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Excellent Tutorial for OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X
Blano writes "Marc Liyanage recently posted a great article on getting up and running and optimizing OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. He includes some tweaks and helpful configuration tips." Another option is getting the software on CD.
Open Office on the Mac is a joke. It runs under X and looks like crap. I used Open Office on Windows and loved it, but refuse to use it on the Mac.
I hope they plan on coming out with a "native" version sometime soon. I own a Mac because I love the interface, it's very hard to take 12 steps back and use this.
http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
Take a look. It works beautifully here. Takes a little longer than MS Office to load, but once it's loaded, it's wonderful.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I was trying about 6 months ago to get OpenOffice working properly on my wife's iBook, so she could have something better than AppleWorks (without me paying MS anything)... it was *not* easy. She ended up sticking with AppleWorks despite its flaws and limitations. X-11 apps are really tough to integrate properly into OSX (Jaguar, at least - haven't tried Panther), even using nice windows managers like OroborosX.
I think I'm going to give it another shot -- this guy really walks through all of the nitty gritty details clearly, and comes up with something that looks pretty usable. He might be using Panther, though... I remember reading somewhere that Apple's X-11 wasn't going to be available for earlier versions of OSX; I installed XonX (XFree86 for Darwin), not Apple's version.
Anyway, he's going specifically for the goal of creating PDFs with bookmarks (which we don't really need), but you get all the details of setting up a workable install of OOo along the way.
Do you think it's ready for non-technical users yet?
I got scared off a bit by the website's warnings like "it's really only a prototype" and "As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users." (emphasis theirs).
Personally, I don't mind working around some bugs and crashes here and there in exchange for cool new features, but my wife doesn't work that way.
Marc Liyanage is a great asset to the Mac OS X community. Check out some of the Mac OS X packages he provides for several important Unix applications. Though not linked to from that page yet, he also has a PHP 5.0.1 package ready for Mac OS X. (Caution: link points directly to the .dmg file).
JP
I think the best implemntation of OOo for OS X at this thimr is NeoOffice/J
...etc
/j is that you need a few hundred mhz tor run it.
It still does not really look like a mac app, but it does behave like one. In comparison to the X11 version it has:
- quartz text rendering
- native key commands (like cmd-s and so on)
- one application package
- double clicking files works normally
- no seperate launchers
- no extra software required
- native printer and font support
neooffice/j makes a lot of Marc's suggestions obsolete. The only drawback of
Could not get value of CFPref AppleLanguages! Please reset your locale in the International control panel..
Does anyone here know if there are other relases that work on OSX (perhaps a *BSD/PPC release?).
Apple can easily prodce a kick ass iOffice package that would make M$ Office look like the cluttered piece of junk that it is. Actually a fully working copy is probablly already in the software basement at Apple anyway.
Appleworks is purposely kept lame all these years for a reason, the Apple/MS relationship which is competitive, but not hostile. After all Apple does want Virtual PC to be continued.
So this uneasy reationship gives neutral party Open Office a chance to really take hold on the Mac platform and out produce Appleworks and be done cheaper than M$ Office.
So to you Open Office programmers: Get a investor and some real interface/ease of use programmers and charge $20 or so for your product on Mac's.
From there port to the Windows platform and kick M$ in the nuts pernamently.
Just don't forget to keep it cross platform.
Well? What the hell are you waiting for? My CC is ready, along with millions of other Mac users.
Get busy
If you're 10.2(.x) or earlier, you run into a bit of a roadblock at the X11 stage: Apple's X11 only works w/Panther. Anything earlier and you want to look for Fink and/or XDarwin. And have some alcohol handy.. it took me a little while to get X in place before the oO install.
caveat - i'm playing with an iBook as a possible work-PC replacement, so though unix is my day job darwin/osX is new to me.. damn if it isn't cool as shizznitz though.
-'fester
-'fester
"My reason for looking into this was that I need to produce long technical documents as PDF files."
Why not just use LaTeX? Since PDF is native to Mac, PDFLaTeX seems (to me) to be the best solution. I've been using TeXShop for a few years now and have really enjoyed it. Sure, you don't get the GUI of an Office "suite", but I think the results speak for themselves.
bueller...bueller...bueller
...before my customers will even consider throwing Office away, and trust me, they REALLY want to, with the raft of problems that it creates daily for just about all of them.
However, those problems pale in comparison to the issues that these decidedly non-technical people will have in trying to use the horrendously awful X-based interface. I'm having enough trouble getting them able to operate OSX without having a fit of panic every 10 minutes because it doesn't work like OS9. I don't need them getting even more confused with all the X requirements of Open Office.
Yeah, Open Office is great. I use it on my Windows and Linux installs, and recommend it to my Windows-using customers. However until they get it native, unless someone makes a special request I'm not going to bother further confusing my Mac customers with it.
OOo, at least on the Mac, doesn't yet pass my "wife test". I'm getting my wife to switch from her crusty old PC to our new Mac, and the change in interface is already enough. I don't need an app that works vastly differently than everything else. I need one that integrates well.
My solution, given AppleWorks well-known limitations, is to try to install old versions of Office to run in Classic. While still not native, it's closer than an X11 app is. So far the biggest problem is getting my new floppyless Mac to communicate to my very old System 7.1 Mac. It takes a bit of updating by sneakernet on the 7.1 side to get it to even see my network.
Constitutionally Correct
I've never Understood the whole OpenOffice/*Works type Applications.
Having one Application for Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Drawing and Painting just doesn't make sense. They are three different creative tasks, which occasionally have overlap.
The Windows-OLE/GNOME-Bonobo concept makes much more sense to me. Write a Document in AbiWord/WordPerfect. If you want to add a pretty Picture, Embed a Sodipodi/CorelDRAW! Drawing. If you just want to write your Resumé, just use AbiWord/MSWord. It just seems a lot more Unixey than including everything in one Application. You can also utilise previous work using a Linked Object. I could create a technical Drawing in AutoCAD and link it into a Report in Word. Then, when I wish to update the Model with more information, I just update the original and the Illustration in my Word Document automatically updates. You can't do something like this with a Works Suite, and if I want to use something more powerful (like AutoCAD) than the built-in Offering, I can. Platform Portability can be a problem with OLE/Bonobo documents, but that's what PS/PDFs are for, aren't they?
Most *Works-style applications store all types of documents in the single File Format. Where's the sense in that. If I want to find the letter that my father wrote to Grandma, I have to search though a dozen photos of grandma, a spreadsheet on Superannuation, 20 different letters to do with the Family Tree, a Picture of the family tree, a drawing of a desk, until I find the letter that I'm after. All these documents appear as Gobe Productive Files in the File Manager. There is no way to determine that one is a Spreadsheet, Painting, Drawing or Document.