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StarOffice 7, GNOME-Office 1.0 Released
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$79.95 to buy your copy for home (free for edu, plus cost of media+shipping.) Now is a great time to show this to your boss and pitch that 'MS Office to StarOffice' conversion project."
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge has a 'drive-by' 'quick-peek' look at the new StarOffice up on their site."
One suggestion on office software for the Free Software desktop: Casually re-start a friend or co-worker's Windows computer with Knoppix and show them you can open their Word files with OpenOffice.org. Mention their machine is moderately safe from Word-borne viruses until they reboot into Windows.
Microsoft is at, what, Office 2003? That's 1996 versions beyound StarOffice 7. Come on guys, get moving!
AP talks about another Sun thing, code Mad Hatter or "Sun Java Desktop". What's the relationship between StarOffice and this Mad Hatter deal? Why would they work on two parallel projects like this? Presumably MH builds on the translation libraries from OpenOffice? Inquiring minds want to know...
Openoffice is based off of Star, not the other way around.
2.0, as specified in the article title, or 1.0, as specified in the article text?
StarOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, which is based on StarOffice.
Around and around we go!
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
StarOffice is, of course, based on the ever-popular OpenOffice.org.
Nope, OpenOffice.org was created from the BASE of StarOffice. They might have ment based on the ever-popular Microsoft Office...but I digress.
I suppose you could go do the StarOffice pitch to your boss, the only problem I forsee is trying to keep up with M$ 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...
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.
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!
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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...
The Mothership
Moderately safe? What does that mean... Safe from moderation?
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. :)
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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.
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?
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.
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.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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.
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).
Karma. Moderation. Is my
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.
I mean it!
Good work!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
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).
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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.
The Mothership
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.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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.
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.
"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?
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...)
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.
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.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
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.
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'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.
Yes, of course. You just need the gnome libraries installed (but not the full environment.
AbiWord for viewing
OpenOffice.org as my office suite
Vim as text editor
MiKTeX / LyX for Research Paper, Fancy Documents, etc.
So the problem isn't a lack of API details (GTK API's and Qt API documentation), but moreso an issue of choice.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
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.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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?
Where ever I go, there I am
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
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
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!
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.
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 !
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
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.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
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.
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.
Abiword 2.0 was released today.
According to the release mentioned above, Dr. McCullaugh recommends using Gnumeric instead of excel.
See what I've been reading.
Koffice Loads faster than OO, has proper footnotes, has never had its "own" font directory, and is properly integrated into the rest of KDE.
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.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
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).
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.
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?
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
>Its not my computer either,
Try running it on your own computer
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.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
>> Don't these people actually work in an office?
.doc format did make us lose documents.
And I use Word. Only Word. Despite this, I recommended the use of rtf as standard because the
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. :)
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
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
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.
still reading?
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.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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....
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
*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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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 (=
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Perfectly valid reply, I thought
Where ever I go, there I am
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?
"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.
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.
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.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
"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 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.
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.
-- DuckWing
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.
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.
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Unless Microsoft comes up with something extraordinary and indispensable, Office's rising cost will eventually render it a niche product.
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.
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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
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.
Thank you. Drive through.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
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...
Just can't help thinking of
So, what word processor did you just release? It's not really Abiword, is it?
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.
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
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.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
...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.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Um...if it's on the AbiSource site, it's probably AbiWord's, unless credited to elsewhere.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
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!
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
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.)
.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.
[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
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
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.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
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.