At Long Last, NeoOffice/J 1.1 Released

VValdo writes "After nearly five years of development, NeoOffice/J has made it to its first stable release. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is a Mac OS X-integrated office suite based on OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 that includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing applications. Key Macintosh features include a standard Mac OS X installer, a native Aqua menu bar, use of the native printing system, full clipboard support, drag-and-drop, Mac "command" key shortcuts, mouse scrolling, integration with major Mac email clients and native support for Mac fonts. The full announcement is here."

Comments

Re:Valid reason for BitTorrent

[Ford Prefect]

I'll keep my client running today. Will you?

Mine's chugging away, downloading - there's a fair few seeds already so it hasn't uploaded anything yet!

Here's a nice, friendly Mac BitTorrent client for all you GUI-fiends, and while I'm at it, here's a list of conventional mirrors and translations...

Re:Just when they get if finished....

[Ford Prefect]

Will that be a huge setback to the project, or will they just be able to check a box and recompile, as Steve Jobs suggested in his keynote?

Sounds like it'll 'simply' (heh) involve porting to GCC4...

What they really need is (a) more programmers with some highly esoteric combinations of skills, (b) a Mac-Intel box or two, and (c) monetary donations! :-)

Re:Question:

[zborgerd]

I find Linux font rendering to be very nice; better than Windows and even on par with OS X, but a lot of it is largely due to configuration and the videocard/monitor being used. This is a pretty lengthy reply, but I'd like to help people debunk the myth that Linux has "bad" font rendering. It's just that most distributions don't provide fonts and font renderers that function in the way many users might expect.

By default, all distributions (except for Debian, I believe) use the Autohinter instead of the Bytecode Interpreter, due to potential patent issues. They render in very different ways. The Autohinter looks pretty good on LCD displays, with its subpixel hinting (producing fonts that are better in my opinion than Windows Cleartype), but I prefer the Bytecode Interpreter on CRTs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "native" support for Linux fonts. All of the font rendering is handled through Libfreetype. You can compile Freetype to use either rendering method, but it defaults to the Autohinter. Freetype supports more than 11 different font formats. This includes standard scalable formats such as Truetype and Type 1 fonts.

For example...
With the Bytecode Interpreter:
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/zborgerd/screen shots/2.10_1.png
http://www.borgerding.org/dropline/zborgerd/screen shots/2.10_2.png
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/2.10_4.png
http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/uploads/katana.jpg
http://dlgwiki.dot42.org/uploads/katana2.jpg

With the Autohinter:
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-11. png
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-9.p ng
http://www.dropline.net/gnome/optical/dropline-5.p ng

Additionally, configuration can cause fonts to look bad. Some people don't like much antialiasing. They prefer the method that Windows uses to antialias only fonts greater than 12 points in size. A combination of the Bytecode Interpreter and disabling antialiasing for small fonts can produce font rendering that is similar to the rendering that most Windows users are familiar with.

If you disable antialiasing while using the Autohinter, you'll find that fonts look terribly uneven and jagged.... They're pretty ugly. If you want to disable antialiasing, you probably should do it only with the Bytecode Interpreter being used as the renderer. This will produce the results that you may be looking for if you prefer Windows-like font rendering.

Lastly, OpenOffice.org's builds have typically included internal Freetype libraries that don't particularly look pretty. There are some workarounds for this. I mention it in the following FAQ:

http://www.dropline.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=825

It's quite outdated, but may provide you with the information that you need to get the font rendering that you prefer. You may also want to try tracking down a package of the Microsoft Core Webfonts. They are legal to distribute as long as they are provided in the original EXE, which may be extract with cabextract. As an alternative, you may be able to find a custom build of OpenOffice.org for your favorite distribution, that links against your system's own freetype libraries instead of the internal OO.o Freetype libraries.