completed yet. Or there not designed to do the same thing. There is a Top Quality Closed sourse products out there and also a lot of Top Quality Open Sourse products out there. But there is also a lot of Junky Open Sourse Products and junky Closed Source products. To be slanted on one side or the other can be a problem because it will lead you to getting the wrong tool for the job. Which is always the problem
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Let's develop software and give it all away for free. Then you can all figure out how you are going to earn a living because no one will hire American programmers anymore. Why would they when they can hire Indian or Chineese programmers to do maintenance for 1/10th the cost.
Can someone clarify this for me? I've heard a few people mention it, but I've never seen a popup on NYT web page with Mozilla.
They may try to simply do the same thing Trellian does to AOL IM-- Patch it everytime MS does soemthing to screw with access. A patch for everything and everything in a patch.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
1. Ugly fonts
So, why not change them? You can find the details in the README file under the heading "Changing the User Interface Fonts". Mine looked ugly too, until I did as the README instructed.
Didn't the underpants gnomes from southpark have a similar strategy? Who do you think will be more successful?
How can something be -1 interesting? WTF?
it is just a little counter-intuitive.
go through the "install" (setup?) for each user,
although it looks like a full install, it only
put's in pointers to the system wide files
from ~/openoffice60, it's a couple of MB
instead of 80 / user.
I seem to remember that TrueType was an Apple product with MS collaboration.
...)
Whatever, the basic idea is so good that its worth is obvious. And I beleive that progress is underway. Don't both KDE3 and Gnome2 support "anti-aliased" fonts? That's a partial answer. Now what is needed are some decent tools for building those fonts. If I recall correctly, the idea of a font is a collection of objects that know how to draw themselves are various sizes and resolutions and which can be mapped to a keyboard. One way to specify this is with Bezier curves (+ hinting), but I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be possible to specify programs that would do the same thing:
draw(char#, rect=(top, left, height, width), weight, color=false, solid=true, underline=false,
FontMaker used to show one a rectangle and allow one to specify which dots were black for which letter (rather like an icon designer). Fontographer, it's sequel, changed this to specifying the same thing in terms of what appeared to be Bezier curves, with hints for things like how lines ended, how you specified holes inside of letters, etc. These programs allowed the Mac to have MANY custom fonts that did just what was needed. The pixelated fonts looked ugly at every size but the design size, and appropriate reductions, but the bezier fonts looked good at many sizes. (There were scaling problems with things like serifs, size of dots, etc. which created esthetic problems if you deviated too far from the design sizes, so even scalable fonts look better at appropriate sizes.)
I haven't gone searching for projects like these, but they would certainly be a "good thing(tm)".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So I say this is a total red herring, and one that will bite the commercial vendors in the ass real soon now. As soon as OpenOffice hits Mac I'll definitely try it (and I'm using Mozilla now).
sulli
RTFJ.
A couple quotes from the article that made my jaw drop simply due to their mention:
OpenOffice can't run macros written in Microsoft's programming language, either. (On the bright side, you're therefore safe from Word and Excel macro viruses.)
I don't know if macro viruses are still floating around in the wild, but in a computer-illiterate, yet paranoid user culture, this may prove to be an important selling point. Time will tell if StarBasic can be used for similar abuses.
The article notes a few things that, if I understand correctly, OOo does better than MSO:
It's nice to have a proper Font menu (showing font names in their actual typefaces) at the top of the window, instead of on a toolbar that may not be open. It's also a pleasure to be able to open any kind of OpenOffice document (text, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing) from the File menu of any of its programs. [...] Both Word and OpenOffice Writer let you set up abbreviations that when typed expand into longer words or phrases. But only OpenOffice offers to complete frequently used long words automatically, which quickly becomes a huge timesaver.
If you listen to Bill's Legions, MSO is the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world that can do everything you can think of and more. I would appreciate being corrected here if MSO does the above, and I'd be surprised if it didn't.
Fortunately, the open-source nature of OpenOffice.org holds tantalizing promise for improved versions. Anyone is permitted, even encouraged, to submit bug reports, wish lists of features and other feedback via the Web site. As a new droplet in the tidal wave of the open-source movement, you may even experience the thrill of watching your tiny input have an effect on the next version.
*jumps up and down like a moron on speed*
This is what keeps me coming back to OSS efforts. I may not be able to program worth a lick, but I can still directly contribute to the improvement of a program I use and interact with the programmers as if they're human beings, instead of distant gods on top of a mountain of C code somewhere. I think this aspect of the Mozilla project should have been screamed to the heavens even more than it was to the users, the idea that Joe User could make a solid, tangible contribution to making their computers easier and better, rather than waiting for God Gates to bestow His latest Blessings upon the unwashed masses. Maybe it's due to my anarchist leanings, but I think we're better when we work together and listen to the people affected by our decisions and our work, instead of assuming I, and I alone, know what's best for everyone else.
Give a person a taste of the power, freedom, and agency s/he can have as an individual among many, and that person will never want to give it up. It's a liberating feeling.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Another link to the fetid realm of Trollaxor.
Admittedly this is just my own experiences, but all of the users I've had to support in an office environment, as well as my own use of office suites says that the functionality in OpenOffice and StarOffice should completely replace MS-Office with about zero user impact. It's good to see that OpenOffice is getting the kind of press coverage needed to make it a real challenger to Microsoft's dominance. The NY Times article is exactly the type of thing any product (not just open source) needs to become accepted as mainstream. Bravo!
"Suppose you were an idiot..... And suppose you were a member of Congress... But I repeate myself."
Right. Now try the same comparison with more complex documents. An xls that includes various buttons and other objects, along with the data. A Word doc with an embedded vid clip. A PPT, with a linked xls graph and chart.
For the business user, THOSE things do count. And when your client passes you an xls, they expect you to be able to read it and use. Added objects and all.
OO is getting there. And is GREAT in a standalone environment. But still not quite there if you have to send/receive M$Office docs.
I downloaded and installed OOo right after it was released. I generally like the software. However, there is one show stopper issue that keeps me from migrating completely. It is currently not possible to make crossreferences to paragraph numbers. If for instance you have a document with a numbered list of references at the end, it is not possible to insert a cross-reference in the text to one of these numbers. The same applies to tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings.
Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above, I can't use OOo (I use framemaker right now). I checked with issuezilla and this is something they are aware of, even though there doesn't seem to be much activity on the issue. I really hope they fix this soon.
Jilles
dude, if you're doing web work, shouldn't you NOT be a font freak? you don't know what systems people are using, and what fonts they have installed...
It was:
1) collect underpants
2) ???
3) profit!
At least the Underpants Gnomes would end up with a pile of underpants - which could be useful - even if they didn't make any profit.
I suspect that the engines of games will eventually be open source. But look at this:
When you are buying a game, you are buying entertainment, and that content will likely still be proprietary (plots, etc). A compelling game is like a compelling movie, and it is not just the rendering, etc, but it is also the plot, the innovation, and the rest of the content.
Think of games as being part programming and part litterature
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
More like "Windows: every now and then you pay for what you got"
-no broken link
I seem to remember that TrueType was an Apple product with MS collaboration.
It was
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
No, that's called a 'workstation install', and I've already done that, it didn't help.
How often have we heard this phrase.
Yes, but it's happening. A couple of years ago, the idea of Walmart selling linux boxes as desktop machines was laughable. Not now.
OSS evangelists saying this is like kids on car journeys repeatedly asking "are we there yet?" Just because they're annoying - and we're not there yet, dammit - doesn't mean we're not going to get there.
Could some1 post a user/password for the nyt, i'm an anonymous coward too lazy to retrieve my lost password or create a new account ........
I agree. I work for a large (thousands of employees) company and we won't switch from M$ Office until Microsoft freezes over. One thing worth pointing out, though, is how needlessly complex people make documents. If you look at the sample doc, there's nothing in there that *needs* to be as complex as it is. There's no reason that document shouldn't render in Office 3. M$ just made it fancier than it needed to be, as do many people. OTOH, lots of 'interactive' Excel stuff can be handled by web apps as well. They made a timecard for us here in Excel, which is great--except that the 300+ Mac users in the building can't use it. No reason for something like that not to be on our Intranet instead, driven by (scripting language of your choice) and (database of your choice.) (I also enjoy pointing out that a document, _created_by_microsoft_, is unreadable in what they say are comparable and compatible products.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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Although 99% of the people at the company where I work are hardly power users - most have their hands full just doing basic work in Word and Excel - I think the mindset here would preclude us from installing OO.
Recently we had a major meeting where the head honchos asked us to come up with ideas on ways to save money. I informally suggested to my manager that we consider migrating to OO and he just chuckled in response. We probably have 1000+ copies of Office installed so we are talking saving some real money here.
Incidentally, my boss recently decided that one way he could save money was to drop support on two production Unix machines - at a total of $20K/yr ! But switching to OO from MS Office was considered a joke. even though none of our users need anything exotic in an Office suite.
Okay, so I've contributed many hours as a developer to OpenOffice (hypothetically)? How do I get paid? Seriously. Sure, it's fun. Sure, I benefit from all the other cool free applications that others are working on. But, how, as a programmer, do I pay my bills and my family? Sure, some things like a companies e-commerce system will remain proprietary, but I'm honestly afraid that the ubiquity of OS's and productivity applications will threaten my ability to make a reasonably comfortable income.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
First off, thank you for taking the time to give that side-by-side comparison. That's cool!
I use OO on both Windows and Linux, and I've also found some of the similar issues pointed out in this example (along with the problem with the bullet points).
The one thing I can say about those sample screengrabs is this: while OO on Windows/Linux isn't entirely consistent with Word on Windows, it appears that OO is at least internally consistent with itself, across those two platforms.
So, if it's got to get it wrong, at least it's consistently wrong--which means that there is a defined locus for future improvement. Much better than random errors that go all over the place.
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Shoplifting: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for.
Prostitues: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for.
napster: every now and then, you get what you don't pay for.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
hey are you going to release the source to the cgi? it would be nice to get realistic information to populate their database with.
-- john
I work as a web developer, so my main need for .DOC files exists in creating proposals, contracts, letters and similar for correspondence with my clients. Like many other Windows users, I've been using the various Word products for as long as I've been using computers.
I've always found Word to be one of the least-intuitive, poorly-supported applications that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. To say that I hate Word with a passion would not be an understatement. To make matters worse, with each new release, the number of Word's "features" seems to expand nearly geometrically, while my ability to use nearly ANY feature decreases by some sort of evil inverse proportion. Microsoft needs to hire Jacob Nielsen to conduct some usability studies on the app, seriously.
So for me, ANYTHING that can help me to escape from the grasp of Word sounds good. I've got the 1.0 release of OpenOffice and I love it. Sure, it's got bugs vis-a-vis opening and saving Word files perfectly, and the bulleted list thing is really annoying (although some Windows people think they look really cool! LOL), but since most of my documents need to be created for hardcopy printing only, I'm learning to love OpenOffice.
The freetype font engine
http://www.freetype.org/
There are some nasty patent issues
http://www.freetype.org/patents.html
"Again we see major media discussing open source as an actual alternative to a longstanding standard"
How long has MS Office been a standard? It certainly isnt by my definition of the word
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> It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.
> From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"? [openoffice.org]
Shouldn't that be Gnu/OpenOffice.org
:P
/me laughs in the face of silly gnaming pedantry
Who needs the silly grammar checking anyways.
Not I, says this grammar wonk. I've got a better grasp on grammar than Word does (not hard, if you actually understand things like gerunds and subjunctives), and I'm tired of having to argue with it constantly. Why not switch? Because my project boss won't switch, so my hands are tied.
In fact, Word has very silly grammar checking, and its spell-checker blows diseased goats, too...especialy from the point of view of someone who professionally must keep a dictionary or two AND a thesaurus underhand constantly, and who may have to consult numerous specialized glossaries on any given day besides.
Nasty partisan shot: I like Word Perfect because it's the perfectionist's tool: It shuts up and leaves you alone. (If I have to fix those "you must really want..." MS 'regenerating' defaults one...more...time...)
I Go To Bed Angry and Wake Up Angrier the Next Morning, just like Harlan Ellison, and here're the reasons!
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
How about OpenMSoffice?
3. Still a bit sluggish
I'm not sure if you're referring to the load-time or the in-program speed, but if you want to (dramatically) speed load time on OpenOffice.org or even Mozilla, create a ramdisk and stick the libraries in there on boot (put it in your startup scripts) and voila! Everything loads as fast as IE on Windows!
Hargun
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
i would imagine the xml file refers to a dtd at the top. i would also imagine they are using an open standard so you shouldnt have to reverse engineer it. are my assumptions here incorrect?
-- john
Last I looked, the Linux version of Microsoft Office didn't exist. When given the choice between "cake or death", most everyone will choose the cake.
Except for Hitler. Remember, he took the vegitarian (that Nazi shithead).
Blurry fonts are not better. Anti-aliasing is a bad way to compensate for poor font design. Don't blur your desktop; choose fonts that work well when rendered as pixels.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
A little bit off topic here, but does anyone know if OO support printing to envelope. I've found that OO does support printing label, but can't seem to find printing to envelope. A little bit from personal experience using OO, when I tried to open my resume from Word2K format, it barfs. Abiword and Koffice managed to open the document, albeit not looking "right". So I tried to save my resume as Word97 format, and this time OO managed to open it and looks closest as it is when opened with MS Word. Now if there is a way to get rid of the "header" at the beginning of the document, I'll be very happy. My other question is whether there is a common document format between Abiword, Koffice and OO? I know there is RTF, but i'm looking for something with more "features".
I'd love to convince The Powers That Be to dump MS Office, but as an educational institution we pay next to nothing for it. When I tell people that I use a FREE office suite that is MSOffice-compatible, they invariably say "Is that so!" then change the subject.
U.S. Democracy: born 7/4/1776, died 12/12/2000 R.I.P.
They supported OpenOffice, decided to make some money off of StarOffice, and happened to also set up a move that might reduce Microsoft's ability to give away servers, software, etc to companies and schools on their assimilation list by reducing the endless money coming in from Office.
Thank you. That is so annoying but I have been :)
too lazy to try to figure out what was causing
it.
If one of these reputable sources did a whole series of articles (or a long article) on a group of Open Source applications/OS's. They could group OpenOfice.org, Mozilla, Linux distros, etc., and present it as a complete solution to Microsoft software.
If 1.5-2.5M federal desktops switched it would be disasterous for Microsoft. Go write, now
So far I'm pretty happy. The UI is okay, and things are pretty nice. However, I've had a lot of problems. (all in OO writer)
- I had serious problems with bullets. They all just changed to bullets with the number 10 in them. After spending about an hour on this, I found it as a fixed bug with a workaround.
- I've had the program crash once and my machine crash once (due to something else.) Both times I've lost work because there is apparently no crash recovery.
- Saving as HTML doesn't seem to work very well. In this directory you can see the HTML file has had some of its graphics messed up pretty badly, while others are just fine. I think that if I group each drawing into one drawing this problem will go away. But still...
- The spell checker is nice, but I can't see away to get it to ignore punctuation. So everytime I have two puncutuation marks back-to-back it calls it an error.
- You can't change the default bullet that is generated by hitting the "bullet on/off" button. You'd think it would use the list1 style or something, but it doesn't.
- If you want to contribute to openoffice.org you have to sign your code over to Sun. As far as I can tell, this means they can use it for whatever they want (StarOffice for example...)
I've also found that the bib. tool needs a lot of help. Also, right-clicking seems to cause menus to pop but based upon cursor position, not mouse position. I guess that is okay, but it seems like I have to click twice to get the right-click menu that I want (once to move the cursor, once to pull up the menu.)Given all of these complaints I still expect I'll finish this using OOo. It seems to work well enough and I'd like to move away from MS tools if possible.
As Nietsche famously said, "If you stare too long into the Abyss, 1d4 Tanar'ri of random type will attack you."
Talking of saving as HTML, has anyone managed to generate legal (as in passing validation) HTML in any version of MicroSoft Word on any OS from any DOC-format document (including the empty document)? Maybe W3C should sue them for trademark infringement. 8-) H++ anyone?
Yes, it is technically true that OO doesn't ship with a database program.
However, it has some darn nice database features. If you have existing odbc sources defined in windows, you can access them. However, unlike word, which let's you access them via the mail merge function only, OO goes one better: you can see and edit the tables as tables. You can create new queries, that are then available to all the OO components.
Let me say that again another way. You get everything MS Access gives you except for the ability to create custom forms. And they say that OO doesn't have a database.
You can also use jdbc or just link to an existing excel file. That's right, you can access an excel file as if it were a set of records and columns. I just linked to an excel spreadsheet with 17,000 rows and 30 columns, viewed it as if it were a table in a database, wrote a custom query that will now be available to all the OO components.
And they call this not having a database.
I've got users using OO to edit mysql tables that hold data for our website because MS Access couldn't work correctly with the myodbc drivers.
I really wish people would cover that aspect more in their reviews. It's a very important feature to us here. Our hidebound faculty will never move to it of course, but for some tasks like basic mysql database entry, that's what I'm going to have them use.
OpenOffice 1.0 is supposed to have anti-alias support, but it doesn't seem to work in 1.0.
See: Tools -> Options -> Openoffice.org -> View -> Screen font antialiasing
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
...than OO.
Most of us think "object oriented" when we see OO. When we see OOO, we think "exclamation of extreme satisfaction."
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
and the poop duck says- aye aye!
Yeh, kind of like those schools out west could pay next to nothing for MS Office.
prisoner# msce18xxxxx. Currently planning my escape.
how about act Mail merge functionality, that is the one feature that is holding us back from switching. of course Act! is of zero help on that subject
I'd like to see a comparison between reasonable anti-aliasing and un-anti-aliased fonts. Every page I've seen that wants to say "anti-aliasing is bad" shows some excessively anti-aliased text as an example. The example on that page can only cause me to conclude that Corel Photo-Paint's anti-aliasing is really bad. Heck, it looks like he ran it through a blur filter afterward just to make his point. AA on my GNOME desktop does not look like that.
(I'm not saying that GTK's AA is perfect. Diagonal lines tend to disappear.)
I'm reminded of when Mac users show examples of anti-aliased paragraphs of text rendered "before Quartz" and "after Quartz", raving over how perfect the "after Quartz" picture looks. The "before Quartz" one always looks MUCH better to read, as Quartz makes each character absolutely true to the letter form but, as a trade-off, really fuzzy.
I assume that the good antialiasing also takes hinting into consideration. So, are there any comparisons between properly-hinted AA and non-AA text?
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Yes, it indeed brings a smile. I am using Open Office for the last few months and I am very happy with it.
Of course there are some quirks, but you will sure get over it and adjust.
Tat Tvam Asi
Just looking at the documents you posted, it definitely looks the worst in OOo. It looks like the other Office programs have differen't margin settings, but render the document correctly.
Each MSOffice program gets the footer with page number right, where OOo fscks it up completely. You're metric of where the footnotes show up isn't the most important thing. I'd wager a guess that if you changed your margin in all the MSOffices you tried this on, it would show up identically. This was a poor choice to demonstrate intra MSOffice incompatibilities.
But fonts are boring, so nobody is designing them for Linux. Sure, you can get 101 different bitmap fonts, but no decent scalable monospaced fonts at all, and very few decent proportional width fonts (the RedHat Helmet fonts being an exception).
The main issue with fonts isn't designing the font, it is the proper hinting of the font. Also many scalable fonts look pretty crap at smaller point sizes - usually the sizes you want to use them at, so a hybrid bitmap/proportional font system would be best (so that you can custom design the smaller font sizes to look good). Again, the Amiga had this 10 years ago.
I can't help but think that everything we do we go 3 steps forward whilst stepping backwards twice and falling down a manhole.
This would be funnier if it weren't so accurate: Microsoft Technical Support vs. The Psychic Friends Network
And I'm not just MS bashing. I've had experiences with MS tech that closely resemble these. Every time I hear a PHB say "We have to use MS, becase we need the support" I just laugh and laugh and laugh. Then I go back to my office and cry.
That's a good reference. I was contemplating something that wouldn't be able to handle truetype fonts, but would instead use it's own approach. Basically this would just be a different VM, though. Something that would allow you to do a different kind of hinting (to be determined).
OTOH, when do those patents run out? 1989 + 20? = 2009 (right guess?) and how long would it take to build a new engine? and all the fonts to use it, too, of course...
But if the 1992 patent is the blocker, then that's 3 extra years. Might make all the difference which one is the blocker.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
OpenOffice.org is even more inconvenient to say than "Gnu/Linux".
No way, man.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
How do you install OpenOffice? It strikes me odd that it installs in its own space rather than to play nice with the file hierarchy standard.
Cygwin is much easier way. There are already X11 there. Several win-managers are already ported. Even some of gnome/gtk libs are successfully compiled. The rest of the work is just to fix (to port) the rest of the libs :)
I use Cygwin everyday at work and it works nice to me. I would very appreciate to have GNOME with evolution on it. It might work slow at first, but PC hardware performance is growing fast every day :)
much better :)
People work on open source projects for the same reason they write technical books. If you take into account the amount of time spent writing a book and the amount you get paid from it, it's pretty close to minimum wage. People write technical books because they have expert knowledge to share, and it's a way to get acknowledgement for it. A great resume builder...
Sorry if I'm being pedantic.
Not at all. There is far too little pedantry in the world today. Keep up the good work.
-x
You are correct about the spacing around dashes
However, OpenOffice does convert hyphens to dashes on my Windows box, regardless of whether their are spaces or not before or after the two hyphens. It's my Linux box with OpenOffice which is the problem, and I think the previous post about the fonts are probably the solution.
Caveat: I teach English in college.
There are a lot of things involved. First of all, what you think is bad and what someone else thinks is bad might be two very different things. Personally, I'd rather have malformed footers than a document that needs to be majorly reflowed. (Which OO would need anyway; Office/Windows makes the document 18 pages, Office/Mac and OO makes it 21 pages.)
.doc or .xls in IE/Win and it opens right up, but there is no web-browser plug-in *at all* to let you view Office docs on a Mac (except for PowerPoint, whoopdee-$#!+), which we have 300 of in our department. How nice it would be if all of those docs were zipped XML, like OO produces--we (or someone else) could just write something to dynamically unzip->parse->convert-to-html the documents--no more trying to train people "save, then resave as HTML" every time, etc.
But, it's just one page from one document, so it obviously can't represent every possible case. Elsewhere in the document are other problems. There's a table that runs through the margin and right off the page, trimming the ends off of words, on the Mac; OO/Win handles it fine.
I made that page to get several points across. I find it funny that M$ went out of their way to make a document that can only be read on a PC. (How many other documents have you "installed"?) Also, many people make documents much more complicated than they need to be. The more light-grey footers you add to your documents, the more trouble you'll have with *any* transition. I like the plain-text/XML-ness of OO documents.
Right now, I'm building my department's Intranet site. One of the things they want to do is make easily-available a lot of constantly-updated Word docs and Excel charts. You can click on a link to a
I think two things will/should happen: 1) Home users, no longer able to steal Office from work, will start using Open Office. If your mom & dad "live in a vacuum" (that is, not a lot of document trading), get them onto OO and off of Works or that copy of Office you stole from your last job. 2) Companies of 5-25 people will probably standardize on OO, with one copy of Office in the building for translating docs that OO can't handle. (Open in MS, copy, paste into OO on the same box, save to the server.)
The plain fact is that OO will not replace M$O in the enterprise anytime soon, but I think it'll make some great strides down the road.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hear hear! If I never see another anti-aliased glyph, it will be too soon. Just say no to blurry letters.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Many users attempting to migrate from M$ Office to Open Office complain that the native Open Office file format, '.sxw', does not always retain its formatting when opened in M$ Word. Well, how about '.rtf' (Rich Text Format)? Save as '.rtf' in Open Office and open with everything intact in M$ Word. Better still, if your M$ Word user at the other end will only accept '.doc' files you can change the extension of your '.rtf' file to '.doc' and no-one will be any the wiser!
In my experience, some of the best open source products are those that started off as closed source. IBM's Eclipse IDE is another example. I don't see any reason to discriminate against a good, open product because it once was closed. What's the logic in that?
Take a look at KOffice (I know, here starts the religious war)
:)
After using both KOffice and OpenOffice, I found the performance of OpenOffice to be unbearable. KOffice may not have quite the feature set of OpenOffice, but it's speed is great, and it's overwhelming "polished" look thanks to it being a KDE app.
I'm all for something replacing MS Word. But will someone _please_ code in a "Reveal Codes" feature like what WordPerfect had? This is the one thing I still miss about WordPerfect.
I also find I still want to hit / in my spreadsheet to do things, but I don't use a spreadsheet that much so I can cope
Why do people post NYT urls? Not everyone here wants to be a member!
When you send documents as attachments to people, send the attachments as OpenOffice.org formats.
Then when people complain that they can't read them, reply back with the document saved as the Word.Doc format, and tell them that there may be information missing as MSWord can't handle the format, and that it's old and outdated now.
Or something like that anyway.
Ian.
I've just gotten & installed StarOffice after having Open Office for a while and damn, it makes me believe. I think it stands an excellent chance of doing real, deep damage to MS if only sysadmins & CTOs will wake the hell up and smell the gains in cost of operations.
Amongst the big benefits:
And those are just the beginning of what the software is. Talking now about what it isn't, it IS NOT getting roped into a 3-year plan where you get to continue to pay money, but may or may not ever see a new version or any bug fixes. It IS NOT continually mutating file formats. It IS NOT macro viruses screwing with your systems here and there all the time. These are real problems with real costs attached, and to fix them the "nobody ever got fired for buying MS" status quo must change. Give it a serious look. Try it out. Do your jobs, for God's sake, and you'll see it's better.
It's not an option. If you don't do it your competitors will.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Funny how Microsoft, IBM, Corel, and some other companies are linked. However, there are no links to OpenOffice.org. How hard would that have been?
How to Download YouTube Videos
I think we're on the same page here. I still think that with regards to your earlier post, there were two issues
1) Interpretation of the codes
2) Display of the document
It sounds like you believe that MSOffice messed up on the second thing because the length of the document is different. If the margins were all the same (or embedded in the document) then I'd agree with you here.
I think that OOo messed up the first and the second. This is a problem. It's nice to have footers, headers and other similar items show up properly. My biggest problem is taking some nicely organized and formatted document from MSOffice and then trying to open it in Linux (any linux office app applies here) and having it show up completely different with wierd fonts, spacing issues and footer codes.
Fixing this is not easy because the spec isn't available. I understand this. But it's still a major obstacle.
Pobrecito Hablador
Does Open Office do footnotes? The only reason I write stuff from uni on my win partition is MS Word's footnotes - which are very good.
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
What? Prostitutes are free, now? Why didn't anyone tell me this before?
OO 1.0 does not have a working regular expression search. Neither does M$ Word. But because of the funky way Word files are put togther (open one in a editor like emacs), you can search for things like line breaks and page breaks. I think that Sun Star Office 6.0 has a reg ex search. Its absence in OO is due to a licensing problem (I can't get the bug report cause the site is /.ed), that Sun does not have.
I have had no problems opening XL 97 spreadsheets and Word docs with OO.
eg 1. No smart quotes, no emdashes. This effectively prevents reading of most Word docs as you get ugly "?" symbols at every quote or dash. This has been fixed in the developers build 642, but that crashes so much it's unusable.
eg 2. No anti-aliasing of fonts. Again this is "fixed" in 642 but - guess what - instead of using Xft anti-aliasing they've developed their own, ugly, and flawed font aa.
In short - people are going to try 1.0 on Linux and shy away just as I did. Perhaps these issues don't exist in the windows build? I hope not.
btw - is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that MS word opens faster in Linux using WINE than OO running natively?? Doesn't a 15 second boot time worry people??
Perhaps you didn't read all of my comment...
I'm making the distinction between anti-aliased text that takes hinting into account (apparently - I have no idea what the font renderers are doing behind the scenes), versus the kind that tries to be "picture-perfect" to what the letter would look like at a higher resolution.
In the comparisons of "before Quartz" and "after Quartz", the text is anti-aliased in both cases; the "before" case is somewhat distorted from the true form but very crisp, yet the curves are still smooth and AAed, and the "after" case is the ugly fuzzy one.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Follow the instructions on changing the interface font from the OpenOffice.org font guide. Be sure to add the changes (with the checkmark) and check the two boxes next to the newly added changes (you'll see what I'm saying when you do it). That should do it for your interface font.
For your other font ugliness problems (i.e. ugly fonts in the documents), the reason this is occurring is because true type fonts are not installed correctly. There are two remedies to this: 1) Do what the font guide from OpenOffice.org tells you (the hard way) or 2) if you have Linux Mandrake installed, run "Drakfont" and add the true type fonts found in your windows partition (c:\windows\fonts -or- /mnt/windows/windows/fonts directory, or if you don't have a windows install partition, just copy all the fonts in that directory from a friend's windows system to a temporary directory and have Drakfont load the true type fonts from that temp dir).
Linux at home
Churchill expressed it more eloquently:
"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"
- Churchill Nov 10, 1942
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
again someone who can't see the diffrence...
open source stuff doesn't have to be free you know
Do you mean: "Windows: every now and then, you pay for what you already have"
Woops, replied to the wrong post. I'm agreeing with the guy who has no use for AA fonts at all. They all make me squint, even the supposedly "good" ones.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder anyway.
I hear whining about fonts but I find them perfectly adequate.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I couldn't get mail merge to work from an Excel spreadsheet to an OOo text document.
Anyone have any luck doing so?
Windows: every now and then, you pay for what you don't get
free the mallocs!
1. Ugly fonts
The fonts are not ugly. OO.org uses freetype2, but the package you get at their site is statically compiled against ft2, and with a disabled bytecode interpreter (because of patents). If you are on a rpm system, you might want to try cookers OO.org, because it is dynamically linked against freetype2. Then, recompile or download a freetype2 with the bytecodeinterpreter enabled.
I think this was tried sometime back with the results of the Psychic Friends Network being slightly more helpful.
Gaming is the last true hurdle for Linux and it's being jumped quickly.
Forget Linux: Gaming is the last true hurdle for PC compatibles, no matter what the O/S. And it's not being jumped quickly. The PC game market is a terrible technical environment. It's a nightmare of multiple hardware and software configurations, being called upon to perform fast and in real time with zero user configuration. Brutal price competition means good tech support would be an impossibly large cost. Short attention spans on the part of press and public mean a race to the bottom as far as bug count.
Having said all this, the game production companies are obviously going to continue to focus most of their effort on the 95% market share O/S. Linux and Mac gaming will continue to be a red headed stepchild, months or years behind and with a fraction of the titles. MS will continue to be very aggressive in game API software development, and API emulators will continue to lag these gaming APIs more than most any other APIs.