SoftMaker Rolls Out Office Suite for BSD, Linux, and Others

martin-k writes "Commercial office suite software is coming to FreeBSD, Linux, Windows, Sharp Zaurus and Windows Mobile. SoftMaker, a German developer, recently released SoftMaker Office, a multi-platform office suite that excels in Microsoft Office compatibility, claims to be much leaner and faster than OpenOffice.org and works on many operating systems, down to PDAs." While SoftMaker certainly isn't new, it is nice to see them roll out a finished suite as opposed to one-off programs.

Comments

how much better than OpenOffice?

[yagu]

I'm downloading the trial version now.... more on that in a minute. My question would be, "How much better is it than OpenOffice, and how razor thin is the difference between it and Microsoft Office, and how compatible compared with Open Office?"

I've had expectations raised many times in the past and while always initially excited found myself not using any products that had rough edges. For the longest time that basically meant I used Microsoft when I had to, vi and vim the rest of the time :-). Open Office was the first product with sufficient polish and compatibility, so much so I could pretty much plug and play replace Office for people with little fear they would have trouble adapting.

Anything that falls short of that is likely to have problems gaining purchase in market share. I've used all of the KDE products, ABISoft, etc.... none of them really measured up. That isn't to they were bad products, many of them would be considered excellent in and of themselves, but that isn't the yardstick the buying public uses (and will use).

Well, I've downloaded and installed the trial version. I know it's not fair, but here is my five minute review (which is about all I have time to give for new products competing with products with which I already have perfectly good solutions):

Download and install went flawlessly, a requirement for any product anymore -- if the install doesn't go seamlessly, I won't spend a lot more time trying to figure out why. The program fired up cleanly, and was easy and intuitive enough to use especially if you've used any word processor or spreadsheet before. The graphics, layout, and presentation were good but the icons were not crisp as Microsoft's or Open Office's.

I don't have a suite of files to test for compatibility with Office and Open Office, but as I indicated, I have a solution for this type of work (Open Office), and I'm not inclined to spend much time beyond apparent return on investment.

PROS: Easy download and install, very similar to Microsoft Office (though that will change with the new Microsoft Office, not necessarily a bad thing), inexpensive comopared to Microsoft Office, established company, multi-platform and multi-form factor (for PDAs, though other than browsing, I'm not inclined to do much word processing and spreadsheeting (verb?) on PDAs).

CONS: Expensive compared to Open Office, not enough better (in my opinion) to warrant the switch, expensive to add typefaces, "compatibility" with Microsoft is a moving target -- one for which there is no guarantee of currency.

Cool that there's another player... Would I switch? Probably not. YMMV.

Re:how much better than OpenOffice?

[bcrowell]

I tried it on my Linux box.

pros:

• It starts up too quickly for me to notice the startup time, as opposed to OOo, which takes 3 seconds on this machine.
• PDF export seemed to work well.

cons:

• The default fonts are ugly (or are rendered in an ugly way on the screen).
• It didn't always open Word documents successfully. I tried 4 docs that I happened to have around, and there was a loss of formatting in at least one of them -- a Greek letter was lost. (OOo opened the same file without losing the Greek.)
• The first time you run it, it insists on making a directory for its documents, which by default is ~/SoftMaker. I didn't understand why it would assume I wanted to keep all my word-processing docs in a single directory, or what would happen if I didn't keep them there.
• It's not free (-as-in-anything).

So I'm not really clear on what the advantage is vis a vis OOo.

Re:Word is the route through these other things.

[Mike Rubits]

I have worked in a Windows publishing house. I have worked in a Mac publishing house. I've visited countless shops throughout Rochester. The majority of the print workflow you describe is frighteningly inaccurate.

The original source can come from anything from a text file to a Word document. Most often, it's Word. You're right there. However, the writers aren't concerned with that too much, they use what they are comfortable with. They use a Word processor to.. process words.

The book goes into Quark BEFORE going to press? If by every step afterward you mean it goes into Quark, then yes, you'd be correct. There are several hundred thousand dollar solutions dedicated to managing your Quark & InDesign files, and your assets. Check out Xinet and Dalim and Documentum and etc. The authors are out of the chain by this point. The page designers work in the page layout programs. They upload their changes to Xinet, where it is opened by the editor, marked up, changed, and approved or sent back. It's only THEN converted into a print-ready PDF. That lonely guy at the end of the hall you describe is actually 2/3rds of the workflow.

The only people that use Word are the original authors. The page designers wouldn't subject themselves to doing page layout in word. That notion is just preposterous.

I honestly can't say where you got your impressions from, but they seem to be extremely off base. This is coming from someone who went to college for print, has talked to people throughout the print industry, and now works in print.

I bought it, I like it, I recommend it

[water-and-sewer]

Looking over the course of this Slashdot thread I'm not surprised by the now-familiar Microsoft-bashing/LaTeX/Lyx recommendation/OO.o zealotry/refusal to pay Softmaker's price. But I have been reading Slashdot now long enough to know the words to this particular song.

I bought Textmaker back in 2003 and liked it so much I also bought Planmaker, their spreadsheet (now sold together). But because I'm a (professional and prolific writer, I care a lot about my tools, and I've tried just about all of the products out there; plus, because I use Windows at work and both Linux and Macs at home, I've been exposed to a lot of word processors.

On Linux, I use Textmaker. Here's why.

Stable. I've never crashed it, even with ridiculously complicated documents

Fast. I like OO.o but on my old 555Mhz PIII it's unbearably slow to start up, and on my Mac, NeoOffice is just not fast enough, and even repainting the screen after a window stretch/shrink is ghastly. I appreciate the effort and even use the software, but it's not the first thing I reach for. On Textmaker menus are snappy, the graphics are fast, and things work as though it had been designed and built by professionals that want to make a product good enough to convince people to spend money on it.

Easy to use. That means keyboard shortcuts for everything, sensibly laid out, familiar interface, professional.

Lightweight. It's been designed to be resource friendly and is, even on my outdated hardware.

Fast enough to be a useful document previewer for your mail client so you can get a glimpse of what's in the Word docs I receive.

Basically, it's fast, reliable, and works well. Its Word doc import is much better quality than OO.o's. I gave Abiword a try but rejected it because of frequent crashes and a somewhat amateurish feel to it; Kword has never been usable for more than simple letters in my opinion and the font kerning issues make Kword printed documents ugly. OO.o is simply too slow in spite of all its other endearing qualities.

Textmaker's downside? The TML format is a mystery to me, so I don't use it. You can save to Doc format as a default, but I hate Docs. I would be thrilled if they would adopt the ODT format. It's also not as feature rich as OO.o, which is in turn not as feature rich as Word. On the Mac there are far better alternatives (I happen to love Mellel, and Apple's Pages is top-notch). And I use LaTeX for what it does best, and RTF or even plain text all other times.

But face it, GNU/Linux (and BSD more so) lacks a small, fast, good word processor. Abiword and Kword are fast but not good, and OO.o is good but not fast. For professional writers that care about their work and their tools, this is a great piece of software and I'm not alone in representing a market of GNU/Linux OSF fans that believes in freedom but is not against paying for software (SUSE, Rekall, Textmaker, Planmaker, Xandros, NoMachines) if with that software comes additional quality, reliability, or convenience. Textmaker provides all three.

Finally, the above doesn't even take into consideration the fact that its primary market isn't Linux/BSD in the first place, it's Windows users that synch docs to a PocketPC. And in that niche, it is unsurpassed and very critically acclaimed. Be glad they even make a Linux version at all, whiney slashdotters.