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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
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
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
*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!