OpenOffice.org 2.4 Released

ahziem writes "The multiplatform, multilingual office suite OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.4. New features include 5 PDF export enhancements, text to columns in Calc, rectangular selection in Writer, bug fixes, performance improvements, improvements supporting the growing library of extensions such as 3D OpenGL transitions in Impress, and much more. Downloads are available either direct or P2P. In September, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will add PDF import, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, and ODF 1.2."

Comments

Mac Version

[rubeng]

I'm really looking forwards to a native (non X11) Mac version. NeoOffice works OK but seems a bit slow. I see that about a week ago a new native development shapshot was released.

Re:Mac Version

[panda]

2.4 is supposed to be the last X11 release for Mac OS X. There have been some QA hold ups on the Mac OS X port. It will likely lag behind the other ports by a day or two in getting out. See http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=mac&by=thread&from=1981668

3.0 should be Aqua-only for Mac OS X. At least, that is the stated goal.

Re:PDF import?

[TheRaven64]

Acrobat is for editing and creating PDFs, not displaying them (although it can do that too). KPDF does not have this support.

Most useful extension

[phayes]

REGEXP search & replace! Supposing you're a geek... Of course we're all geeks here on slashdot, right?

Re:Most useful extension

[Bert64]

It's had regex find/replace by default for years... Not sure if 1.x had it, but the beta builds of 2.x and everything since has.

Re:Most useful extension

[inertialFrame]

It's had regex find/replace by default for years... Not sure if 1.x had it, but the beta builds of 2.x and everything since has. Yeah, but, in the latest release, back-references are finally supported, and so it's actually generally useful now.

Re:PDF import?

[morgan_greywolf]

Note the difference between Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader. Adobe Reader is one of several PDF readers available on Linux, along with evince, KPDF, xpdf, etc. Acrobat lets you create and modify PDFs. Right now, OOo only lets you create PDFs -- modifying them is currently not possible.

Re:hopefully

[morgan_greywolf]

That already exists. It's called Evolution.

Re:hopefully

[Drinking Bleach]

Why something like Outlook? KMail beats it in every way.

Re:A leaf out of iWorks?

[morgan_greywolf]

Looks like (with the 3D effeects) that they've taken a (nice) leaf out of the iWorks book. Cool! Ummm...more like Keynote took a leaf out of Impress' book.

You see, OpenGL support was once present in StarOffice, but was removed due to problems with the newer OOo code.

Re:A leaf out of iWorks?

[TheRaven64]

You see, OpenGL support was once present in StarOffice, but was removed due to problems with the newer OOo code. For transitions? Really? I used StarOffice 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 and 6.0, but I don't remember Impress doing 3D transitions. I do remember some OpenGL-based 3D options in the drawing tool...

Re:PDF import?

[morgan_greywolf]

OOo has had PDF export for quite some time -- since around v2.0 or so. GIMP's support for importing PDFs is limited to the images, I believe.

Re:PDF import?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Note the difference between Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.

A note for clarification: Adobe Reader used to be named Acrobat Reader, so users mistaking one for the other have been understandably mislead by Adobe's own marketing in the past.

Re:Only one comment

[vertickle]

Thank them with your wallet. http://contributing.openoffice.org/donate.html

Any word

[Kelz]

On when they're going to fix autoformat? Has anyone else ever tried to make a resume in OO (god forbid you use bullets or tabs)?

Re:Only one comment

[snilloc]

Tools Menu --> Customize --> Keyboard

(I abso-friggin'-lutely needed ctrl-d to fill down in Calc.)

Pet Peeve...

[mutube]

Auto-completing words when writing bullet lists. If you don't end the lines with full-stops, hitting Enter will auto-complete some random word instead of starting a new line. You're list of "My Favourite Animals" becomes:

catastrophicdogmaticfishfingermousetrap

Which, as you can imagine, is quite distressing.

Re:hopefully

[xaxa]

Uh, has KMail gotten around to composing HTML Mail or making it easy to insert links yet? Last I heard, the developers seemed to have a philosophical thing against HTML for some reason.

KMail will compose HTML emails. At the moment, it won't reply to the HTML part of a multipart message in HTML, it will take the plain text part.

They don't have a philosophical objection to adding support for this though. I had a look on the mailing list a couple of weeks ago (this came up in a sub-thread somewhere). The current developers don't want to spend time implementing it, they're unpaid so they do what they want to do on Kontact/KMail. They're happy for someone else to add the functionality though, or for someone to pay someone else to add it.

Yeah, most of my emails are plain text, but I do end up sending links to people quite often, and having to copy a plain text link out of an email client into a web browser is a lot slower than just clicking on a link. It's also nice to send and HTML email from time to time. If you prefer not to write HTML email, that's nice, but I take it as a limit on choice. In the composer window, click Options, Formatting (HTML).
KMail highlights links it finds in the text, it's good at this (I've never had to copy and paste a link from a plain text message).

Re:no news

[j79zlr]

If you are actually compiling OO.o by hand, you do not need java. Just take a look at the Gentoo ebuild and you will see that if the "java" use flag is not set, there is no dependency on java.

Re:PDF import?

[Schnapple]

Well, if anything, Acrobat Reader is more precise of a name. It reads Acrobat files. Seems pretty clear to me.

Yeah but I think the problem Adobe was having is that no one got that Adobe Acrobat != Adobe Acrobat Reader. They probably couldn't sell Acrobat at all since people saw they were charging $200 or whatever for Acrobat and said "Why would I pay for that? I can get 'Acrobat' for free online!" while at the same time wondering how one would make PDF files (this is before PrimoPDF and another hundred good ways to make simple PDF files became available). Worse than that, people would go to the Adobe site and look for "Acrobat", find the not-free Acrobat product instead of the free Acrobat Reader, think that suddenly they needed to pay money to view a PDF file, and leave in disgust. Renaming the product Adobe Reader, in theory, avoids this confusion and also makes it out like Reader is a generic viewing app that reads PDF's.

Re:bad timing

[Tranzistors]

Um, it is already there. Right now only release candidate.

Re:Does it load any faster?

[Knuckles]

See the link to "performance improvements" in the summary? FWIW, startup is considerably faster for me in Ubuntu 8.04 beta (on a regular business laptop from last year).

Re:I wish OOo would sign (PGP or authenticode)

[Neon Spiral Injector]

Firefox and Acrobat Reader are distributed as signed executables. Plus, what's this? ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/2.0.0.13/KEY Oh, look Firefox has a PGP key.

Really, OOo should sign their executables.

Re:PDF import?

[EnOne]

I prefer Foxit Reader to Adobe Acrobat. It's free, faster, lighter weight, and it doesn't add things to your start menu.

Re:PDF import?

[springbox]

No, GIMP just uses ghostscript to rasterize the PDF

Waiting for outliner

[harlows_monkeys]

The major thing OO is missing for me on the word processor front is good outliner support. There was a note from the developers posted on their forums a while back where they acknowledged that adding this is important, and that the navigator stuff is not a substitute. So, the good news is, OO will get good outliner support. The bad news is that it is going to be a lot of work, so it might not be soon. :-(

Re:PDF import?

[Teun]

You can use PDFedit for editing.
Not perfect but often sufficient.

Re:PDF import? Don't wait, use inkscape today!

[pieleric]

FYI, the brand new version of Inkscape (released 3 days ago) has very good PDF import (and export). You can modify text, modify vector-based drawings, remove or add pictures... all you've ever dreamed of.

I think it's only possible to edit one page at a time, but with pdftk it shouldn't be much of a limitation.

Too slow

[kylehase]

I just installed OO 2.4 to work on a few spreadsheets and it feels really slow. The response (so far) was worse when working with graphs.

Re:I wish OOo would sign (PGP or authenticode)

[Chris Burkhardt]

I'm not saying the danger isn't there, but generally if someone has access to make nefarious changes to an archive, modifying the signature as well is pretty trivial, if not mandatory.

But if the signatures/hashes were signed by a trusted PGP key, as the GP was suggesting, then they couldn't be modified without notice.