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Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org
[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows! My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
When the office suite becomes a commodity, you'll see more defections.
Agile Artisans
But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.
.doc files.
This sounds like a job for cvs or arch or monotone some other version management system. LaTeX files are plain text, so a proper versioning system would work with them much better than it would with ugle
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I use Ubuntu, and put up with the various annoying things. Like installing a new app via synaptic and then having no way to launch it except by running it from the command line. That's a new kind of insanity.. the first time it happened to me I actually went and grabbed the source package, extracted it and looked at the diff created by the Ubuntu team to see if I hadn't missed where they put the menu item. Nope, nothing there. So we have this dead simple package installation program but no way for an ordinary user to actually run the programs they've installed. Genius!
How we know is more important than what we know.
So, were your margins a bit too big? Or do you mean you sent him the latex source and he printed that out? Just because it's Latex doesn't mean you can't make shitty looking documents with it.
I suspect the OP was referring to the fact that MS Word has what are, by typesetting standards, very narrow margins that make for long lines of text. In practice narrow text actually proves to easier to read, requiring less left-right scanning with the eyes and making the end-of-line to start-of-next-line shift much easier and less prone to error. Professional typesetters are not idiots and have been studying and refining such things for a very long time. LaTeX defaults to the same margins you'll find in professionally typeset books and other publications - the same margins professional typesetters have come to use after years and years of experience and refinement. They look large if you're used to MS Word documents, but are by most other measures, the margin size that maximise readability and amount of text on the page.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time. I've just booted my laptop to Kubuntu so I can walk through this.
Changing the screen resolution.
Right click on the background, select "Configure Desktop", click "Display", select your screen resolution from the drop-down.
Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
My keyboard and mouse worked out of the box. I can plugin in a USB mouse at any time and the system picks it up uses it. However, if you want to tweak the keyboard or mouse, click your "System" icon in the task bar, select the "Settings" entry. Select "Peripherals". You'll see both "keyboard" and "mouse" in the dialog. Tweak away.
Configuring a network
From the System/Settings dialog we were just in... clck "Internet and Networking". You can add network interfaces, configure the proxy, set up your wireless networks, configure Samba, etc and so forth.
Installing a printer
Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.
I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.
Kubuntu is drop dead easy to use. You can still open a shell and go crazy (if you know how), but you don't have to anymore.
btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.
Agile Artisans
> My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
Then he shouldn't be using Microsoft Office. Different versions of Microsoft Office often render the same file differently. For compatibility, use PDF or OpenDocument. *Everyone* can view and edit his OpenDocument files since *everyone* has a license to install and use the same version of OpenOffice.org while there are far fewer people with a license to install and use the same version of Microsoft Office.
And besides, I, my parents, and my aunt and uncle use OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas. They would probably *never* switch to Microsoft Office, even if you gave them the chance.
Adoption of OpenOffice will be sped by two things - adoption of Linux/*BSD on the server and workstation, and awareness and availability of the cheaper but mostly equivalent option for home users. The reason people at home don't use OpenOffice is because they already have Microsoft Office. The old argument that people expect to have Microsoft Office when they buy the computer is not true, since most computers are sold with Works (completely incompatible with any recent version of Office). All people need is a half decent office suite - the first highstreet retailer to realise that people would prefer OpenOffice to Works will make some money then everyone else will follow suit.
Disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboi. In fact, I dislike a lot of what they do. I'm no OO fanboi. In fact, I'm quite disgusted with what they've done with the product.
7 20
and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO. I've done my best to use OO and even to try and help. I am so disgusted by the developers and their responses to my pleas for improvement in key areas that I've stopped promoting OO to people that need a cheap office suite. If they need a free one then I still show it off. If they have some $$ then I show them where to get MSO dirt cheap. The new MSO 12 looks to blow the socks off of anything out there. If it all works like it is supposed to (huge IF) it will be a remarkable product.
The delta between Excel and Calc is too large to ignore.
The delta between Powerpoint and Impress is small at the moment and can be tolerated.
The delta between Word and Writer is negligible for _most_ users. For a basic word processor Writer is better but _a lot_ of people I know love the collaboration features of Word. I hate how Word keeps "thinking" for me and screwing with my documents.
The delta between MSO and OO in terms of speed is just a tad smaller than the distance from one end to the other of the Grand Canyon.
Now considering all that, OO is trailing, hugely. Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114
In that case, I thank the OO development team for putting pressure on MS. Like everyone, competition causes one to raise their performance and I think MSO 12 will be a killer app. I just wish OO could have moved quicker.
Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.
Keeping track of changes is as easy as RCS/Subversion/version control system of choice (I've even used Visual SourceSafe when I was in an MS shop). Sharing changes can be done easily enough via PDF annotations, or LaTeXdiff depending on what tools you have available.
LaTeX also offers possiblities that simply aren't available in word processors like MS Word and OO.o Writer. Using packages like xcomment it is possible to write a single document that is both a paper report and slide presentation - just change the document class and recompile. I've written document classes such that I have a couple of extra environments available: \begin{summary} and \begin{shared}. Anything in a summary environment is included in the presentation, but not in the report, and anything in shared is in both report and presentation. Anything not in either environment is left out of the presentation. With that done it is easy enough to start writing your report, adding a little set of bullet points summarising each paragraph in a summary environment as you go (and sharing any equations and diagrams as needed) and once you're done you've got your presentation complete as well as your report. You've also go the whole package encapsulated in a single file: any changes are easy to propogate from report to presentation of vice-versa, and maintenance is far easier. Try that with your standard office suite.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who writes XP software. ;)
/etc/X11/xorg.conf and pray.
Sigh. I also write a lot of Free Software.
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time.
That's offensive. Just because I'm pointing out some obvious deficiencies does not mean I have some evil agenda.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
I'm talking about changing your X display driver from "nv" to "nvidia" so you can play some games. I believe the current procedure is: edit
Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.
Note that lack of support for your printer. Note that complete lack of any information that tells you how to install a third party driver. Ask on the forums and get a long procedure that involves the command line and running vim/emacs a lot.
I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.
Uhhhh, no. It's about the Ubuntu team not adding a menu item to the diff they apply to the Debian package to create the Ubuntu package. It's entirely about the people who made the distro. Not that I'm complaining. If they don't want to add a menu item, fine, but don't be surprised when your average user wonders how the hell they can run the program they just installed.
btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.
Yeah, sounds like Kubuntu is pulling ahead of Ubuntu!
How we know is more important than what we know.
Some oddities will remain, though.
For example, if you highlight something (say, mark a word yellow) in OpenOffice, you can't change it with the same tool under Word. You have to use the formatting paintbrush. Why? Word has 2 seperate levels of highlighting while OpenOffice has one. Got me why Word benifits from 2 different types of highlighting...but it has them. This difference is an artifact of Word.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Most of those 100 developers (80!) are pain Sun employees - the article states that there are "less than 10 active external coders involved in the project".
If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.
I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
On the file browser, select "All files" instead of spreadhseets. File type of "Automatically detected" works, but you can use "Text import (configurable)" if you like.
Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?
Not at all. I think it's particular to OpenOffice.
I *wanted* to contribute to OpenOffice. I even downloaded it and compiled it myself. Here's what I saw:
- it's huge: it takes forever to download
- it doesn't use a standard build system; in fact, typing one of the typical build commands ("make all", perhaps) would actually *delete your changes*
- there was a wiki page describing how to get it all set up; no one step was very hard for me, but there were an awful lot of steps, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if many potential contributors got tripped up
- finally, once you actually get to look at the source code, it's a complete mystery: everything is in a bunch of folders with 2- or 3-letter names that don't seem to mean anything; the source code is in messy C++, and sparsely commented in a mix of German and English techspeak
To be clear: I'm fairly proficient in German, I'm fluent in English, and I've written and modified medium-to-large C++ programs before. I'm completely fucking lost in the spaghetti that is OpenOffice's source code. When I see comments drop off into acronym-land, and I can't even figure out what (spoken) language the acronyms are in, that's bad, mmm'kay?
#1 priority for everybody working on OpenOffice should be to make it much easier to hack on. It's great they've got 100 hackers, but if it was easier to work on, that number would be 100 or 1000 times larger. It's OpenOffice, for cryin' out loud. Everybody and his mother *want* to hack it. It's just too damn hard.
Compare with any of a couple dozen small Python/Ruby/PHP/... projects. I've seen tiny Python projects that had 25 hackers -- way out of proportion, but they were really easy to work on. But it doesn't have to be a HLL: the Linux kernel has a lot more of contributors, too.
*I* would expect people to use LyX. All the power of LaTeX, lots of easier to use.
It's not wysiwyg, it's wysiwym (what you see is what you mean). You type, with no latex code (unless you want to), doing all the latex stuff with pulldowns and key combinations - kinda like any other WP. You insert citations, references, etc. with dialogs. Your content simply gets typed and viewed in a format chosen for readability. When you want to see what it REALLY looks like, you preview in DVI or pdf with a simple keystroke.
The point is, this separates the content from the formatting. Especially in an office with standardized formats and relatively untrained typists/secretaries, this is great. One person can design the templates for LyX, and the typists simply type in and go. They actually don't need to know LaTeX at all, as LyX pretty much takes care of all of that. It's also got the best math equation editor I've ever used, bar none.
I've used LyX to write my master's thesis and several journal papers, and I don't know SHIT for LaTeX. I've got a reference that I can use if I need to... but I usually don't. It looks the way it's supposed to, it's easy to use, and the citations and cross-referencing mechanisms are superlative, both in terms of the underlying LaTeX functionality and in terms of LyX's user interface to those functions.
Basically, it's what I think a word processor oughta be. I think I would have torn out what little hair I have left if I'd tried to do that thesis in Word - it certainly wouldn't have been done as quickly. Did I mention that you can get LyX to spit out pdfs with the TOC, Lists of Figures, Index, etc. already hotlinked to their targets? Took me 10 minutes to figure out the line in the preamble to make that happen, which is a LOT quicker than having to try to manually create all those links. Yes, that's LaTeX functionality, not LyX - but LyX lets you have the best of both worlds.
I don't think anyone expects you to write all that LaTeX code and keep rendering to see if what you've typed works. Good news is, you don't need to.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Gnumeric was the only spreadsheet in the list, so is the only direct competitor. HOW is Excel more powerful than Gnumeric? I know from personal experience that Gnumeric has more built-in functions & the functions are CORRECT. Excel does have some mistakes, which have persisted for many versions.
The others all allow you to manipulate and chart data, so they aren't ALL that different. They each intend to address specific (and different) limitations of standard spreadsheet software.
R/S/SPSS are for when you need more thorough statistics.
Octave is a decent Matlab clone. Matlab is more costly than Excel, but Octave is GPLed. They are both better general purpose/scientific numerical programming languages (I'd also group python+Numeric+scipy+matplotlib in this group).
Grace/Kaleidagraph/Origin are for better graphing.
The best place to start is by identifying bugs and reporting them. Make sure you file a report that allows the testers to recreate the bug if at all possible. After you've gotten familiar with a project and its developers, maybe you can take a stab at some documentation. Most projects are badly in need of good docs!
May be a database table is what you need!
-itsme
"Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."
Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)
Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's QA and testing might be a lot less than perfect, but, you know, they at least _exist_.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.