StarOffice 7, GNOME-Office 1.0 Released

An anonymous reader writes "Abiword 2.0 has been released. Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory. At the same time Enchant 1.0.0 has been released, a cross-platform abstract layer to spellchecking. Enchant has been proposed to be a Freedesktop.org standard." That's not the only news, though: Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface." Sun's StarOffice has just reached version 7, as well: read on below for some more information on that, including a first-look review.

Jim Hall writes "I just noticed that Sun Microsystems has released StarOffice 7. I've been using the StarOffice betas for a while now, so I have been eagerly awaiting this release! StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org. StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format. It also introduces the new StarOffice Configuration Manager, the StarOffice Software Development Kit, a macro recorder, and support for assistive technologies, as well as for complex text layouts. Multi-platform running on Linux, Solaris OS and Windows. Only US$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."

An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."

One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.

Comments

StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is at, what, Office 2003? That's 1996 versions beyound StarOffice 7. Come on guys, get moving!

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont get me wrong I hate the M$ monopoly, but Office XP is hands down superior to star7.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[el-spectre]

Ok, I REALLY hate people who bitch about moderation, but they guy (not I, I refuse to use XP) was expressing an opinion politely. How the hell is this flamebait? Moderators, try using the 'logic' part of your brain over the 'politics' part, please.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

It's because he posted as an AC. If he posted from an account it would probably be +4 Informative by now.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[cuyler]

Please don't give Sun any ideas on numbering the versions of their products.....

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[marshall_j]

Yeah but 1999 of them were bug fixes for the previous versions ;)

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

>> If he posted from an account it would probably be +4 Informative by now.

Exactly. No matter what sh** he'd written.

OTOH, I'm forced to read at -1 because many meaningful things are said by ACs and get 0.

Maybe I should register with a fake name... oh, well...*sigh*

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Ubergrendle]

Ironically, 1996 is about the same time MS Office stopped including useful features making an upgrade worthwhile.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Kehl]

I use Star Office at work and Open Office at home. Open/Star Office has certainly been noticed by MS however with a patented and closed source MS ".DOC" format (yes it's coming soon!), it may cause some hardship. My last three job applications (CV's) were in .TXT format (containing a reason why I sent the document in this format) and I am proud to say that on 2/3 applications I got the job! Oh and don't forget finances! XP Pro Office XP Firewall Virus Checker DVD Player Photoshop .NOT(NET) Development package ..... etc --------------- Lets call MS software updates (for a "Techie" user) 750.00 per annum Linux 0.00 Allways nice when you have an imaginary balance of + 750 each year and high tail it to France backpacking! Or you could put it in Bills pocket ..... your choice =) Vote With your feet ----> GPL

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

And StarOffice has yet to catch up to even that point.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[jbottero]

For just about everything except PowerPoint, StarOffice is just fine. One thing I have learned working for the AIr Force (which is as corporate as any corporation), got to have that PowerPoint!

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Trejkaz]

We had the Java 1.0 and then 1.1.
Then we had Java2 Platform 1.2 through 1.4.

Personally I'm hoping that Java 1.5 will be named Java3 Platform 1.5.

Then they can have a Java 1.6 or something.
Yeah.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[scotch]

Ah yes, I remember my days in the air force. We used to refer to the career slide makers as power point rangers. Captains, Majors, and beyond. I don't know who said it, but it certainly applies: "Powerpoint, never before has one tool allowed so many to say so much about so little." Or thereabouts.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[LDoggg_]

Maybe because just calling something "superior" than something else is generally considered a flame?
Whereas providing specific examples of why its better is usually moderated as insightful or interesting.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[dolson]

Yeah, I used to have a lot of problems with PowerPoint stuff. The majority of my problems were font-related, and one day I managed to fix it by installing the fonts that come with Windows 98. There are still a few other minor issues, but don't seem to be that many... Just out of curiosity, what other problems have you had?

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[oever]

Why did you use txt and not e.g. rtf, pfd or html?

My last applications I used rtf and/or html (without explanation) and I did not receive any comments about the use of a different file format.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[log0n]

TXT makes the anti-.DOC point more obvious.

That's actually a good idea.. *breaks out TextPad*

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[javamutt]

I don't agree. "got to have powerpoint" makes no sense in itself.

For most of the presentations I do (and I do a *LOT*) I ignore all the bells and whistles and focus on my content. I put the bells and whistles into the way I convey the information rather than the file itself.

What I end up with a clean presentation file which exports very nicely to PDF where it smaller in size than the source file, and can be read on any machine, including those not powerful enough to efficiently run a complete office suite.

I've said it before, and will say it again. If Powerpoint is needed to make a point, then there are serious communication skills lacking in the presenter.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[jbottero]

"I don't agree... Blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, I am God, you are an idiot, blaw, blaw, blaw...."

Face the facts: Corporate uses PowerPoint. If you want Linux on the desktop, two things: PowerPoint and a better spreadsheet.

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[javamutt]

I don't think I implied in any way that I'm a God - I only said that I do a lot of presos so that you'd know I wasn't a casual user. I certainly made no implication of your abilities, although your response certainly does. I'd like to hear more "facts"... Unfortunately your response doesn't include anything but conjecture.

You mention that "Corporate uses PowerPoint"... I wokr for a very large, very global company with all the same corporate red tape other large companies are hindered by. We use SO as our office platform and interperate with our MS Office using customer base with no significant problems. Many large goverments (talk about corporate red tape!) as well as educational institutions are also getting the message recently.

One of the things my team does is organize global customer forums where the customers present their best practices. Most of these presentations are in Power Point, and with few exceptions (mostly due to font translations) they load up in SO with no significant issues.

The presos which we deliver are authored in SO7, so obviously need no conversion. If you have specific areas which you can point out in which PP is superior to SO I would be interested in hearing about it. My observation is that very few of those areas amount to more than a a "cooler way to embed a MIDI file into my slide". I'm interested in learning about other areas as I haven't spent as much time with PP.

As for the spreadsheet, the only area I'm aware of SO falling significantly behind Excel is in 3d surface plotting. When we were graphing performance scenarios for enterprise storage we ended up using Excel for twiddling and GNUPlot for the automated suites because they could do it and SO couldn't (see, I can be objective on the negatives as well!)

Not sure where you picked up the negative vibe, but if you can carry a conversation I'm game to learn what you know. The question is, can you open your mind?

Re:StarOffice has a lot of catching up to do

[Anonymous Coward]

What a completedly stupid statement!!! Firstly, you have no figures to back up your claim. Instead, you make immature idiotic comments in reference to the poster.

"I don't agree... Blaw, blaw, blaw, blaw, I am God, you are an idiot, blaw, blaw, blaw...." "
All I can say in reference to this completely retarded statement is why don't you keep your trap shut if you can't make an intelligent statement?

You claim that "Corporate uses PowerPoint and to face the facts!" What facts? You don't provide any facts!!!!! Even if corporate users do use PowerPoint that in no way necessarily implies it is the best tool for the job!

Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[EricHsu]

AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice? Inquiring minds want to know...

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[EricHsu]

Okay, answering my own question, Sun talks about Mad Hatter and it seems to be merely a Java front-end to StarOffice and misc other Office type programs.

I thought it was going to be something cooler like the Java port of OpenOffice.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Madhatter is a integrated desktop focused OS. First release will be based on SUSE Linux. Staroffice, Mozilla, Evolution, Gnome, tightly integrated. Target market is call centers and the like.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[spektr]

Okay, answering my own question, Sun talks about Mad Hatter and it seems to be merely a Java front-end to StarOffice and misc other Office type programs.

A Java front-end to StarOffice? I think not.

As far as I understand it, Mad Hatter is more or less a SuSE spin-off that comes with a new Sun-theme and is bundled with StarOffice 7. At this time Sun puts the word "Java" in all their new products. This is just a brandig strategy like .NET

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're pretty fucking stupid.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[IM6100]

There's always Corel's 'Corel Office for java'

I downloaded that years ago when the beta was available. Not that long ago I came across it on a CDR and ran it once again. With modern hardware (relatively speaking, i.e. Pentium 3 450) it was pretty slick. Obviously limited, but not the bog-mess it was on the current hardware when Corel first floated the beta code.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[Illbay]

I think the important thing to note here is that a major player, Sun, thinks it's time to challenge MS on the desktop with Linux.

I don't think even IBM has been ready to go that far (well, they could've done it with OS/2 eight or nine years ago, and I don't see that they've grown a spine since that time).

This'll be interesting to watch.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[ClosedSource]

Yes, too many of Sun's customers were running Windows on their Sun Workstations, so it's about time the Sun challenged them by installing Linux.

Seriously, StarOffice is really the only product that Sun has produced that competes directly with MS on the desktop.

The fact that they are still selling a non-Intel platform running a non-Windows-compatible OS just proves they're using the same failed strategy they been using for a decade to stop MS on the desktop.

The $100/employee offer sounds like the same sort of scam they had with the Java/Network computer. They never tell you the total cost including all the hardware you need to buy to make it work.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[GooTi]

...the Java port of OpenOffice

Gee.. that's a complete new meaning for bloat, you know?

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[elodan]

There's no parallelism here. Mad hatter is a desktop environment - it's basically repackaged GNOME. StarOffice is an office suite.
Related, yes.
Parallel, no.

Re:Relationship to Mad Hatter?

[Moredhel]

Sorry? Have you bothered to read *any* of the announcement before pontificating?

The $100/employee is for the *server* side stuff. The desktop is sold per seat (discounts available depending on other software purchased, I think) for just the software. The customer supplies the hardware - in this case the PCs that are already on the users' desks, but may be too old/decrepid to run Doze/Office XP.

Sun sell x86 systems, and 2 x86 OSes. Not selling Doze is one of the major reasons they still exist. Announcing they were dropping Unix and moving to Doze is a major reason SGI is in the position it's now in. NVidia is probably the main other one.

Sun own Cobalt, so have been selling x86/Linux based servers in big numbers for years.

Please try to keep up.

Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Openoffice is based off of Star, not the other way around.

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice is actually a pared down version of emacs.

Re:Casual mistake

[buffer-overflowed]

Do you really miss the eliza psychologist that much?

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more accurately, they are both branches of a common code base.

Re:Casual mistake

[kfg]

"Do you really miss the eliza psychologist that much?"

What makes you say that?

KFG

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be Causuality mistake?

Re:Casual mistake

[shellbeach]

Openoffice is based off of Star, not the other way around.

I don't think so ...

OpenOffice was based on StarOffice ...

StarOffice is now based on OpenOffice.

From the OpenOffice.org Unofficial FAQ:

1. 1.3. How does it differ from StarOffice?

   OpenOffice.org is an open-source project, which means that it is a piece of software (an office suite in this case) developed under a set of very liberal licenses (the LGPL and SISSL - more on this later).

   One of the freedoms provided is that one can take OpenOffice.org and package it as his/her own distribution. Then, this distribution can be sold to make a revenue. Such a distribution is StarOffice, from Sun Microsystems.

   Therefore, OpenOffice.org and StarOffice have exactly the same core applications, except that it misses out on certain fonts (like Asian language ones and a few for improved Microsoft file format compatibility), a database component (AdabasD), certain file filters, templates & a clip art gallery, and some sorting functionality. However, most of what OpenOffice.org lacks can be made up with the help of third-party applications...

What you're saying is rather like saying Mozilla is based on Netscape ...

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the universe is a pared down version of emacs.

Re:Casual mistake

[yerfatma]

What makes you say that?

We're here to talk about you, not me.

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OpenOffice is actually a pared down version of emacs.

Isn't everything?

(/me ducks as the vi advocates arrive...)

Re:Casual mistake

[aled]

In fact emacs is a scaled up version of vi.

Re:Casual mistake

[bernywork]

hahahahahaha, nice work!

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

`bloated' is the word you were looking for. :-)

Re:Casual mistake

[TeknoHog]

Actually, the universe is a pared down version of emacs.

How is it then that inside a universe you can find emacs, which in turn contains a universe containing emacs... now I get it, it all works out in Linux which does infinite loops in five seconds!

Re:Casual mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

What's troubling yerfatma?

Re:Casual mistake

[FroMan]

Hmmm, I am not so sure.

OO.org was based on StarOffice. However, StarOffice is now OO.org with touch ups I believe.

Similar to how Mozilla was Netscape from when Netscape was opened. Now Mozilla is the base source tree and Netscape uses images from the Mozilla tree w/ updates.

So, what's the version of Gnome Office again?

[dzym]

2.0, as specified in the article title, or 1.0, as specified in the article text?

Re:So, what's the version of Gnome Office again?

[Anonymous Coward]

abiword is at 2.0. Gnome Office is at 1.0. Gnome Office includes abiword 2.0

I don't think I can clarify more than that

Re:So, what's the version of Gnome Office again?

[captaink]

word.

Re:So, what's the version of Gnome Office again?

[yerdaddy_777]

It is Gnome Office 1.0 (I read the article, but don't tell anyone).

Complete history

[ENOENT]

StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, which is based on StarOffice.

Around and around we go!

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up!!!

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

just like mozilla is based on netscape, which is based on mozilla.

Re:Complete history

[rampant mac]

"StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, which is based on StarOffice."

Close...

StarOffice is based on OpenOffice which is based on StarOffice which copies many functions from Microsoft Office, which debuted first on the Macintosh, who purchased ClarisWorks only to produce AppleWorks and later created Mac OS X that copies many *BSD features. Does this mean Microsoft Office is dying, StarOffice is dying or OpenOffice is dying? I'm confused.

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape is based on mozilla, which was based on netscape... :-)

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

who purchased ClarisWorks only to produce AppleWorks

Claris was always a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple (which I'm sure is the subject you intended to place at the beginning of that clause). Also, there was a suite called AppleWorks for the Apple II and IIgs which was made by Apple, and unrelated to the Claris suite for the Macintosh.

Re:Complete history

[stefanlasiewski]

Excellent, I now have a storyline for my Geek Soap Opera: "As the OS turns". Is your Office Suite cheating on your OS? Who shot J.R.E.? Sure, Mac OS X sure is pretty, BUT WHO ARE THE PARENTS??? If Microsft dies, who gets to keep the mansion?

I love Linux. But I like OS X a lot more.

And with a .sig like that, you my man, will cast in the leading roll!

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

It's role.

The leading roll is the one which I eat first. :)

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it just means we have to refer to .doc files as being "*OFFICE" documents. Wait...

Re:Complete history

[Cyno]

BSD is dying. ;)

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

Speak for yourself. In my screenplays, I eat the leading role first.

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

Word Up!!!

Re:Complete history

[Illbay]

Does this mean Microsoft Office is dying, StarOffice is dying or OpenOffice is dying?

Actually, it means that everything starts with *BSD.

Which, btw, is dying.

Re:Complete history

[rampant mac]

"Who shot J.R.E.?"

I'll only perform if you change that to "Who shot JBoss."

Sorry, that's my contract, and it's GPL'ed :)

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

If a Greek tragedy is the "fall of a great man" then I suppose a Geek tragedy would be the "fall of a great of OS"

So you can't write a non-fiction Geek tradgey then, because windows isn't a great OS, although it (and many others) are falling/dying.

People who post in reply to this saying but <insert obscure OS (that isn't linux) here> was great can die the filthy *BSD BeOS and Atari deaths they deserve. I, for one, welcome our new GNU overlords.

</troll>

Re:Complete history

[Phroggy]

which debuted first on the Macintosh, who purchased ClarisWorks only to produce AppleWorks and later created Mac OS X

It should be noted that Claris always was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple. Apple did buy ClarisWorks from Claris and rename it to AppleWorks (which is also the name of a word processor Apple created back in the Apple II era), and Claris renamed itself to Filemaker, Inc. which is still an Apple subsidiary.

Claris the company is not to be confused with Clarus the dogcow.

Re:Complete history

[Anonymous Coward]

Claris was an Apple spin-off in the late 1980's. Claris's been reabsorbed and spun-off at least once since during the 1990's. It became FileMaker, Inc. in the late 1990's, most of its other products were EOL'd and ClarisWorks became adopted the classic Apple II software name AppleWorks.

StarOffice was almost IBM StarOffice. Before IBM purchased Lotus in the mid-1990's they were set to make StarOffice their official office technology offering. StarDivision was translating its German-language suite for OS/2 to English. I remember toying with a partially-translated StarWriter 3 around 1994 or so.

IBM bought Lotus to get Notes and Smartsuite came with it essentially eliminating any reason to absorb StarDivision or trumpet Star Office in America. They did however include a Star Office 4 trial version with OS/2 Warp v4 and vowed to fulfill whatever contract they'd struct with regards to Star Office.

Re:Complete history

[managementboy]

Not entirely true, even Microsoft copied functions from StarOffice (it did not crash as much in the later version). StarDivision created StarWriter first for DOS then for Win3.1 (I dont remember if there where any english verions of them tough). StarCalc came later and if I remember correctly StarDraw even later (both as DOS versions). I think DOS is dying :-)

Re:Complete history

[paulbeasd]

ENOENT remarked
"StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, which is based on StarOffice.
Around and around we go!"

rampant mac reacted:
"StarOffice is based on OpenOffice which is based on StarOffice ...
I'm confused."

Confused? You wont be after this episode of Geek Soap.

The software programm suites -Star Office (version 6 and after); -StarSuite; -OpenOffice.org
are all based upon the OpenOffice.org source code (open source),
based upon the StarOffice 5(.2) code,
which was "open sourced" by SUN Microsystems,
after Sun acquired Star Division, the (german) maker(s) of StarOffice.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Was GNOME-Office 1.0 just released? Or was GNOME-Office 2.0 released?
Or were they both released simeoultaneously in a mad late night programming section?

I can deal with the spellings, errors, and (occasionally) the blatant bias, but could we at least get the headlines to match the articles?

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Section = session.

There was a reason I said I could deal with the spelling errors.

Got it wrong!

[linuxkrn]

StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org.

Nope, OpenOffice.org was created from the BASE of StarOffice. They might have ment based on the ever-popular Microsoft Office...but I digress.

Re:Got it wrong!

[big.ears]

Sorry, it is you who are wrong; the original statement is correct. Although the original codebase was StarOffice, the main tree is now OpenOffice, which StarOffice is now just a branded child of (there are others, like Ximian's OpenOffice). StarOffice includes some other things as well, which can't or won't be open-sourced.

Re:Got it wrong!

[el-spectre]

I think that the only real difference between OO and Star Office is that OO is missing proprietary file format converters. But, it got the pretty seagull logo...

Re:Got it wrong!

[larien]

It's also missing Adabas (the DB component) and the proprietary spell checker. For companies, it's also missing the support element which many of them view as mandatory.

The impression I get is that Star Office is worth it for an enterprise; heck, at $80/license, it's still cheaper than MS Office and it's cross-platform (Solaris/linux/Windows).

Problems with gnome.

[anonymous coword]

Ive had a few problems with gnome and gnome-office recently. Gnome works fine on my 1024x768 laptop, but when doing work on my main computer with a 1920x1440 monitor it runs very slow. Its not my computer either, KDE 3.2, XFCE and Fluxbox run really fast on that machine (Athlon 2000 with 256 mb ram)

See my journal to see my other problems I've experianced

Re:Problems with gnome.

[Jody Goldberg]

I don't see any problems with gnome-office listed in your discussion of gnome's failings. Can you elaborate on any issues you've had with recent versions of Gnumeric, AbiWord, or GNOME-DB ? We're quite interested in constructive feedback.

Re:Problems with gnome.

[Dr_LHA]

You using the NVIDIA drivers for XFree86? I've heard that for some reason Gnome/GTK2 has in the past (and maybe still has) problems with those drivers making it run slow.

Re:Problems with gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

And let me guess: Emacs lite is straining to keep up as you type this.

Re:Problems with gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Its not my computer either,

Try running it on your own computer

Re:Problems with gnome.

[Anonymous Coward]

other problems I've experianced

Like poor spelling....

Pitching Star Office

[-Grover]

I suppose you could go do the StarOffice pitch to your boss, the only problem I forsee is trying to keep up with M$ and their new ideas for keeping Office locked down with the proposed security interface with Win2k3, and incompatibilities with other Office suites. Could be more of a hassle than it's worth down the line...

Blah...

Re:Pitching Star Office

[blibbleblobble]

"I suppose you could go do the StarOffice pitch to your boss, the only problem I forsee is trying to keep up with M$ and their new ideas for keeping Office locked down..."

I find the "I need such-and-such features. You could pay $600, or I have this system which is available free..." tends to work quite well.

Of course, after the first "these 5000 documents are in Word97 format, and if we want Office2003, it'll cost 3 man-weeks to convert them" conversation, some people might have a serious think about file formats.

Keeping up with the latest file formats? Doesn't that cost $500 per year per computer, plus half a day of everyone's time? And for what? The feature-list hasn't changed in 8 years.

Re:Pitching Star Office

[digital_franciscan]

Could be more of a hassle than it's worth down the line...

What with all of Microsoft's own compatibility issues with file formats and their many iterations, staying with MS office could be the biggest hassle of all.

Pointless switch?

[contrasutra]

Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."

Why not switch the company to OpenOffice.org? I doubt the company needs StarOffice.

You're just going from one pay-for product, to another (albiet less cost). If you REALLY want to show your boss the beauty of alternative software. Show him something thats great, FOR FREE! (that will get any bosses attention).

And if you choose StarOffice just because "Money means better" to the management, you're just as bad as MS.

Re:Pointless switch?

[phraktyl]

For most large companies, it's not about free or not free, it's about dedicated support. From a company standpoint, they would rather shell out money for the non-free version if they can call someone on the phone and get an answer. Sure, the free version may have mailing lists and USENET, but a company can't rely on that, and they can't point fingers when something goes wrong.

That's the same reason a lot of companies will pay through the nose for RedHat Enterprise---not because it does more, but because they have a single place to call when something goes wrong.

Re:Pointless switch?

[DeathPenguin]

>>And if you choose StarOffice just because "Money means better" to the management, you're just as bad as MS.

Unfortunately, it seems that many management types look up to MS management. A friend of mine worked for an ISP which ran Windows server software. In spite of my friend colocating a Linux server which had no problems to speak of, a mail system superior to NTMail, and trying his darndest to get his boss to switch to free software, his boss still insisted on equating free with crap. PHB's (Pointy-haired bosses) don't know the meaning of the word "free," and are willing to piss away enormous amounts of money for a warrenty card and tech support number even if the product itself is inferior.

That's where StarOffice comes in. OpenOffice is great, no question about that. Only problem is that it doesn't come with any sort of liability. Sun calls their version of OpenOffice StarOffice and fills this gap, maybe even going a little further to make the migration from MS to non-MS a little easier.

Re:Pointless switch?

[rmohr02]

Make the switch to StarOffice at first. Then, after StarOffice and OpenOffice have had new releases, show your boss how the programs look exactly alike, and that one is free, while the other costs $80.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Kunta Kinte]

You're just going from one pay-for product, to another (albiet less cost). If you REALLY want to show your boss the beauty of alternative software. Show him something thats great, FOR FREE! (that will get any bosses attention).

Of course you can also pay for StarOffice because...

(i) The money going into StarOffice is being used to continue the development OpenOffice, as Sun still pays for a lot of the Development of OpenOffice.

(ii) You can get product support, and training from Sun. Important for even small business, or any overstressed IT department.

Not all of the cost of software is in the purchase of that software.

Re:Pointless switch?

[kotfu]

Exactly. Why just the other day, we had this problem with Word crashing all of the time. We called those bums at Micro$oft, got right through to a person, and told them that we didn't get our sales presentation finished on time because Word kept crashing. The MS guy was real nice, he took all of the blame, and even offered to remunerate us for our lost revenue. My boss said, "see, that's why we spend the big bucks for Micro$oft products, they have great support and always make things right."

Really what happens is you wait on hold for 30 minutes, and then talk to someone offshore who may or may not understand the English you are speaking. After hitting your credit card for 35 bucks, you are told to reboot, and that will fix the problem.

I'll take the mailing list any day.

Re:Pointless switch?

[contrasutra]

YOU GET VERY LITTLE SUPPORT WHEN YOU BUY STAROFFICE. You have to pay Sun MORE money for corporate support.

On top of that, how much support do you need for an OFFICE SUITE? I of course understand how you would need support for an Operating System/Server, but who could justify spending the money for StarOffice (thousands of dollars) just for support.

Re:Pointless switch?

[phraktyl]

StarOffice happens to fall under our existing contract for Sun anyway. But it is excellent support.

We are still, unfortunately, stuck with SO5.2 (I know, and I'm working on it...), but we have gotten custom patches from Sun 3 times in the last 6 months for SO dealing with MS Word documents. I'd like to see MS provide patches for Word because it's not bringing up a Word Perfect file up correctly...

Re:Pointless switch?

[ddilling]

his boss still insisted on equating free with crap.

And for this reason, the Open Source movement was born; "Free Software" being "crap" in the estimation of brain trusts such as these.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Mantorp]

On top of that, how much support do you need for an OFFICE SUITE?
I agree, I've used MS Office at work for the last 10 years or so, not once have I ever called MS for help.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the mailing list gives you:

rtfm j00 n00b!

(although there are some great sources, it sux when you get that)

Re:Pointless switch?

[RisingSon]

PHB's (Pointy-haired bosses) don't know the meaning of the word "free," and are willing to piss away enormous amounts of money for a warrenty card and tech support number even if the product itself is inferior.

Not to be an ass, but in my modest experience in the professional software universe (7 years) I've noticed that most of the PHB's that insist on paying more money for an inferior product with more visible support usually are scared shitless of technology in general because they aren't gurus.

I've thought about this quite a bit. If I was a technology Charlaton that landed a job in management, I'd do many things that I see other techies bitching about:

Only use software that has a highly visible technical support. This would be my scapegoat when something goes wrong. Pass the blame.

Have a temper. Scare people into not questioning my non-technical mind. That way when I'm in a meeting and I claim that an X-client on Win2k xhosting apps running on linux servers taxes the clients more than writing a distributed corba system that utilizes 100% of all clients (except Sundays) nobody will question me.

Memorize all FUD that favors your previous decisions and speak in at least 30% buzzwords. This makes you sounds smart to non-tech top-level execs that write your paychecks and also frustrates just-out-of-college-newbies that know you're wrong but can't muster up an argument to prove exactly why you're full of horse manure.

Spend 90% of you're time at work writing email containing mostly the crap listed above. This leaves a paper trail that will hopefully save your ass when your group fails ("Its not my managing - look at these 10 reams of paper I've written in email during project XYZ") and it also makes you look busy enough that no one bothers or questions you. And of course, you get to easily dance around any real issues the gurus harass you with.

Don't let anyone that is doing the work actually speak with the customers, clients or end users. That way, if you're the only contact, all the customers, clients, end users (and thus employers) think any progress on the project is due to your hard work (and email - see above)

Last but not least, since you don't really do anything usefull, spend the time you should be doing something productive playing the politics. Always smile when you're visible outside your group and make sure to go out of the way to ask how the exec's weekend trip with the family went.

So, long drunken ramble summarized - the management that makes the decisions on what office suite to use in the group (or even company) may in fact not be making their decision based on the quality of the software. They may evaluate software based on the smoke it generate, perserving their longevity.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Slime-dogg]

The point that my boss and his "consultant" come up with that opposes going to Linux is that "There are no training classes for Linux, but there are thousands of courses for Microsoft products." I really can't counter that, since they seem to think that a class that teaches you how to click a mouse button is important. I muttered "as if anyone really takes these courses and benefits." They chose to ignore me.

The point that my boss has against OO is that there isn't a nice booklet with a shiny cover that comes with it. Then again, you have to pay through the nose to the Microsoft press for a book on MS Office, but the aspect of having to print up the documentation is daunting.

Believe me. These are true reasons why people do not switch.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you that the support means nothing. However, as a person trying to be dedicated to the free/OS philosophy, I don't think OpenOffice is anywhere near as refined as MS Office. Compare them on the basis of details that show the product is mature and understands the user (paper clip and other attempts at being too smart for the user aside), and MS Office wins hands down.

Yes, MS Office still crashes, and I definitely believe free/OS can develop technologically better solutions -- which is why I think it is pointless trying to beat MS at their own game, and instead go for the techs that MS is aiming for, eg a "universal well formed canvas" rather than countless specialty boxes for data.

Re:Pointless switch?

[trats]

his boss still insisted on equating free with crap. PHB's (Pointy-haired bosses) don't know the meaning of the word "free," and are willing to piss away enormous amounts of money for a warrenty card and tech support number even if the product itself is inferior.

StarOffice should produce a "StarOffice Professional" and sell it for $800. No difference at all, just the price.

Re:Pointless switch?

[David Gerard]

When it gets to that level, it's pretty clear that logic is not the issue. They're talking like junkies in danger of being cut off. Treat it as a drug addiction.

Re:Pointless switch?

[TheRaven64]

OpenOffice and StarOffice are not exactly the same. Two features I noticed when comparing the two are:

• StarOffice actually ships with fonts.
• The StarOffice thesaurus is much better.

I haven't used StarOffice since the 6beta, so I imagine there are other differences as well. For me, they are not enough to justify the extra cost (I use LaTeX for document preparation, and rarely use the other components of OOo) but for someone who actually uses an office suite they might be.

Just because they look alike doesn't mean that they are.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Pharmboy]

Fortunately, most growth in the US is in small businesses, which are more willing to switch. I have already installed Star Office 6 on two machines and OO on a few machines. The machines running MS office are running the 97 version and will not be updated. We have less than 25 people in the company using computers.

What got MY boss on the Open Source highway was all the news stories I sent him about MS licensing, the new "We get to roam around your hard drive" provisions, plus the BSA fines of $100,000 for accidental infringement. He still insists on using one Windows application, but I am scheduled to get it running on Wine soon, to start replacing the windows boxes. (Dammit, why can't RH support Wine in a stock install!)

I used the old "All your base are belong to us" tactic, which of course, is now true with MS licensing. This should not be confused with the The Chewbacca Defense. He is not a PHB but he knows what being sued is, knows what fines are, and knows what the blue screen of death is.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Lumpy]

For most large companies, it's not about free or not free, it's about dedicated support.

oh bull crap. several PHB's tried trotting out that lie the LAST time we went around with Open source.

Fortunatley we called them on the carpet. Made them gather the call data to microsoft from the help center. and show us the number of important support calls to Microsoft on Office.

Oh guess what... ZEREO calls were made and billed to us No support was needed for Microsoft Office and therefore we wasted money on a support contract with them (that was pay per incident anyways... go figure)

If making dishonest statements like the one above that "It's about dedicated support" make you feel better in the conference room them by all means continue that stance. There are more of us out here that are more than willing to deliver the full amount of information to the decision makers, or go above the heads of those that resist us.

Open office, if you don't need the special import filters that Star office has. and yes, if you look hard enough you can get support for Open office.... even pay support if you want to pay for something.

Re:Pointless switch?

[bwalling]

Why not switch the company to OpenOffice.org? I doubt the company needs StarOffice.

Try to do an unattended install of OpenOffice to 1000 desktops. Oh wait, their installer won't let you. You have to run the wizard - no command line options.

Re:Pointless switch?

[Stephen R Hall]

I could switch my whole company to OpenOffice tomorrow, but for one thing. We use Goldmine CRM software, which has lots of facilities for integration with Microsoft Word. None of these facilities will work with OpenOffice/Star Office, as they rely upon Word macros. Is there any development being done in this area?

Re:Pointless switch?

[pix_inMO]

sure, that's what they'd like to think... read my lips "there-is-no-real-software-support". Often happens that when you have a problem you are on your own. There is no silver bullet when you have a buggy software. You either wait until the next version or learn to live with it, and all that money spent on support is only good for hearing some employee tell you to reboot your machine over and over.

Re:Pointless switch?

[pmz]

(iii) I think Sun should also bundle a little video game in with StarOffice. A Mortal Kombat-style game pitting the StarOffice butterfly against the MSN butterfly in a deathmatch would be quite entertaining.

I don't think so...

[Anonymous Coward]

One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne until they reboot into Windows.

... Then have them yell at you for "breaking" their computer. Not everyone understands that Knoppix doesn't actually write to any of your disks.

Re:I don't think so...

[bogie]

Or have them get annoyed at you when OO screws up and loses all the formatting of the word doc.

Sorry but even as a big OO booster, I'm the first to say that importing word docs is still a total crapshoot. Plain text letters etc come through fine most of the time. In fact most of the content comes through, but when it comes to even slightly complex word docs with images and lots of formatting OO chokes badly. Sure you end up with most of the text and images, but then you have to spend 5 minutes trying to move everything back to whre it should be the .doc import feature loses its charm.

I don't fault OO for this since sucky MS won't open their file specs though. Unfortunately MS knows that proprietary Office file formats are the key to its desktop monopoly, so don't expect that to change in our lifetime.

Honestly though I just don't think its right to outright lie to people and say OO can easily open all Word files. That's probably never going to happen. For me its not a problem since I never deal with a ton of word docs anymore, but for those who HAVE to both send and recieve word docs all day long I can't say they should see that as a plus for using OpenOffice.

God I hate proprietary file specs and protocols.

Re:I don't think so...

[shaggie]

Amen to that.

One of the biggest taboos when dealing with non-geek related side of any business is demanding a client to conform to your document standards. If the client sends you a file in .doc, you better make sure you send your files in .doc back to the client. Any time a client calls up complaining about being unable to read or open your documents, your job security is on the line.

I did a test on our secretarial staff, I had them try OO once, they still stick to their MSO mentality. Most of the questions are where can I find menu feature X or Y, its not where its supposed to be or the like. New hires are all versed in the nuances of MSO and most never heard of OO.

It is very difficult for us to switch over to OO at all. All the top management have considered OO for a very long time but reality is that we just can't do it because of our business realities and the education in computing usage being provided in our region are 95% based on MS products.

Re:I don't think so...

[RealAlaskan]

... but when it comes to even slightly complex word docs with images and lots of formatting OO chokes badly. Sure you end up with most of the text and images, but then you have to spend 5 minutes trying to move everything back to whre it should be ...

I'm sure you're right about OO's performance here. Unfortunately, you can say exactly the same thing about Word opening slightly complex .doc files. Word will choke when trying to make them, choke when trying to save them and (it's wonderously consistant!) choke trying to open them.

I have opened a ``moderately complex'' Word document on the same version of Word on two machines, and had it paginated differently. I have seen one copy of Word fail to import some of the features of a document created on another copy (again, same version).

... I just don't think its right to outright lie to people and say OO can easily open all Word files.

I think that's no different, and no more lying, than pretending that Word can easily open all Word files.

2.0 or 1.0?

[chill]

The title says "GNOME-Office 2.0" but the rest of the post references "GNOME-Office 1.0". Which is it?

Yeah for GNOME Office 1.0!

[jimmy_dean]

Contratulations goes out to all of the developers for the Abiword, Gnumeric and GNOME-DB office programs. These applications show the power of open source software and the open source process. Thanks for all of the hard work and the dedication to excellence!

Re:Yeah for GNOME Office 1.0!

[mikesmind]

I do agree that congratulations are in order. I have used both Abiword and Gnumeric, but have not tried GNOME-DB. What I don't understand is why these three are not bundled! If you click on the link to the announcement, there are three separate downloads. If it's going to be an office suite, it should be bundled as an office suite, ready to go, out of the box!
I really am pulling for GNOME office. OpenOffice.org is too bloated and slow. My seven-year old son thinks that something is wrong when OOo is loading. I just go and do something else until it is done loading.

No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Dancin_Santa]

That can't possibly be right.

On another note, I've been trying to pick up some Linux programming in my spare time and am completely confused. I come from a Win/Apple background where the system APIs are fairly straightforward and well documented. In contrast, Linux APIs are pretty much non-existent.

I assume that the standard C library exists, but once I try to do any windowing, I am faced with half-documented APIs from a multitude of sources. Gnome, KDE, etc., it's all very confusing. The worst part of it all is that the documentation is virtually nonexistent. Sure, there are blurbs here and there, but you'd be lucky to find a documentation system that links together related APIs, clearly enumerates all parameters and their meanings, and displays the data in a readable manner.

It makes me wonder how anyone gets anything done with this proramming environment.

If I run KDE, will I be able to run Abiword?

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I've always found win32 strange and confusing, programming under Linux is straight forward I think, manpages for all the basic stuff and web documentation for things like GTK and GNOME APIs, and of course lot's of example code to look at or use as a base.

Haven't done all that much GUI work though...

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Dancin_Santa]

I found the manpages quite difficult to use because sometimes I don't know what an API is called, so I would have to do a grep on the entire doc tree. Samples are great, but again, I can't usually hyperlink from the sample to the actual documentation.

Then the problem becomes one of deciding whether to go with the KDE or Gnome APIs. I may be mistaken, but these two API sets do not seem compatible. Thus any program I write for one WM may not be compatible with someone else's machine. I'm not willing to ask someone to reload their WM just to facilitate my programs.

So that brings me back ontopic to the Abiword question. Will Abiword run outside of Gnome?

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume that the standard C library exists, but once I try to do any windowing, I am faced with half-documented APIs from a multitude of sources. Gnome, KDE, etc., it's all very confusing.

Try Qt. It has superb documentation, examples and tutorials. And once you pick it up, the KDE API documentation (which assumes you know Qt) will make much more sense.

If I run KDE, will I be able to run Abiword?

You'll need to install some Gnome libraries to get it to install, but yeah, there's no problem running any app in any window manager or desktop.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[jimmy_dean]

Yes it will, as long as you have the GTK libraries installed (if you're using KDE or Gnome). KDE programs run under Gnome and Gnome apps run under KDE. That's the beauty of the window manager. It'll just put it's own decorations around the app but use the GUI toolkit the application was written for. Gnome is the desktop, not the GUI nor the window border/controls. Gnome and KDE are more about bringing these two components and making it a complete package (desktop).

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll need to install some Gnome libraries to get it to install, but yeah, there's no problem running any app in any window manager or desktop.

Where is this documented?

DS

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[molarmass192]

It's more confusing on Linux because there isn't just one like on Win / Mac. Well, that's not 100% true since you could code directly to X11 but you'd be a hell of a sucker for punishment if you did that.

Your best bet for a GUI toolkit will vary depending on which language you want to use to program but I'd recommend looking into wxWindows if you want a toolkit that's MFC-like. There a bunch of other good choices, most notably QT and GTK based toolkits but those would require a more significant departure from what you'd be familiar with.

Outside the GUI, there are some differences with regards to system calls but if you're familiar with Posix (exists on Win too) you can get up to speed pretty quick there.

Documentation is sketchy and I strongly recommend spending $40 on a Linux programming reference book. You'll save a lot of frustration and time scouring the web. One key concept to remember is that on Linux almost everything is treated as a file, including devices. As a programmer, you'll find it frustrating for a good 6-12 months, especially since you already have a background in another environment. Believe me that it does "make sense" after a while but it takes some time (and frustration) to get to that point.

As for KDE and Abiword, you'll need to have GNOME installed (though not running) to use Abiword. This is the source of a lot of bad blood so I'll leave it at that.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[caseih]

On another note, I've been trying to pick up some Linux programming in my spare time and am completely confused. I come from a Win/Apple background where the system APIs are fairly straightforward and well documented. In contrast, Linux APIs are pretty much non-existent.

When I first read that I thought you were joking, but as I read the rest of your comments, I understand where you misunderstandings lie. I don't know anything about Apple's APIs, but I imagine that they are very clean. Win32, on the other had, is a mess. Linux *does* have very clean and well-defined system APIs. You are mistakenly thinking that windowing and GUIs have something to with system APIs. They don't. And they shouldn't. Instead, userland libraries supply this functionality. The windows gui is quite a hack, api-wise. And it has many, many security problems because of it's being put into the kernel as a system api.

I assume that the standard C library exists, but once I try to do any windowing, I am faced with half-documented APIs from a multitude of sources. Gnome, KDE, etc., it's all very confusing. The worst part of it all is that the documentation is virtually nonexistent. Sure, there are blurbs here and there, but you'd be lucky to find a documentation system that links together related APIs, clearly enumerates all parameters and their meanings, and displays the data in a readable manner.

Windowing has nothing to do with the standard C library (which all c compilers link against, even on windows -- that's what msvcrt.dll is for). This library, combined with the system apis (chapter 2 of the man pages) provides lowlevel access to the operating system. User interaction on linux comes through other higher-level apis from libraries such as gtk. This may seem backwards to a Windows developer to separate it this way, but this gives a great amount of development flexibility and increased application security.

It makes me wonder how anyone gets anything done with this proramming environment.

It's quite funny, actually, that experienced unix programmers wonder the same thing about win32 developers. I recommend checking out some books on linux development. I think you'll be slowly impressed as you discover the unix model of development and the simplicity and power of the posix-style api, and the tremendous availability of programming libraries to do things like gui programming, you'll be impressed.

If I run KDE, will I be able to run Abiword?

Yes, of course. You just need the gnome libraries installed (but not the full environment.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Qt. It has superb documentation, examples and tutorials.

And as long as you're not producing proprietary software it's free. Okay, you have to sign your soul over to Canopy but you probably weren't using it anyway. That's kind of free.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[harikiri]

The difference between Window/Apple GUI environments and the GUI environments in Linux/Unix is this:

• There is a "standard" API, but it's using the old, limited feature Xlib API.
• Today, there exists two very popular alternative Desktop environments, which in turn are based on two different Widget-toolkits. These are Gnome (uses GTK+) and KDE (uses Qt).
• Developers wishing to develop on Linux will usually pick one of these two Toolkits, as almost all Distributions offer both environments (and associated development libraries).

So the problem isn't a lack of API details (GTK API's and Qt API documentation), but moreso an issue of choice.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is what documented, the libraries or the no problem?

The dependency issue is the same as with any Linux software installation. If you have a reasonably modern Linux distro installed, the package manager (Mandrake Update, emerge, the Red Hat thing) will take care of it for you. No human can understand the interrelationship of all the GTK/Gnome libraries.

As far as the no problem running apps across different WMs -- you have the word of an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot. What more could you want? But it will work.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[swv3752]

For Linux, there are two different Abiwords. One is based on GTK and can be used in the absence of GNOME and one that is based on the GNOME framework. So GNOME is not required but still a good idea to have as a lot of other programs do require the GNOME libs.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Eponymous Coward]

I found the manpages quite difficult to use because sometimes I don't know what an API is called, so I would have to do a grep on the entire doc tree

Try 'man -k KEYWORD'. I don't use linux very much, but this has helped me a great deal.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[swv3752]

A Window Manager/Desktop Environment is like a shell for MS Windows. One can replace explorer.exe with other shells like GeOS or LiteStep. The different WM/DE's just provide a choice of different features.

When chooising toolkits one can use the full KDE API's or just use Qt. So one can code to just Qt and then the program would only need the Qt libraries installed. Or one can code to KDE then Qt and KDE would need to be isntalled. The same applies to GNOME and GTK+ respectively.

So, if the GTK+/GNOME libs are installed, then Abiword will run regardless of which WM/DE the user chooses to use. BTW, it should be noted that a version of Abiword will run on any OS that supports a GUI environment.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[msevior]

As opposed to the numerous Free Word processors that natively run on Mac's....

The AbiWord project has being trying to people to help out Hub on the OSX port for years. Not much help so far.

Well Hub will eventually get there but basically it appears to me that OSX has a hard-core of users but very few coders outside of Apple.

OOo has similar problems.

Martin

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[KeyserDK]

GTK is not 100% comparable to QT.
GTK is a gui toolkit, QT is much much more. It's a complete framework in c++.

Then there is other glib based projects, but seperate from gtk, that implement stuff that exists in qt so they end up with pretty much the same features. Ie, gnome-db (the libgda part)

A great thing about abiword, is that they are doing support for other OS's the right way. Every platform has their own UI implementation, the win32 UI has nothing in common with the GTK UI. Because of this, abiword provides far better integration into the UI of the respective platform, instead of being a weird crossapp like openoffice/mozilla, that doesn't really fit in anywhere.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Guy Harris]

You are mistakenly thinking that windowing and GUIs have something to with system APIs. They don't. And they shouldn't. Instead, userland libraries supply this functionality. The windows gui is quite a hack, api-wise. And it has many, many security problems because of it's being put into the kernel as a system api.

I suspect what we have here are two different meanings for the phrase "system API".

The original poster probably means "all APIs that come with the system", where by "the system" he/she probably meant more than just "the kernel" - i.e., a Linux distribution, not a Linux kernel. By that definition, GUI APIs are system APIs.

It sounds as if you're referring only to system calls.

BTW, as far as I know, the only part of the GUI that's in the kernel on Windows NT (including the 5.x versions, even though Microsoft doesn't call them "Windows NT" any more) is low-level drawing stuff (some or all of GDI - think "Xlib"). The toolkit stuff is in user32.dll and assorted other libraries, running in userland.

Heck, prior to NT 4.0, the low-level drawing stuff was in the Win32 subsystem process - to draw stuff, the libraries would send messages to that process. Sounds a bit like X....

The big difference is that, in UNIX+X, there isn't a GUI toolkit, there are multiple toolkits. On the other hand, given that GTK+ and Qt work on Windows, you could say the same about Windows, except that the native Windows toolkit is, as far as I know more dominant on Windows than any of the UNIX+X toolkits are on their platform.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't even need the gnome libs for abiword, just gtk+. Or at least that's how it worked up to 1.99.4, I don't have 2.0 yet.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[dubiousdave]

For a consolidated source of documentation for Gnome development, you might also check out Devhelp. It is "an API documentation browser for GNOME 2". You can get source, RPM, or SRPM on their site, and Gentoo has it in Portage.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[GunFodder]

What a spectacular troll! Seems like a straightforward question, but the weakness of Unix has always been the standard windowing system, or more specifically the lack thereof.

Just about every Unix system has an X11 server, but few seem to know the dark arts of programming directly to X. Everyone picks the windowing toolkit flavor of the month and programs for that, apparently under the assumption that everyone will eventually see the light and pick their toolkit.

KDE, Gnome, CDE, OpenWindows, OS X, etc all have one OR MORE windowing toolkits! Even though the underlying OS is basically the same in all cases. I love Unix but I can see why folks prefer programming for Windows. The APIs may suck but at least there are fewer of them.

Looks like the future may be an abstracted or even interpreted language, like Java or Dflat. At least a developer has a chance of writing multiplatform code in one sitting.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[stephenbooth]

You might have to run catman first to build the keyword indexes. Some distros do it automatically, others don't (often it depends on what options you've selected when you install).

Stephen

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes of course....

X of course can take extensions. Xlib is the most BASIC part of it. It's the "libc" of X. Comparing xlib directly to MFC or Quartz is a bad example. Quartz undoubtably has a extremely low-level api like xlib, but you don't deal with it at all in 99% of Mac OSX programming.

So we have xlib, glx, the shape extension, Xinerama, Xrender, XM ( The X multimedia framework, for allowing remoting of audio/video besides X ), xinerama ( which KDE and GNOME support ), and Cairo ( X's version of 'Quartz' style rendering, a vector based imaging system). Nevermind the massive rework done on the fontserver. Almost all newer apps now display in glorious smooth font outlines, at 1280x1024. :D

(And when Cairo takes off, woo! )

Some extensions have died over the years, as newer or better ones have replaced them.

Re:No macros and they JUST got footnotes?

[molarmass192]

Wow, I didn't know that! Kudos to the Abiword crew for making desktop bindings an optional choice. I wish more projects would provide a choice like that.

What happens with XML...

[The Ancients]

I have read various comments on this but wouldn't mind the /. crowd's various takes. What happens when MS's Office switches to bastardised XML? Is it going to tip the whole cart over, or is it a small bump in the road? For someone considering switching to *nix, this could make a significant difference...

Re:What happens with XML...

[statusbar]

Some might say that ALL xml is bastardized.
However microsoft's office xml is apparently no more bastardized than any other xml document.

--jeff++

Re:What happens with XML...

[Otter]

What happens when MS's Office switches to bastardised XML? Is it going to tip the whole cart over, or is it a small bump in the road?

An ignorant opinion, but probably no more ignorant than most people's:

Grocery lists will continue to open fine, your 300 page thesis with autogenerated table of contents and bibliography will continue to cause a kernel panic if you're using Nvidia drivers on an Athlon/VIA system and basic documents will continue to open all the text and numbers but need some prettying up. Same as now.

And Slashdot posters will continue to insist that a) the open-source apps all open all Office docs perfectly, and if there are features that aren't supported, well, you suck because you shouldn't use them and b) Microsoft needs to be broken up because their files can't be opened.

Re:What happens with XML...

[rowanxmas]

Why? As soon as you switch over and someone sends you a MS Bastard-XML doc, send it back and request it in html or rtf. If they want to do business with you, then you shouldn't have to buy over-priced software.

Re:What happens with XML...

[Jody Goldberg]

1) We'll start supporting it. Indeed I've already roughed in a basic framework for Office XP xml for Excel. Its a good deal easier than their binary format, especially given how much of their implementation detail is exposed in the file format.

2) It will not be used very much because old versions of office can't read it (oops the Office 97 install on your secretaries machine is out of date).

3) It will not be used very much because 100 Meg of uncompressed xml takes longer to parse than people with 30Meg of xls want to wait.

Re:What happens with XML...

[Greyfox]

If you're doing your thesis in a WYSWIG word processor, you kind of deserve what you get anyway. I believe LaTeX and its spin-offs are still the accepted way of doing those documents.

I prefer raw hand-coded (In EMACS...) HTML when I have to exchange documents with my managers. I can churn out a document faster with that than a WYSWING word processor, and if you put .doc on the end of it, they never know the difference.

Re:What happens with XML...

[4of12]

I guess there's XML and there's XML and getting between them is not necessarily easy.

Microsoft made a big deal about the most recent versions of Office writing out XML, but that was because XML was a buzzword, sounded as if it might be more open than ".doc", and was essentially a selling point.

From what I've read, people have been underwhelmed with the XML coming out.

But your question is a good one when you see the potential for XSLT transformations that enable OpenOffice to import and export DocBook XML.

If only a similar set of transformations could be developed for OpenOffice to import and export the XML of the latest version of Microsoft Office. From what I understand, the schema is not documented and the formatting and rendering rules for documents are still kept a private affair, just as it has been for .doc files.

You're still locked-in, dude!

Re:What happens with XML...

[NotClever]

"If they want to do business with you, then you shouldn't have to buy over-priced software."

And the potential customer that you just told off will never be heard from again...

Re:What happens with XML...

[Anonymous Coward]

"You're still locked-in, dude!"

WRONG my little Star Trek geek! Either you are purposely spreading FUD (most likely the case), or you are completely ignorant on things XML related. Either way your stupidity only hurts the conversation, so perhaps you should leave posting to the grown ups.

Microsoft documented WordML long ago, check out the Microsoft Word XML CDK at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/9/7/ 49799 b71-5502-40c6-b7ce-c791f87f65cd/xmlcdkb2.msi

or

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?ur l= /downloads/list/office2k3.asp

Re:What happens with XML...

[javamutt]

This is one area which I find frustrtating. For all but the most advanced power users, OO/SO really provides what's needed for business functions.

The only exception is MS Access, however I think a lot of Access apps out there would be just as functional in a spreadsheet since the average user doesn't "get" relational theory, and doesn't program.

When the bastardized M$ XML appears I think we'll have an interesting potential for phenomenon. Historically, (as much as I hate to say it) M$ could do what they wanted without fear of repercussion because the alternatives weren't upo to snuff. Today a company has the very real ability to choose SO/OO as their office platform and take the initiative to ask their sources to use more open formats. This could be the first time customers of Mr. Gates can actually say "no" and choose an alternative.

Does this sound unreasonable? Sun Microsystems uses SO as its office platform (not surprising!). To be fair, I should admit that I'm an employee of Sun, but I think I can make fairly unbiased observations. In the 2 years that I've spent with SO,OO, and all the betas in between, I haven't yet encvountered an insurmountable document interchange issue. I have spent a lot of time writing technical documents, so I'd consider myself in the "power user" camp.

The most common "yeah, but" is presentation macros. My response: If you can't make your point without powerpoint animations & macros, then you don't have a good point. A good presentation *can* be communicated using PDF slides created by the M$ originator if it doesn't convert cleanly into Star Present. What if your customer doesn't have SO? Send 'em a nicely rendered PDF - SO7 has a completely revamped PDF engine which runs circles around SO 6. Better yet, use TEXT where its appropriate, and RTF in other places. If you're really hooked on format abuse, SO7 can even create a Macromedia Flash presentation.

People have come to make 2 mistakes because of features in common office products:

(1) relying on gimmics to communicate rather than relying on mastery of communication skills.

(2) assuming that just because everyone else saves in a proprietary, short lived format, that they need to also.

Given that so many other aspects of the tech industry are moving to value "good enough" technologies, I think we're very close to the tipping point for Office platforms as well.

Re:What happens with XML...

[110010001000]

"If they want to do business with you, then you shouldn't have to buy over-priced software." says the college student who has never worked a corporate job in his life.

Re:What happens with XML...

[pmz]

100 Meg of uncompressed xml

Me thinks Intel and Microsoft just found a way to justify the next generation of CPUs. We'll see benchmarks like "The octo-pumped 6035MHz Pentium Whizzo processes 100MB of XML in only 8 seconds, saving an average of 1/3 FTE per year compared to previous models!"

Re:What happens with XML...

[rowanxmas]

I am assuming in this situation, as should be obvious, that *you* are the customer, thus you can demand of some comapny to send you stuff in non-propietery format.

Typical Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

a cross-platform abstract layer to spellchecking

How about something to check your grammar? That's why *I* use MS Office!

Re:Typical Comment

[fgb]

You've go to be kidding! Other than the ability to detect when you've accidentally typed the the same word twice in a row, the grammar checker in msword is completely worthless.

Re:Typical Comment

[jimmy_dean]

I completely agree. :) And doesn't a spell check do this for you anyway? Now something that tries to incorporate some new and leading edge type stuff for a grammar checker would be cool. But I agree, MS Word's grammar checker is useless.

Re:Typical Comment

[William Baric]

I don't know for the english speaking community but for anyone writing in french you can always use a program like Antidote. It integrates with Writer and it's far better than the one with MS Office.

Re:Typical Comment

[Compuser]

This is not true. I tend to often write in long
sentences and having a program remind you that
a sentence is too long is nice. It also occasionally
catches plural-singular mismatches etc.
If you are not a native English speaker, it has
some value, so long as you realize that most of
its suggestions are BS.

Oops

[ilctoh]

StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org Sorry, but I think you have it backwards. OO.o is based on Star Office, not vice-versa.

The old debate...

[Iscariot_]

I'm sure everyone is tired of the old debate of GNOME vs. KDE, or StarOffice vs. KOffice, but I have a question of sorts...

Wouldn't it be better if theses camps to together? I mean, they're both basically competing with Microsoft (who has massive amounts of money to spend advancing their products), so why compete amongst themsevles? I like bits of both KDE and GNOME really. But I'd be in heaven if they got together to create a single desktop solution with the perks of both.

What do you think?

Re:The old debate...

[jimmy_dean]

I think collaboration between the camps is fantastic. Take a look at freedesktop.org for this initiative. Other than that, a single thing is almost always a bad idea. Competition is a really good thing. There are plenty of talented open source programmers to go around for all of the projects. No need to put everyone in the same boat only to get people mad at each other for conflicting ideas. Then you get about 50% less people working on the project(s) because they can't express their ideas for program improvements. Bad, bad idea. :)

Re:The old debate...

[Jody Goldberg]

Yes is would be very nice if we could stop replicating each others work. However, its difficult to do that in practice because we're all operating on what are in effect completely different platforms. KDE uses entirely different data structures than GNOME, which is in turn different from OO, which is different from mozilla ... and MS sits on the sidelines and smiles.

Adding to the technical challenges are the politcal bits. I've writting elements of gnome-office (libgsf) with the specific intent that it be sharable between the different platforms. Why bother rewriting OLE import/export 3 times ? Unfortunatly, that teeny little 'g' is a big problem. The kword folk have accepted the library, but the kspread team seems intent on writing their own. The OO people can't even look at it because 'the mac people would scream when they saw a glib depend'. Its depressing.

For the time being we're stuck. Each of us feels our project can produce the best result in the shortest time. At best the projects can share test suites and documentation. Which is where Mitch Kapor's grant to Gnumeric comes in handy. We're using it to commission a set of tests in xls format (so that we can all read it, even Ms Excel). The other projects are welcome to use it along with all of our other interoperability tests.

Re:The old debate...

[xtronics]

NO, competition is great! The lack of competition is exactly why M$ products fail to get better.

If you don't like competition, you might consider living in China or some other socialist place (or just wait a while, even the Repubs are now headed that way, ).

In the end GPL/Linux WILL be the dominant operating system and the more forks, the more likely better ways of doing things will be found.

Re:The old debate...

[Anonymous Coward]

What were they thinking when they made glib?? Who thought it was a good idea to take the entire C standard library, put a 'g' in front of all the functions, and pretend it is something different? Sure, it is nice to have a standard linked list and stuff like that, but a lot of it is just replication of C99, and sometimes a very poor replication!

Re:The old debate...

[aled]

China likes Linux.
M$ is monopolic in USA.
Then logically follows that USA is a comunist dicatorship and China is a paradise of free speech, right? For a moment I was confused but now I see the wisdom of your comment.

Re:The old debate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you write it with a Glibc dependency? Glib is a pain in the ass; one more huge fucking peice of GNU source to port and maintain. Oh sure, its fine for you Linux users, maybe those of you using *BSD. Those of us on more minority platforms need to deal with things like Glib ourselves. Please, for the love of all that is holy, will you please stop using Glib?!

Re:The old debate...

[IamTheRealMike]

Er, no. Glib makes programming C actually somewhat sane. It's still a pain in the ass, but sometimes it's the best choice.

Programmers have been writing utility libraries to help them since the dawn of time. Jody is right, it's pretty damn depressing when some people take fright at a utility library because it has a "g" in the name.

There aren't any compelling arguments against glib that I've seen. If glib isn't portable to your platform alreay then it's almost certainly easy to do. The other "arguments" I've seen basically revolve around the use of underscore_style, a style that's also used in the Linux kernel and parts of the STL, and the fact that it's C.

These people chose their language, and built tools to make their lives easier. If you, or other people, can't deal with that, then it's really pretty sad. You just end up making more work for yourselves...

Re:The old debate...

[xtronics]

Actually the truth is China is becoming more open to competition and we are getting more open to socialism.

Strange that there is more competition in open source than in the commercial world until you realize that the US government consumes 60% of the software M$ ships.

In the Linux world there is competition for the honor and prestige of providing the best software.

Moderators in Office too?

[grennis]

Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.

Moderately safe? What does that mean... Safe from moderation?

Re:Verisign - Sign the Petition Online...

[Anonymous Coward]

mod this up!

Corporations again making stupid decisions

[salmonz]

Why would a company choose to pay $1500 for StarOffice 7 when they can download Openoffice for free? I see a reverse sense of logic, which must nowadays be part of the standard American corporation.

Re:Corporations again making stupid decisions

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may grasp this but I will say it anyway: The fact that StarOffice costs $1500 makes it MORE attractive than the free version to your average corporation. The cost gives it credibility; the fact that they can pay Sun even more money for tech support gives it even more credibility.

A related suggestion on open source office suites

[mijok]

I'm sorry if this is a bit O/T but it's something I've wanted to say here for a while and no closer topic has shown up lately either (so please don't mod down...): Since we (probably) all want to avoid lock-in and thus open formats to be more widespread (ie. other office suites than MS) I have a suggestion that others might want to follow. I've tried to help Open Office spread in the following way (the reason chose Open Office is that it's supported on more platforms than any of the others AFAIK and is thus most suitable for this purpose): I'm (among other things) a business student and frequently books on eg. finance include a CD-Rom with Excel spreadsheets as examples of some concepts in the book. I test whether the sheets work flawlessly in Open Office and if so send the authors a suggestion that since Open Office would definitely fit on the CD they could spread that along for free and thus allow students who don't have access to MS Office to use the additional material if they just have a computer. So my suggestion is simply that others too do this when they encounter such books. Please note, however, that the authors of such books are businesspeople and thus "MS Sucks, Open Source rulez!" is not the way to approach them - just try to emphasize that it adds value to their book and that it's very easy to implement (you can tell how easily it worked for you) and if you feel like it you might mention that MS surely needs some competition (and they certainly acknowledge that since MS has been used in books as an example of how a monopoly sets prices).

Lazy Questions

[evil_roy]

Can any of the wordprocessors handle msword docs with auto page numbering , auto table of contents and/or tables. Last time I checked these were the features that were lacking. Every thing else I came across in baisc msword docs was there. The lack of rendering for tables created in msword was a major stumbling block in converting anyone who has to exchange docs with ms users.

Re:Lazy Questions

[jimmy_dean]

Abiword 2.0 will handle all of that except for the auto table of contents which will be a new feature for the next version, 2.2.

Re:Lazy Questions

[SCHecklerX]

While I'm sure abiword will get all of those features, I prefer that they aren't there. It's NICE having a WORD PROCESSOR that ACTS LIKE ONE rather than trying to be a document processor / layout engine.

Word processors should be used for letters and very short papers. Anything approaching a book, or anything needing any kind of consistency should be done using a document processing language like LaTEX.

Same goes for spreadsheet 'programming'. If you have to automate some data analysis, write a program. Spreadsheets should be used for quick analysis, or a place to keep your notes for anything not complex enough to warrant a database.

Re:Lazy Questions

[stefanlasiewski]

I have to agree.

A few months ago I had to type up a fairly complex docu

I was getting sick of maintaining my own TOC, so I decided to try the MS word features. I started the TOC when I was 80% done witht he document, which was a big mistake. It worked miserably. Page numbers not getting updated, TOC pointing to the wrong place. MS word couldn't handle msword docs with auto page numbering , auto table of contents and/or tables.

yicky

Re:Lazy Questions

[slide-rule]

I appreciate your opinion is validly yours to have, but here's mine: I'd love to have page numbering handled properly and even basic table ability. Granted, I don't even write that many papers these days, but my wife still does, and there's no chance with all the crap she has to shove in her head that she'll want to "learn latex" to get what many people, if not you, expect nowadays as "basic features." And so, in the meantime, her system dual-boots to you-know-what to use you-know-who's version of Office. So, what then? A non-CS-geekoid needs to write a 20 pager with foot/end notes and other minimal elements and we're just going to turn them away and say "sorry"? That's not advancing things too well.

Re:Lazy Questions

[jimlintott]

LyX. If she spends thirty minutes with the LyX tutorial she'll never use a word processor again. LyX acts like a front end for latex. It is WYSIWYM (what you se is what you mean) and excellent for large documents.

Best little piece of software I've seen. Ever.
www.lyx.org

Re:Lazy Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Can any of the wordprocessors handle msword docs with auto page numbering?

Well, we have Office 97 and it can't. Page numbers are not correctly updated. And, no, we don't have money for thousands of new Office licences.

Re:Lazy Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to chime in as agreeing COMPLETELY with parent. LyX is easy, powerful, looks nice, and does not encourage the use of MS Comic Sans.

Re:Lazy Questions

[Hektor_Troy]

Actually LyX is a pain ... hardly any keyboard shortcuts, meaning you have to move your hand to the mouse all the time, and you can't change the font inside of a paragraph.

Congratulations!

[Progman3K]

I mean it!
Good work!

It

[tigre222]

"...combines state-of-the-art usability, powerful Word Processing features, excellent interoperability with other Word Processors and many unique plugins that can be used to extend the program as needed. Among the new features in AbiWord-2.0 are: tables, footnotes, endnotes, mail-merge, database connectivity, revision marks and numerous server-side features such as command-line scripting. It features superb MS Word import ability as well as perfect import/export to Rich Text Format."

It exports to RTF! OMG, what about saving the file as a MS Word file?? What a concept!

Re:It

[jimmy_dean]

Here's a fact about that: you can capture 100% of everything that Microsoft Word can do (yes this includes the very latest version, Office XP) by exporting to RTF. That's no lie, it's a fact.

Re:It

[Anonymous Coward]

It does export to MS Word (at least, 1.0 does, I haven't installed this new version yet). Its just that it isn't "perfect" since the format is undocumented, whereas RTF is not, and since the MS suites can import RTF perfectly as well this is a better choice.

Re:It

[tigre222]

My point was this; If a user in an organisation saves as an RTF then I will get a phone call from the "sendee" asking me what to do with a .rtf file. Stupid I know but true. Why not just offer the Save As option to .doc as per OpenOffice? (and don't get me started on that program!) Don't these people actually work in an office?

Re:It

[jimmy_dean]

Actually, I agree. And it's just MIME-type games. But here's how it works. You save your file in Abiword 2.0 as a Microsoft Word .doc. What Abiword does is it is actually RTF but with the extension .doc. If you do want a true RTF with the proper extension, that option is there too. How's that work for you?

Re:It

[damiam]

You can rename an RTF file to .doc, send it someone, and they'll never know the difference. There's really no valid reason to do a (possibly imperfect) Word export when you can do a perfect RTF export that Word will open fine anyway.

Re:It

[jimmy_dean]

How on earth can my comment about RTF export be marked as a troll post? It is a fact...search google for it, go to ircd.gimp.org #abiword and ask dom about it. He's the head software developer for Abiword. Moderators get your facts straight before modding something down. Unless of course you're a Microsoft troll. :)

Re:It

[tigre222]

Perfectly valid reply, I thought

Re:It

[Anonymous Coward]

asking me what to do with a .rtf file.

Why, RTF file of course!

Re:It

[KnightStalker]

I moderated it as "Troll" because there is no "Completely wrong" category. Unfortunately, it looks like I was wrong[1]... I have not looked at RTF lately and apparently it is a lot more featureful than it used to be. (Hereby I undo the insult to your karma which is no doubt excellent.)

[1] There are a considerable number of problems with RTF in AW though. As a test, just now I created a document in AW 1.99.2 on Debian, with three styles and a footnote, saved it as RTF and reloaded it in AW. I was surprised to see that the styles weren't lost -- apparently RTF is better than it used to be, hence the separate "RTF for old applications" type. But the footnote was destroyed (the footnote text ended up right after the [1] reference,) and it inserted a spurious blank line where there wasn't one before. After that, I created one with a hyperlink to a different part of the document, saved it as "2.rtf", reopened it, and the hyperlink was preserved! Suspicious, I noticed that even though I used a .rtf extension, it saved the file in AW's native XML format. I re-saved it as a real RTF file, and now AW crashes when opening it. As a third test, I created a file with a calculated field (# of characters) and after saving and re-opening that, the field survived, but the old value was inserted in plain text following the correct computed value.

Ignorance can be bliss

[The Ancients]

Ignorant? Yes.
No more ignorant than most people's? Yes!
Do I want to stay ignorant about the inner workings of office software? Hell yes!

When it comes to this sort of thing, most users just want to know that xxx app will open the document, and display it as close to how it should be as reasonably possible. Yes, free (or cheaper) is good, but then so is functionality.

There is no AbiWord 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

1.99 is latest version, this is a blatant lie.

Re:There is no AbiWord 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

1.99 is 2.0

They're just taking it to one less decimal place than you are.

Re:There is no AbiWord 2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

1.99 is 2.0

So they are using Excel (see here

Finally!? A word processor!?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor "

And people wonder why Linux isn't 'on the desktop' yet!? Seriously, apps like these are needed; they aren't some kind of swish extra that only Windows users can have. So while it's nice to see a decent 'quality' wordprocessor, it's also a bit embarrassing really.

What was everyone doing? Waiting for M$ to release Word or is it just a sign that Linux is still currently in the palm of techies, not office workers?

Re:Finally!? A word processor!?

[RicRoc]

Yes, it is a sign that Linux is in the hands of techies! Office workers don't program, so of course they don't contribute programs to Open Source. They pay for what they need. Up til now, Open Source development has been unpaid, but now that money (IBM, SUN, ...) has started to flow into Open Source, we can expect to see more non-techie needs fulfilled.

As long as the source is still Free, I welcome our contributing overlords! :-)

abiword

[Raagshinnah]

i'd love to like abiword no, really, i would! if only it didnt segfault everytime i try to copy from it, or when it tries to spellcheck french documents etc...don't get me wrong - i do like it, but it just doesn't behave properly here, and i don't really have the time to look into it(the only solutions i found when i got off my arse to search was recompiling it without gnome support, which didn't quite work) for now i'll just use koffice, who's loading time is decent on this p3 450, and has most of the features i need(when i need bigger stuff i just use OOo) anyone come across this crash-when-trying-to-cutnpaste-from-abiword problem? (btw this is happening on a debian testing box, but i had the same problem on a gentoo stable...)

Re:abiword

[jimmy_dean]

Nope, I've been running Abiword CVS HEAD for about a whole year (on a Gentoo stable box) and those types of problems haven't been around for months now. Are you trying this out with the Abiword 2.0 stable release or a pre-release?

Re:abiword

[Anonymous Coward]

spellcheck french documents

Why shouldn't it? I added a french spell checker to my OSX box and it works just fine.

On a side note, my current contracting job involves using *shudder* Word. Whenever it runs across the acronymn, NTP, it switches all the menus to spanish. The only way to get them to change back is a reboot. I find it most amusing.

MS & OpenOffice compatability

[My_Apron_Has_Stripes]

How well does OpenOffice handle Word files? Can you import AND export, so that someone with Word can open a file you created using OpenOffice? With just about every other computer out there running Word, this could be a potential brick wall.

Re:MS & OpenOffice compatability

[iapetus]

Handles Word files fairly well, though not perfectly. As you'd expect, the more complex the file, the less perfectly it handles it. Yes, it can handle both import and export.

Re:MS & OpenOffice compatability

[Airconditioning]

Word files it handles generally well. I found, at least in version 6, that it has a hard time reading and writing spreadsheets properly. A problem that kept coming up was that print ranges were being changed so as nothing printed by default, you had to go and manually assign certain sheets to be printable. Imagine trying to explain that to your users. The biggest problem is when the documents are being accessed, modified and saved by both MS and Star users, things start to get progressively worse. Strange anomolies appear in the documents and some things disappear completely. If on the other hand you're handling the documents only in Star and you save them as MS formatted files, they retain their consistancy a lot better. Thankfully the most that people want to do in my company is write letters to clients and StarOffice is very capable of doing that.

Re:MS & OpenOffice compatability

[The Terminator]

AFAIK and is my experience, SO 7 Beta imports all MS-Office Documents up to XP without many Problems.
The layout of Word documents has to be fixed from time to time, but not that often. Even Scripts are supported.
Excel is mentioned in another posting.
The export to M$-Office format is AFAIK without known faults. Sometimes Open Office or Star-Office is the only way to migrate legacy MS-Office Documents to Office-XP format as Office-XP lacks import filters for older Versions (eg. Word 5.0).

Proprietary is the way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is painfully evident this "overt sauce" model is clearly breaked! I dont forsee Linus catching up at all in the version department.

My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

AbiWord for viewing
OpenOffice.org as my office suite
Vim as text editor
MiKTeX / LyX for Research Paper, Fancy Documents, etc.

Re:My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

you suck... Emacs can do all those things. maybe abiword for some stuff, but thats all i give ya.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, Informative (as in Troll)

Slight Error in Summary

[rmohr02]

StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format.

I would like to mention that OpenOffice 1.1 supports exporting to PDF now. Perhaps OO will see Flash support in the future?

Gnumeric Recieves a Grant from Mitch Kapor

[Jody Goldberg]

Mitch Kapor's OSA Foundation funds a free spreadsheet test suite

Gnumeric has received a grant from Mitch Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3) to develop an interoperability test suite with leading proprietary competitors. The money will be used as form of bounty to fund the expansion of our existing tests for worksheet functions (eg =SUM, or =ODDFPRICE). Our goal is to ensure that a users data will produce the same results (or better :-) using Gnumeric. The test suite will be in xls format, and will be freely available to all other interested projects.

Exact prices have not been decided as yet, but this is an excellent opporunity for non-coders to help opensource programs, and earn a bit of money too. Specifics to be announced on the mailing lists in the coming weeks.

Official announcement here

Re:Gnumeric Recieves a Grant from Mitch Kapor

[Anonymous Coward]

Our goal is to ensure that a users data will produce the same results (or better :-) using Gnumeric

Excel: $2+$2=$4

Gnumeric: $2+$2=$5

Yay!! You go girl!! ;)

Re:Gnumeric Recieves a Grant from Mitch Kapor

[akihabara]

Any chance of making the Gnumeric GUI a little less, um, sluggish?

When entering data the toolbars enable/disable with an annoying lag (instantaneous with Excel). Scrolling is also slow. And F9-ing a (sub)formula in the formula bar is a big missing item (great way to paste-value a single cell in Excel since the whole formula is selected with F2).

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Benoni]

If you want to take Gnumeric 1.2.0 for a spin, consider participating in The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project, a research project being conducted at UC Berkeley. We have prebuilt Red Hat 9 packages of Gnumeric and several other popular applications. These binaries are built with extra feedback instrumentation that lets us understand how the software is working (or failing to work) in the hands of real users.

Even if you have never written a line of code in your life you can help make the software better for everyone simply by using our special bug-hunting feedback packages.

Read more about it or download and install today!

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Lars Arvestad]

This sounds really interesting, but I don't understand what you are really doing. And I even followed your links!

In what way does your instrumented apps differ from, say, "talkbacks" in Mozilla? I guess it is on a higher level than a core dump. Perhaps showing the programmer what buttons had been clicked recently and things like that?

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Benoni]

The short version is that we are looking for differences in program behavior between runs that succeed and runs that crash. If there's something the program only seems to do when it crashes, then that may lead us to the bug.

The approach combines techniques from program analysis and statistical machine learning. The program analysis side addresses how to insert instrumenation that can be sampled in a sparse, random, but fair way with very little overhead. The statistical machine learning side addresses how to find the few instrumentation "needles" in the big "haystack" of noise that are strongly predictive of failure.

The goal is similar to that of Mozilla's Talkback system: find and fix the bugs that happen most often to the most people. In fact we have met with the Mozilla Talkback team on several occasions to brainstorm and exchange perspectives. A key difference is that Talkback can only observe program state at the moment of failure, whereas we collect measurements continuously as the program runs.

That potentially gives us the ability to discover deeper bugs, including things like memory corruption where the point of failure can be distant from the point where the bad behavior really happened. In one of our papers we showed how we can isolate a previously unreported buffer overrun in bc by detecting an unusual loop iteration count correlated with program failure.

More detail that that will not, I'm afraid, fit in a reasonable Slashdot comment. See the project pages, and especially the "learn more" area for more info, including links to papers of varying length and technical depth.

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Benoni]

I guess it is on a higher level than a core dump. Perhaps showing the programmer what buttons had been clicked recently and things like that?

It's not higher level so much as continuous instead of only-after-you-crash. The specific behaviors we measure are things like which way branches went, or whether functions returned negative/zero/positive values, or the relative sizes of two variables we guess might be related.

It's very low-level, down at the scale of individual source program statements and variables. And it's sampled randomly throughout program execution, instead of only being observed as a single snapshot in a post-mortem core file.

See the techie details on instrumentation schemes page for more information on the kind of measurements we take.

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Lars Arvestad]

Thanks! That was a succinct yet very informative explanation. The "learn more" link does not explain it as well as you just did, and I simply do not have time to read the papers.

It sounds like a very cool and clever project!

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[pmz]

The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

Sounds interesting, but is it really worth it if the initials don't spell out a funny word?

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Benoni]

Har har. :-)

Trust me, you don't want to see the names we came up with before this one. "Cooperative Bug Isolation Project" may not be catchy or clever, but it could have been a lot worse.

On the other hand, do we have a really spiffy logo.

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[akihabara]

Any chance of making the Gnumeric GUI a little less, um, sluggish?

When entering data the toolbars enable/disable with an annoying lag (instantaneous with Excel). Scrolling is also slow. And F9-ing a (sub)formula in the formula bar is a big missing item (great way to paste-value a single cell in Excel since the whole formula is selected with F2).

Re:The Cooperative Bug Isolation Project

[Benoni]

Any chance of making the Gnumeric GUI a little less, um, sluggish?

That depends on where the sluggishness is coming from. If the Bug Isolation Project builds are sluggish but standard Gnumeric binaries are not, then that is something I need to look at. Our instrumentation may be taking up more than its fair share of your time. On the other hand, if you see the same problems in regular Gnumeric, then your best option would be to file bug reports or contact the developers directly. They will be able to help you out more directly than I can.

When entering data the toolbars enable/disable with an annoying lag (instantaneous with Excel).

This may be intentional, or at least an intentional temporary hack. See this message from the Gnumeric mailing list archives, where Jody says "We're talking with [the gtk developers] to improve performance here, but in the mean time we've put the desensitisation on a delay to avoid pointless flicker when doing data entry quickly."

And F9-ing a (sub)formula in the formula bar is a big missing item

Sounds like a perfect item to suggest in either a bug report or on the mailing list. The Gnumeric developers (of whom I am not one) are generally pretty responsive to MS Excel feature parity requests.

Spreadsheet Programs

[Jody Goldberg]

Same goes for spreadsheet 'programming'. If you have to automate some data analysis, write a program. Spreadsheets should be used for quick analysis, or a place to keep your notes for anything not complex enough to warrant a database

I respectfully disagree. Spreadsheet make a very nice interface to complex analytics. Real practitioners do their own calculations on the complex bits and use a spreadsheet front end as a scratch pad, a way to quickly twiddle data. Spreadsheets are not databases, and generally should not be used that way. However, to dismiss them as being merely stedding stones to real databases is to miss the point entirely. They're quite good at lots of other things.

Re:Spreadsheet Programs

[GileadGreene]

Spreadsheets are not databases, and generally should not be used that way. However, to dismiss them as being merely stedding stones to real databases is to miss the point entirely. They're quite good at lots of other things.

Just to second Jody's point: I've seen spreadsheets (specifically Excel) used for, of all things, spacecraft design (among other things). In fact, JPL's Project Design Center (aka Team X) uses a whole slew of linked workbooks to develop entire conceptual mission designs. The beauty of spreadsheets is that they are very flexible, and it's easy to create and modify low-fidelity models very rapidly. As a result, Excel gets heavy use throughout the aerospace industry for doing all sorts of back-of-the-envelope calculations and simple math modelling. As Jody says, they make a great scratch pad.

Re:Spreadsheet Programs

[kannibal_klown]

At my company, our biologiests and chemists rely heavily on spreadsheets. While thye could do the calculations themselves, the spreadsheets give them instant gratification. They just have to enter the results from an experiment (or have a device automatically dump them to a spreadsheet) and have a macro or set of equations generate a report.

Most of these scientists don't test 1 compound; they test hundreds at a time. So doing it themselves would be a pain in the ass. Using spreadsheets, they can instantly see the resulting graphs and determine where the good data is.

Re:A related suggestion on open source office suit

[polyp2000]

Do you have any products / cdrom books that have taken your advice and produced these cdroms with the open office on the disk?

Other than that, its a damn good idea , and next time i come accross a book with a cdrom containing certain files I might just take your advice. Might as well send em a burn of OpenOffice with the letter too !

PDF export.

[Anonymous Coward]

StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format.

you can export to pdf with OOo Draw already.

Re:vs. Office

[Deusy]

It's a shame that the parent comment is a blatant troll because it does harbour a truth or two.

Gnome Office and OpenOffice.org (I couldn't comment on Star Office as I have not used it) are many features behind Microsoft's latest incarnations of it's Office suite.

However, Microsoft Office has had a head start. It's been going for a great deal longer than any of OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Gnumeric. It also has many more developers.

Yet the Free Software Office programs seem to be catching up. AbiWord has matured massively between 1.0.x and 2.0 - they're almost unrecognisable from each other.

Gnumeric is the one exception to the 'fewer features' since it actually boasts more functions that Excel. A little bit of polish, tweaking, and a few subtle feature additions and Gnumeric will be superior to Excel - some argue that it already is.

OpenOffice.org is also making great strides. 1.1 is far better than 1.0 in all areas - features, speed, and general polish. The plans for 2.0 are promising - there is a detailed roadmap that makes for interesting reading. Version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org will be a major milestone for the project. 1.0 was the initial release, 1.1 was the produce of a bit of spit and polish, 2.0 will be the first to feel like a true individual project as opposed to a bastard-brother of Star Office.

How is it that these Free Software programs are gaining on the software developed by the software giant?

Since Free Software developers develop for free, I think there's a pride assosciated with their work that inspires them to overcome obstacles insurmountable to a payrolled team. It could also be that we have a superior development platform, but that's just flamebait.

What I think:

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an idea generating technique called "brainstorm". Putting it simply, there two phases: a first one, in which ideas are conceived without any judgement of value and a second one, in which viable ideas are selected.

Greater ideas come up when people are free to code, IMHO, without pressures that arise if one is to follow strict guidelines.

So we shouldn't have only two environments, but many more. And we have. ;-P

Then, one day, people get together and say: fine, let's see what is best from each environment and create a common standard, which is yet another environment.

What about Document Management?

[bondjamesbond]

The biggest coup for any productivity suite would be a nice document management application like iManage for DocsOpen. Law firms (like mine) MUST have such a thing with hundreds of thousands of documents.

Re:What about Document Management?

[BiggerIsBetter]

Maybe something database backed that links into Gnome VFS could work?

Re:What about Document Management?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is the Strongroom project. I don't think it is very complete or competitive to said programs, but you could look into it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/strongroom/

Abiword 2.0

[mbrubeck]

Abiword 2.0 was released today.

A strong pitch for Gnumeric

[RealAlaskan]

Dr. B.D. McCullaugh is a big name in statistics, and has made a name for himself in (among other things) testing statistical software. In this article, he says:

The problems that rendered Excel 97 unfit for use as a statistical package have not been fixed in either Excel 2000 or Excel 2002 (also called "Excel XP"). Microsoft attempted to fix errors in the standard normal random number generator and the inverse normal function, and in the former case actually made the problem worse.

That's the entire abstract!

According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.

Blatant bias..

[Jondo]

Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org and includes proper footnotes. It also no longer uses its own font directory.

Koffice Loads faster than OO, has proper footnotes, has never had its "own" font directory, and is properly integrated into the rest of KDE.

Re:Blatant bias..

[jimmy_dean]

Hello, of course there's going to a bias. It's a press release for Gnome Office! Do you see KWord as a part of the Gnome Office suite of programs? Stop complaining, KDE gets an equal share of press coverage on ./.

Re:Blatant bias..

[Anonymous Coward]

umm.. this is a Staroffice GNOME-Office story, get the fuck out of here you 12929 options in KControl shithead.

Re:Blatant bias..

[damiam]

Abiword has proper footnotes, loads faster than KWord and OOWriter, doesn't have its own font directory, is properly integrated into the rest of GNOME, and does revision control, internationalization (w/ bidi), decent MS format support, and mail merge. Plus, it doesn't suck, and it's got a usable Windows port, neither of which can be said for KWord.

Re:Blatant bias..

[r00zky]

The problem with KOffice being it doesn't convert from MSOffice docs as well as OO

Re:Blatant bias..

[adrianbaugh]

The problem that made me ditch koffice (the Mandrake 9.1 version) was that if you created a page with a background image and then tried to put frames on top there was no way of making the frame borders totally invisible in the final printout. This flaw may well have been fixed, I haven't tried kword since, but it's pretty sucky that no-one noticed it...

Re:Blatant bias..

[Unregistered]

and is properly integrated into the rest of KDE.

This can be good or bad. I won't use koffice because it's integrated into kde. It takes too long to load the forst k app and i can't find a decent OSX kde skin that matches the rest of my desktop.

Not that kopffice is a bad project, in fact the fee times i have use it it was really slick considering it was at 1.0 at the time.

Re:Blatant bias..

[jay-be-em]

Um, so did you report the bug? Or did you just sit on your ass and cry about it? No one noticed it? Obviously you did! As a user of oss you should report deficiencies or bugs.

Re:Blatant bias..

[Guppy06]

"Koffice [koffice.org] ... has never had its "own" font directory,"

That's because you don't need your own font directory when you're only running in one environment. Or don't you like your documents looking exactly the same no matter what OS you use?

Re:Blatant bias..

[Jondo]

Aqua widget and WM theme: Here

OSX animated panel SuperKaramba theme: Here

Re:Blatant bias..

[Jondo]

The quoted statement was a general statement about word processors on Linux. It mentioned OO and Abiword, and nothing else.

Re:Blatant bias..

[Unregistered]

cool. i don't think i have control center (what's the executable name?) but i may be interested in this if i ever go back to using kdevelop. How do i install it. I do have qtconfig if that helps.

Re:Blatant bias..

[Jondo]

KDE Control center is 'kcontrol'.

To install the eyecandy/themes, you need current kde and qt dev. libs/headers installed. Basically you just unpack and make && make install the packages, they install into the kde prefix. (/usr/local usually)

Just follow the INSTALL instructions in the packages and you should be fine.

No Mac support?

[rxed]

StarOffice is nice, its just too bad that it doesn't support Mac OS of any kind. There is a lot of edu's that are using Mac's (legacy issue I guess).

Re:No Mac support?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is Mac support for OpenOffice.org Here.

-- ac at work

Re:No Mac support?

[javamutt]

Us OO instead. You won't see much difference between the two.

Re:No Mac support?

[rxed]

I mean Mac OS 9 support. This is legacy OS. There is plenty of stuff for Mac OS X, but some lab's are still stuck with OS 9 for a while (budgets are cut etc)

I do

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Don't these people actually work in an office?

And I use Word. Only Word. Despite this, I recommended the use of rtf as standard because the .doc format did make us lose documents.

Does anyone really care about Macro features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would I want yet another company to design another portal that guarantees users to be infected by more macro virus? As if M$ macro isn't bad enough already, now it can screw up Linux users too.

Where isn't it?

[Niscenus]

It's in at least two newsletters and probably four times in the past year on the mailing lists. You need only google the abisource site for references to KDE and you will most certainly find it in a short order.

Re:Where isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whose documentation is it, in that case? KDE? Gnome? Abiword? Any application that requires extra libraries? If I write a program that only runs on Gnome, do I have to provide these instructions or is it assumed that the documentation for installing the Gnome libs are "out there" and users can go figure it out on their own?

Re:Where isn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I write a program that only runs on Gnome, do I have to provide these instructions or is it assumed that the documentation for installing the Gnome libs are "out there" and users can go figure it out on their own?

At this point, it's safe to assume that any desktop user has the KDE and GNOME libraries installed. If they don't, it's because they're either being frugal with resources or nursing some late-90's grudge, and they won't use your product anyway.

Re:Where isn't it?

[JCholewa]

> If I write a program that only runs on Gnome,

There is no such thing as "a program that only runs on Gnome". Any GNOME app can be run with any window manager (you can even run seemingly lower-level stuff like the GNOME background app or the GNOME bar while running on something like KDE).

Your users are in two categories:

A) The general populace. These people will be using Mandrake, Red hat, or some other wimpy distribution that either automatically includes all possible libraries for all these interfaces or has an auto-installer that goes on the internet and downloads new libraries as they're needed. My Mandrake 9.1 does this. If I have a program called "OogaBoogaOffice" that was made for the "OogaBooga" environment, then Mandrake will install the program and automagically install any dependencies and libraries without requiring me to do anything or even notice any added complexity. Debian acts the same way, I'm told. Windows doesn't have this capability, so it sucks for you if you want to run an app that requires ".NET" on your Win2k box.

B) The hackers who prefer to work on the command line and do all their own dirty work. These folk tend to run Slackware or even their own hand-made Linux distribution. You don't really need to care about these folks too much. For their sakes, it's considered good practice to make a note somewhere that'll just let them know which libraries that they'll need.

So what's the problem? In Linux, stuff usually just works, generally because the distro does all the dirty work automatically. And for those people who have distributions that don't ... well, that's their way and you don't need to worry about them. But the procedures for putting together install files for both end users and hackers are fairly standardized.

--
-JC

Dont forget K-Office

[nurb432]

While i realize the new release isnt finished, the story tag seems to try lead one to belive Gnome Office and Staroffice are the only office suites available.....

Oh, and siag office too.. if you want something more lightweight.

It's coming, sort of, eventually

[Niscenus]

When last we met our hero, Dom was contemplating and otherly licensed plugin to use Link and possibly other, lesser applications. Link, however, currently limits the languages to English and German. If you have a better idea, we're all really open ears....

Biased Story, apps already exist.

[nurb432]

*nix has had quality office applications for sometime.

90% of the features of current MSOffice go unused, and the offerings for *nix are more then enough for most people.

Hell, even 'works' is more then most people need.

ANd before you argue with me, take a good look around at the average user... and identify what they are really doing. You will be suprised.

Re:Biased Story, apps already exist.

[stm2]

90% of the features of current MSOffice go unused,

According to MS (sorry, I don't have the source) most people use only 10% of the features, but the problem is that is not the same 10%. And if the software doesn't have only one of the feature people need, they won't make the change.

What about Excel macros?

[Mistah Blue]

I have a few spreadsheets for business use that have macros in them. I currently use Excel running from Crossover Office to work with these, since OO 1.0.2 (shipping version in RH9) doesn't do Excel macros.

OOo does Flash already

[TrentC]

Perhaps OO will see Flash support in the future?

OpenOffice does export as Flash, according to tho OpenOffice.org 1.1beta2 Features Page.

You won't be throwing out Macromedia's product any time soon, I gather, but it's probably a good option for those Impress presentations...

Jay (=

Re:OOo does Flash already

[rmohr02]

Impress--duh. I hadn't seen the option in Writer. I feel kinda stupid.

Re:vs. Office

[LardBrattish]

How is it that these Free Software programs are gaining on the software developed by the software giant?

My take would be that M$ have not really added any compelling "must have" features to Word since at least Office 97 & arguably Word 6.0 for Windows 3.1 (except XML and I am NOT buying Office 2003 for that, I bought Office 2000 OEM and cheap when I was building my own box & I didn't see any reason to upgrade to XP either). So with a fixed target the open source versions are bound to catch up with the "key" features RSN. Now, being fair to the great Satan there are not many more features that could be crammed into Word 6.0 that are actually useful to the majority of users. Unfortunately for them they have to get people to upgrade regularly and "now without that crash-bug that lost you 3 hours of work" ain't cool enough (and IMHO should not be chargable anyway - unless I can charge them for the three hours of my time they wasted...)

OT: GNOME2 on RH7.x (x=2,3)?

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd be grateful if such a version exists. Please post link here or where to find it. thx!!!

Presentation application?

[GileadGreene]

Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface."

I see a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a database app. How about that other stalwart of the "office productivity" suite, presentation software? Much as it pains me to say it, Powerpoint has become almost indispensable (at least in my line of work) these days. OO.org's Impress is nice, but still not quite on a par with PPT. A Gnome-Office PPT equivalent would be a nice addition to the suite. Or is there some other open source presentation option out there I'm not aware of?

Re:Presentation application?

[ambrosius27]

An astute observation. No, there is no GNOME Office PPT equivalent as yet. However, there is good news on the horizon: the Abiword folks are working with Sven Herzberg in creating just such an application, using the Abiword and GNOME libraries. See Criawips. Yes, the name is a bit odd, but some prominent hackers, including Martin Sevior of Abiword fame, are keen to work on this program to round out the core of GNOME office (see the Footnotes story, comment by Martin, for example).

Re:Presentation application?

[ambrosius27]

Hey, what happened to my hyperlinks?

Fine, here it is in plain text:

*The first link (Criawips):
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/c riawips/

*The second link (Martin's comment):
http://www.gnomedesktop.com/comments.ph p?op=showre ply&tid=17276&sid=1353&pid=17268&mode=thread&order =0&thold=#17276

Cheers!

Re:Presentation application?

[GileadGreene]

However, there is good news on the horizon: the Abiword folks are working with Sven Herzberg in creating just such an application, using the Abiword and GNOME libraries. See Criawips

Thanks for the tip! That's great to hear! Dare I ask where the name "Criawips" comes from?

Re:Presentation application?

[blibbleblobble]

"Much as it pains me to say it, Powerpoint has become almost indispensable"

C'mon, Powerpoint is a piddling little program that you could replace in a week, and several people have. Display a line of text on a pretty background, now there's a difficult task.

HTML slides seem to be the future. (KPresent and Impress notwithstanding) - even if you don't have a program to generate them, it's a 5-minute template job.

Scrolly effects and PING! sounds? You say you've use PPT for more than an hour, so I assume you've got over the novelty and don't use them

p.s. you can use your wallpapers directory as a good source of backgrounds for slides. (not that powerpoint supported that, the last time I looked; I discovered it in KPresent)

Re:Presentation application?

[ambrosius27]

See here:

http://gnome-de.org/criawips/about.php#name

Re:Presentation application?

[GileadGreene]

It's not the backgrounds, and it's not the animation effects. Mostly it's the ease of layout - HTML slides are much harder to arrange. HTML is fine if all you want to present is bulleted lists. But if you're trying to present information in an interesting and visually meaningful way, layout becomes an issue. Content becomes next to useless if the audience can't rapidly absorb it and layout is key to that process.

Re:Presentation application?

[WebMasterJoe]

Forgive me if I sound like I'm on crack, but I would suggest a straight-up graphics program for something like this. Seriously. I have made presentations using Macromedia Fireworks and I was quite pleased with the way they came out. Just create a new image that's 1024x768 (or whatever the projector's best resultion is) and keep adding frames for everything. You can export it to a series of web pages (which will come out as tables of images) or export each frame and run a slide show.

Powerpoint is for the suits. We're geeks. We can control the kerning and anti-aliasing and alpha levels and snazzy rollovers. With Powerpoint et al, the application tells you how your presentation should look. I'd prefer to tell the application what I want.

Re:Presentation application?

[jdavidb]

The Gnome Office page is useful to find application replacements. I'm surprised it wasn't linked from the article.

Re:Presentation application?

[blibbleblobble]

One of the HTML presentation editors I saw was Phil Greenspun's (Link), which is hosted/server-based, and lets people log in to edit or display their presentations. It looks pretty 1990's until you apply one of the CSS styles to it.

Of course, it's possible that a standalone editor would suit many people better, but then doesn't KPresent export as HTML?

Re:Presentation application?

[4of12]

Powerpoint has become almost indispensable

Yes, Powerpoint has become a de facto standard for presentations and it really has some nice features. Getting TeX math rendering is not built-in nicely and requires going to 3rd party vendors.

I've long lamented that a similarly powerful presentation tool wasn't there in the free and open source world.

What I'd really like to see is something which uses SVG and MathML so that vector graphics, dynamic illustrations and TeX-quality mathematics could all be produced and saved in an open XML based format. A file where, if you really wanted, you could open it up in any old text editor and fix a typo in a line in some slide, or change the color of some symbols in an equation. Something which could be accessed using XML parsers available for Perl, Python and C++ so that standard free programming tools could be used to create and modify documents automatically, instead of through some GUI, or by buying a proprietary library.

Something like this would take off, especially if support for international glyphs were built in from the outset and the XML specifications included not just content, but also standardized rendering rules that are so important for presentations.

Re:Presentation application?

[GileadGreene]

Amen to that!

Last time I had a math heavy presentation I ended up generating a bunch of encapsulated postscript files directly from LaTeX sources, and then pasting them in to PPT. A little awkward, but preferable to the MS-supplied equation editor...

Kough and Abicough

[Ricin]

"Finally the Linux desktop has a quality word processor that is faster to load than OpenOffice.org"

Koffice can do most of what people would expect of it and AbiWord has the best MSWord filters (if needed). The year is 2003 BTW.

A while ago a friend of mine (windows only person and no techie) sat down at my *BSD box wanting to make a payment scedule in "excel". I ran kspread and he found his way around easily.

OO.org is nice for windows as a free alternative but for *NIX it's been caught up with already.

Why I can't switch to Abiword yet

[The Revolutionary]

I'm currently an OpenOffice.org Writer for various informal to semi-formal tasks. Although for anything "serious" I use LaTeX. Something like Abiword, which integrates better with my GNOME desktop, is just the sort of application I would like to use.

Also, the story claims that one of Abiword's distinctive features is, "includes proper footnotes". Well what is this supposed to mean? I've never had any difficulty making OpenOffice.org Writer do footnotes properly. Is there some widely known deficiency of which I am completely unaware?

There were also a number of other issues last I tried; perhaps this have since been resolved:

Seemingly no support for automated numbering of a proper outline (i.e. cycle Roman numerals, capital letters, numbers, etc.). I can't even get it to work manually, changing the sort of "numbering" I want at each level of indent.

select+delete or cut text fails to properly redraw the screen, leaving a line of the removed text visible, and leaving me to wonder whether I actually removed the section properly, or if it is just due to improper redraw.

In "Web Layout", strange breaking occurs where page breaks "should be", leaving me to wonder whether it hit "Enter" accidently, or if it is merely this bug.

Scrolling results in text distortion, making one or more lines unreadable until scrolled off the screen again, or until the application window is covered and redrawn (although disabling "smooth scrolling" seems to "fix" this).

Also, Abiword doesn't appear to allow the insertion of any "objects" other than "pictures". Of course this isn't a "fault", as I suppose it is waiting for a framework to be standardized for this sort of thing.

No, between everything else, I don't have the time now to get a handle on the code base and fix or implement these things myself, and so please don't tell me to.

I'm simply stating that as I found it last I checked, it was not sufficient to meet my needs, and I will, if most of these issues still remain, have to wait a while longer before I can adopt or endorse it for regular use.

I look forward to switching.

Re:Why I can't switch to Abiword yet

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"No, between everything else, I don't have the time now to get a handle on the code base and fix or implement these things myself, and so please don't tell me to."

You don't have to "get a handle on the code base" to get things fixed. There is an AbiSource Bugzilla. Post your problems/feature requests. People seem to be pretty responsive and helpful.

Re:Why I can't switch to Abiword yet

[msevior]

For the numbered outline, simply define a new style based on "Numbered Headings" and change Auto numbering style from simple Numeric to Alphabetic, roman, whatever you like.

For the cut+and select and delete bugs, I'm stumped. They work great on my box. Please submit a bug along the offending document in a bug report to our bugzilla.

Web layout! I'm impressed that someone actually uses that :-) Please post a bug report and we'll that fixed.

Regarding the scrolling causing text distortion, this bug was fixed right before the 2.0 release.

I think must have played with a pre-2.0 beta. Look at the hint for auto numbered styles. They work much the same as MS Word. We could include more by default I guess but it's just as easy for the user to create their own and save them to a template file.

So go ahead and switch :-)

PS. We take good bug reports with easy to reproduce examples very seriously.

Re:Why I can't switch to Abiword yet

[Anonymous Coward]

That select + delete bug is right here.

Re:Why I can't switch to Abiword yet

[Frodo2002]

What amazes me is that if you are proficient in LaTeX (which you posting suggests), why would you ever want to switch from a type-setter to a wordprocessor? Why don't you just stick with LaTeX? Its faster, easier, a more effective way to write etc... You probably know the deal...

Re:vs. Office

[Guppy06]

"but Office XP is far superior in terms of usability and productivity."

That's all well and good, but is it four times the usability and productivity of SO? Because that's what the price tag says (and that's just for the standard version). Hell, WinXP Pro retails for less than that.

I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to buying software (and, yes, I buy software), but when it digs into my pocket book as much as a proposed MS Office solution does, I'm going to spend on SO instead and use the savings on ways to make money.

Just one question...

[RedBear]

Just one question about all these wonderful new "office" suites. They all use the same, standardized, open file formats by default, and are 100% compatible with each other, right? Right?

Because that would be a huge benefit of moving away from MS Office, right? Because all these different office suites are totally compatible and interchangeable, even though they can never be totally compatible with the secret, changing MS Office formats.

So I don't have to keep saving in DOC just to exchange files between StarOffice and GNOME Office and KDE Office, right? I can save in some new, default, standard, universally recognized file format, and easily exchange files between all these different programs without any translation problems or confusion, right?

And Microsoft will quickly be forced to create a patch for their Office products so they can read and write this new open file format that the whole world is suddenly standardizing on because it's used by default by every open source office suite in the world, right?

Or am I smoking crack and about to get my first -1, Troll rating for openly wondering why there is still no apparent single, open, standard, widely used file format? One to compete on solid ground with the single, closed, proprietary file formats from Microsoft and others that we all revile on a daily basis.

We've had 15 years or more to replace DOC and its brethren. Where is the replacement for DOC? Or the replacement that can be used for anything, like a combination of DOC, XLS, PPT, PUB, etc? I'd really, really, really like to know. Because until I know that, I feel pretty stupid telling people to drop the nice, simple, standard (de facto if not de jure) Microsoft Office file formats. When they ask what they're supposed to use instead, I have no answer.

Re:Just one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right.
Here is the file format:

http://xml.openoffice.org/

Now all we need is people to use it!

Re:Just one question...

[pointwood]

KOffice will switch to Open Office fileformats - you can read more about it in the Kastle 2003: KOffice Developers' Meeting Report.

Re:Just one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out ... OpenOffice and OASIS> [oasis-open.org] OASIS is a not-for-profit, global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business standards. Evert

Re:Just one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the format is called RTF.

Re:Just one question...

[blibbleblobble]

Like if you save as HTML from Abiword and open it in OpenOffice, or vice-versa, it doesn't display the source-code as text, right?

Right? How soon do we get an independant standard for Free Software word-processed documents?

abiword not there yet

[DuckWing]

unfortunately for me, AbiWord doesn't come close to OpenOffice Write. OO does a better job of converting MS documents. AbiWord, in all my tests, is pathetic at it.

for OpenOffice, any MS Word doc with graphics is hosed and forget about Word Art.

Quite frankly, both have a lot of work ahead of them IMHO.

Re:abiword not there yet

[mrscorpio]

Have you used a 2.0 build yet? I really doubt it from your post, because the old versions do indeed suck.

But 2.0 is really good.

Chris

Re:abiword not there yet

[DuckWing]

yes I have and it's still no go. Lots of room for improvement. Fonts aren't correct, pagination goes out the window, many things need work. AbiWord has improved a lot though, it's becoming a contender for sure.

Re:vs. Office

[antiMStroll]

I don't know if what you say about Office 2003 is true, but I do know it's not too important. The majority of users don't dwelve beyond the most basic feature set. My guess is that Office will remain much better than the free alternatives and stay the favourite among professional power users. The remaining majority will be happy with free and 'enough'. People will almost always take free Chevies over $100,000 Mercedes. I know a few small businesses that already switched.

Unless Microsoft comes up with something extraordinary and indispensable, Office's rising cost will eventually render it a niche product.

Grammar Checker

[hubs99]

Does openoffice or Staroffice have a grammar checker yet? I personally like this feature of Office and I have yet to see in an open source competitor.

Re:Good chews for Evolution!

[Anonymous Coward]

HaHa. VIM ? v-i-m ?? Is that part of a viagra commercial - like vim & vigor ??? HAHAhahahahaha you are SO useless, byteboyz.

Gnumeric for Windows?

[Tailhook]

The Gnumeric folks need to make an effort to get a proper Windows binary done. If I could rely on Gnumeric being available on Windows, I could put it in front of people that would appreciate it. Last I checked there was some rambling about getting it to compile on Windows, but no real results. No, I have no interest in dealing with an emulator or some compatibility environment. I want Gnumeric on native Windows GNOME libraries. I hate to say it but I bet if Gnumeric was based on QT this would have been done long ago.

Re:Gnumeric for Windows?

[sloanster]

If you're a windoze user, you've got excel, right? how many spreadsheet apps do you need?

If you want to demonstrate gnumeric, why not run it on a platform that gnumeric supports?

worse than that

[GunFodder]

We have Java 2 Standard Edition versions 1.2 through 1.4.2. Don't forget Java 2 Enterprise Edition versions 1.2 and 1.3, or Java 2 Micro Edition (no clue what versions). J2EE includes Java Enterprise Beans with at least versions 1 and 2, and J2ME includes MIDP with at least versions 1 and 2 as well. Actually there are more Java specs than you can shake a stick at.

Java 3 may require several megabytes just to store the version numbers of all the included components :)

Re:worse than that

[Trejkaz]

Hahaha. Damn.

Slashdot removed the punchline of my joke too. My last line did say a Pi symbol using the &pi; entity, but something clipped it. Fiends.

Do you expect an open source 100% PP clone?

[Serious Simon]

It's never going to happen, of course. If it just has to be Powerpoint, buy MS Office.

Nevertheless, Impress can import and render most .PPT's pretty well, which suggests it implements close to 100% Powerpoint functionality.

What is it that you miss in the program? Why not visit www.openoffice.org, and commit a "Request for Enhancement" in the OpenOffice.org bug tracking system, Issuezilla? Your suggestion might just get implemented.

Re:Do you expect an open source 100% PP clone?

[GileadGreene]

It doesn't have to be powerpoint. It just has to work. I've been bouncing between powerpoint and impress a lot recently. I usually find that I can draft out a presentation in impress, but end up having to clean it up and finish it in powerpoint (and no, it's not because I want all the cutesy little MS animations). To be honest, my gripes with impress, aside from the slow load time, are mostly bugs (which you're right, I need to report in Issuezilla): The handling of inserted images seems to be a little flaky at times; the master slide functionality seems to have a few glitches (or I don't understand how to use it correctly); some silly UI issues (as much personal preference as anything else), and a few other irritations. Nothing huge, but the sum of all those little nagging problems is an experience (for me) that is not as good as I would like. Not that powerpoint doesn't have its annoyances too...

Re:Do you expect an open source 100% PP clone?

[TheRaven64]

I used Impress to give a presentation once. To Microsoft. It crashed.

I am never again going to use a beta version of presentation software... (the release version was a lot more stable)

By the way, does anyone know what happened to the StarOffice player? It used to be a standalone (small) app for SO5 that would let you give presentations without installing then entire office suite. I can't find any references to it on the OOo site.

Jim Hall - StOf7 adds functionality misleading

[bwakkie]

Hi Jim,

About your quote: "...StarOffice 7 software adds functionality to enable export to PDF, and to the Macromedia Flash format..."

In OpenOffice 1.1 that I currently use on my Windows machine is producing flash and pdf as well. So I don't see why I should use for StareOffice. All good functionality comes back to OpenOffice no matter who is providing it.

regards,
Bastiaan

What ist this fetisch with fast loading times

[12dec0de]

I don't get it. Why is everybody interested in the fast loading of a office suite? Or an Web-Browser for that matter? I start my computer, load mozilla, load openoffice (as part of my saved session) and it stays up. Do I hear you say memory restrictions? That the job of the virtual memory manager. The last time my system stayed up for 163 days until some work on the power system and a kernel update forced a downtime.

What difference does it make whether it takes 1 or 2 minutes to load?

Re:What ist this fetisch with fast loading times

[WebMasterJoe]

There are a few reasons for fast loading times, from my perspective. I use linux on my home machine almost exclusively, and when a friend needs to open a word processor, he/she has to click on the OpenOffice icon. Usually this process is accompanied by the following conversation:

Friend: Where's Word?
Me: Oh, I don't use Word. Click on that icon right there.
Friend: What's this OpenOffice thing?
Me: It's a linux counterpart to MS Office. It works pretty much the same.
Friend: Um, are you sure it's loading?
Me: Yeah, just give it a minute...
...
...
Me: Ok, well, it's not quite as quick as MS Office...

The load time is the first impression people typically have of an application. If it takes forever to load, that first impression is not so good.

The other reason why load time is important is the whole frustration factor. At my job, I use an application that requires starting no less than three other applications first, all of which take 30-45 seconds each, then when I start the actual desired app, it takes close to three minutes before I can get going. That's five and a half minutes of just sitting there. Granted, this application especially sucks, but the point is, long load times are frustrating, and you don't want all your employees to have to deal with a long load time every time they accidentally shut down the office suite.

One thing I've learned working in an office is that nobody cares about theoretical usability and all that stuff. If the users complain, then it's an issue.

Re:What ist this fetisch with fast loading times

[12dec0de]

I think you did not read my comment till the end.

IMHO the point of having a multitasking OS on the desktop, is that you can leave all applications that you are likely to use open. Or better yet, open them with the start of the system. Which, by the way, Windows is doing, in order to have Word to appear to load in seconds.

Re:What ist this fetisch with fast loading times

[WebMasterJoe]

I think you did not read my comment till the end.

Interestingly, I don't think you read the end of my comment. :) Computer geeks use computers differently than the rest of the world. And the bottom line is, if the users complain, then it is an issue. You can't close a bug report with, "users aren't using application the way we expect them to."

Clearly a slow-loading app isn't a problem if you leave the application open for 163 days. But you're an exception. Most people shut down their applications at the end of the work day, if not their whole system. For these people, I can understand why a long load time is bad. And if they complain, you can't very well tell them that you don't have a problem with the load time, and they should stop turning off their computers.

Cool

[Amonynous Coward]

I'm a happy StarOffice user. I use Gnome too. And sometimes I also use Gnome Office too. It's fast! And all of these products are so good I can't miss Window$. They are even than their MacOS counterparts. I can open any m$ office file with my good tools, and I didn't even need to pay for them! My Gnome desktop also looks good and simple, it's the best destop environment available. And with StarOffice things are even better. This is the power of Linux, it's so good and free, thanks for Linus for creating this wonderful system all alone. He's definitely a genius!

Inevitable quote from Young Frankenstein

[The_ForeignEye]

Abiword 2.0 has been released

Just can't help thinking of

• Who's brain is this?
• Abby...something...
• Abby...something?
• Abby...normal
• A B normal!!?

So, what word processor did you just release? It's not really Abiword, is it?

Re:A related suggestion on open source office suit

[javamutt]

The other point, which I think you intended but didn't include explicitly, is M$ format problems.

If Joe student bought a copy of Excel 98, and the book ships with a spreadsheet in Excel 2003 that student is probably screwed.

If the book ships with a copy of OO, they (as you suggest) can allow multiple platforms to access that file without worry about format compatibilities.

It's amazing how Apple has been slammed for obsoleting their customers, but M$ doesn't get the same bad press. I have a site I volunteer at which has to maintain licenses for Acess 95 and Access 2000 because they have Access 95 apps which don't work properly in Access 2k and vice-versa. So much for the benefit of backward compatibility.

Re:vs. Office

[javamutt]

I was pretty happy with the functionality of Word 2.0 in terms of features. I'm not sure that pseudo-AI in the form of a talking paper clip has improved my writing skills.

I think the pricing of something like an office suite (which IMHO is a commodity) is insulting. I think M$ would actually benefit more from including it free in Windows as a value-add than charging astronomical fees. It would be yet another notch in their office ubiquity and even further solidify it as a standard. What's more, it would bring Windows 1 step closer to competing with Linux (Linux does so much by virtue of included apps, where Windows out of the box does very little until you install apps).

Of course, I'm perfectly happy watching Linux keep building its lead, so Mr Gates can feel free to disregard my advice :)

I'm still wondering if...

[A_Non_Moose]

...anyone has written or thought about writing a wordprocessor that uses plain old HTML/CSS (when/if needed)?

If you think about it, plain text and RTF are quite nice, standards wise, but what has the "best" support world wide for exchanging/distributing information?

That's right...HTML, and for the exacting people; CSS.

Think about it...bullets, colors, fonts, images and all that stuff...just like a word processor.

The only "request", I'd like to see is clean code, not the generation/defacation of HTML that Word, Wordperfect, and to a lesser extent (IIRC) OO/SO.

Whose documentation?

[Niscenus]

Um...if it's on the AbiSource site, it's probably AbiWord's, unless credited to elsewhere.

OASIS is cute but

[Niscenus]

Only one thing is actually a standard, and Abi's the only one using it, XSL-FO.

Microsoft's xml office will be a binarified version of that with a few proprietary extensions and block -layout object requests for desktop-publishing-like capabilities.

OASIS is just as good a variation of as Microsoft's own, except it's not in binary form (but they do have a compressor in OOo).

Go standardisation!

Note

[KnightStalker]

Upgrading to whatever is currently in debian unstable (2.0.0-cvs-something) fixes most of those problems... it still crashes when opening RTF files with hyperlinks (i will file a bug) and it doesn't auto-recognize the extension on save.

Re:Note

[jimmy_dean]

Thank you very much for your moderation explanation. I very much appreciate that. Thank you also for being a great user of Abiword (meaning you use it and file bug reports - we need more like you). Abiword's implementation of RTF isn't perfect but there is a very large commitment amoung the developers to put a lot of time into its implementation and to polish it off till it *appears* to have no more bugs in it. Just this past week, there have been 3 patches submitted to the new CVS HEAD of Abiword (for 2.2) that reduces the load time of certain large RTF files by a very large factor. You may want to stick around and check out CVS HEAD after a while (actually right now is good because it's still very stable still being early after the 2.0 release).

Purely Hypertext based word processor?

[Anonymous Coward]

Abiword does try very hard to produce good clean readable XHTML and any help you can provide to improve abiwords support in this area would be much appreciated. Please do take a closer look.

Netscape or Mozilla Composer is a fairly adequate replacement for simple word proccessing but it does not yet have the kinds of advanced features some users would want.

Please take a closer look at Abiword
http://abisource.com

There is also the problem of the limitations of HTML which Abiword hit quite quickly.
The complext list formatting that abiword supports is a nightmare to support. Stopping and restarting lists is particularly nasty.

While this can be done using HTML it is not as easy as you might think.