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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.
* Open Office on the Mac is a joke*
much of the point of this article is to guide on how to make it less of a joke and more of an usable tool.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Fair enough, even if the comment was trollish. The article aims to help make it less of a joke, but you really have to ask yourself this-
There are a lot of talented mac progammers working on all sorts of cute but worthless apps, like 5 billion "download songs off your iPod" programs. The OpenOffice team has repeatedly asked for volunteers to help with the port to Aqua. There are a lot of people who really don't like Microsoft.
So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off? Come on people- stop bitching, step up to the plate!
Please help metamoderate.
The OpenOffice team is redoing their internal APIs for version 2.0 - the Mac porting team would be wasting their time porting a deprecated version. You can find more at the OOo Mac port site.
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.