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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.
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.
Neo Office J is being used to prepare for the eventual native OS X release of OpenOffice, so I want to do what I can to encourage the project.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Part of the problem is Sun wants the programs to behave the same on all platforms, which defeats the whole point.
Why the hell would I want to help Sun anyway?
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
With the former developers of Gobe Productive now working for Apple we might see something happen soon.
I don't like X11 apps on Mac OS X either. And there are things that are indeed not as good as on MS Word, especially keyboard shortcut / productivity tricks.
The biggest drawback is the missing ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to style sheets. This is an absolute must-have for me. The nonstandard keyboard shortcuts really suck and hamper the workflow.
That said, there is just no way to get structured PDFs using real OS X software, and that's why I'm using OpenOffice even though I would prefer a native OS X program that is tightly integrated.
That's why I wrote the article. After working with OpenOffice for a while I have to say that not that much is missing in there to make it into the premier tool for long, structured technical documents. The PDFs that come out in the end are of excellent quality, including fonts and vector graphics and of course the structure information/bookmarks.
It is actually quite impressive that you can get such a program for free. What's really interesting are the XML-based foundations, like the XSLT-based import/export filters. There are some *great* possibilities for shuttling structured content into and out of OpenOffice into other systems in the future.
If there's ever a real Aqua version, it will be a killer.
So I agree, it is hard to "downgrade" to the X11 level, but there is no alternative for what I use it for, and it is an impressive program, especially at this price.
In LaTeX I type some code and then click "Typeset" in TexShop, which shows me what the document looks like with TRUE WYSIWYG (i.e., not Word's sudo-WYSIGWYG). What's so hard about tha? But then I learned word processing on WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS years ago, and was used to hitting "Print Preview" to see what the doc would look like printed.
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
What would really be interesting would be if Apple leveraged OO's codebase like they did for Safari. Why recreate so much when a great deal of work has been done? The community would love it, Apple would gain a spiffy (free???) app as part of the OS (or iLife). They may still have a contract with Microsoft but god, I'd love to see them do this!
harmonious design
Well, you're definitely in the "Other" category of Office users. You use the heck out of one component and ignore the others. And I've long considered that Excel was the best of the package, Word still isn't as well-made as Ami Pro was 12 years ago and Powerpoint is a fucking joke - always has been, always will be.
Keynote 2 needs to happen no later than MacWorld in January. I haven't heard a whisper. It's a damn sham., it's so much cleaner than Powerpoint ever dreamed of being. A lot of it comes from a massive infusion of Cocoa/Quartz/Aqua goodness, but all of those APIs are open to any developer that wants to use them - fairly well documented on the web too (check out Omni Group's stuff). We may yet roll out another half-dozen seats at the agency. And no, PowerPoint '04 is an improvement but it's still not up to snuff.
For a real dream, imagine Visio implemented as a total Cocoa app.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951