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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.
Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series (part 1 and 2 were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml
I guess the printed version would lack all logical markup. No problem if all you want to do is to view or print it, but a big problem if you want to work with it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
May be to use NeoOffice instead?
igor
Off topic my shiny metal ass... a simple google search for openoffice milk expired would have led you to this article. Now wait until after noon before you smoke any more crack.
music lover since 1969
Parent is not offtopic. :) See http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 0/12/1610249&threshold=-1&tid=102&tid=11
the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.
VStrider.
On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.
I think that is a bug in their website. if you go to one of the mirrors http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/openoffice/contrib /MacOSX/ you will see that this is an english version 1.9.130. Note that OO.o is not yet stable in OS 10, this is still a development version. Personally, I have not had any problems using it, but I do find it to be slower compared to other platforms. The lack of integrated Carbon/Cocoa/etc steers me away. OSX is supposed to be pretty IMAO! Nonetheless, kudos to the OO.o team on a significant accomplishment.
Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?
Simply put, the reason is this:
Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.
PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.
OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.
No problem, apart from it's name, RC3 is 100% identical as 2.0.
They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version.
Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.
Dependency hell? =>
I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.
According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.
I push openoffice on anyone who asks me if I have a "copy" of office they can "install" on their new computer. Now with the more advanced Access style database stuff and general improvements, I couldn't imagine the "need" for MS Office anywhere. Except maybe in schools where the classes they teach on basic computer skills require that students have a copy of the latest version of Office. That is one thing that needs to be changed. Users are getting their basic education in productivity applications without any alternatives. Amazon is preselling the openoffice 2.x resource kit for $32.99, which comes with the cd with several versions (MS, Linux, Solaris, Apple) of OOo, plus macros and such. Might make a good gift for someone with the in-depth manual that explains how to do everything.
Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here that some might be interested in.
Best Windows Freeware
If you are downloading via Azureus...PLEASE do the following
Post the Azureus Magnet URI to Slashdot by doing the following
Go to "My Torrents"
Right click on your torrent and choose "Copy Magnet URI to clipboard"
Please paste this in your post.
This will allow people to join the swarm without having to get the tracker file which is TOTALLY swamped at the moment.
thanks!
One suggestion is to AbiWord 2.4 on the command line. It's as simple as:
AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc
Note: System Requirements say:
The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java(emphasis mine)
So, java is *not* required to use ooo. You get extra features if you happen to have it installed, that's all.
PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.
People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!
PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.
Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.
So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX