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

PDF import?

[morgan_greywolf]

I can't wait for that. PDF import will turn OpenOffice.org into a poor-man's Adobe Acrobat.

Re:PDF import?

[an.echte.trilingue]

Even with acrobat pro, you can't do too much editing to existing to PDFs: change a little text here and there, add comments and that's about it.

I understood that this was because of the way that PDFs store information based on positioning, curves, gradients, etc, so I am skeptical about what this feature of OOo actually does, given that some very expensive commercial software does not even do this. If, however, OOo does allow users to really load and edit PDFs, this could be the break though that it has been waiting for.

Re:PDF import?

[TheRaven64]

You can put pretty much any arbitrary metadata you want into a PDF. There is a nice service for OS X that takes the selected text and runs it through pdflatex to give a typeset equation. It also embeds the LaTeX source in the metadata, so it can reverse the process and let you edit the code again later. You could put the contents of an ODF file in PDF metadata if you wanted, which would then allow editors to modify the content and readers to just display it. I believe this has been proposed before, so it might be what they are doing (for other PDFs, you can often edit the text and line art, but you might lose some of the layout stuff).

Re:PDF import?

[Daath]

Well, technically Adobe Reader is more correct, and much less confusing (just see above).
The program Adobe Acrobat creates PDFs (Portable Document Files). Adobe Reader displays PDF-files.
A PDF isn't an "Acrobat file" ;) Acrobat is just a name.

Re:PDF import?

[drinkypoo]

Even with acrobat pro, you can't do too much editing to existing to PDFs: change a little text here and there, add comments and that's about it.

Either you haven't used acrobat pro, or you haven't used it much.

If the application hands the data to the printing subsystem in a logical order then you can usually make some better changes to PDFs.

Really though, the REAL benefits from reopening PDFs come from opening them in a vector graphics program. The best choice is Adobe Illustrator, because it can import PDF more fully (it's just a dialect of PostScript, and illustrator saves in EPS format by default.) I've used this technique, for example, to get art, logos and diagrams out of PDFs for reuse when I was acting as the Graphic Artist at a casino and I couldn't manage to get our ad agency to give me artwork in a timely fashion, so I had to pull it out of the proofs.

I also opened the US highway fonts specifications in inkscape and extracted the character outlines, then brought them into fontforge and scaled them. Now I have true, honest-to-spec highway fonts. Another PDF-cannibalization story for you there.

Problems with Xmonad and OO

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using XMonad and all my OpenOffice menus open in the lower right corner (instead of directly under the menu bar). It worked fine with OO 2.3...

Only one comment

[zappepcs]

I'm using Office XP Pro side by side with OO. There is really no major differences now between the two in my use of office packages. One thing is for certain, at this update rate I could not afford the MS version of updates, but with OpenOffice... meh, this is great. If I could get a car manufacturer to upgrade my vehicle for free once a year (new cupholders, dash panel, etc.) It would also be great, but I'll settle for what I get with OpenOffice thank you very much.

Does it load any faster?

[Nozsd]

I'm not a big word processing or spreadsheet person. The only complaint I really have about OO is that it takes an eternity and a half to start up. Whether or not I use that quick-start-up feature doesn't seem to make a bit of difference. The only thing that feature does is making Windows many many seconds slower to start up. Does 2.4 improve OO's start up time in any way? Is this even an issue that the developers consider to be a problem?

Not all presentations are dull

[BovineSpirit]

I see Keynote used on big televised awards ceremonies a lot. The companies doing the graphics buy Macs to run Keynote, and they want Keynote for the transitions. Those kind of presentations are not done by amateurs. If OpenOffice is just going for the 'engineer making presentations to management' market then yes, OpenGL is a waste of time. However if they're looking a bit further then it is worth it.

I wish OOo would sign (PGP or authenticode)

[mlts]

I wish the OpenOffice.org project maintainers would PGP/gpg sign their MD5 sum files at the least, or if they can get a code signing key, Authenticode sign their installer on Windows.

PGP/gpg is available at no cost, and having the key available from keyservers (and signed by a good number of people) would provide basic software assurance.

I know this is a relatively small gripe, but just for integrity reasons it would be nice that they did so, so I knew a copy I have was not corrupted (or even worse, tampered with.) OOo does such a major role in day to day use for a lot of organizations that if a compromised version made its way around the Internet, it could mean a major disaster.

Last, and I know I'm boring with this, a number of companies won't install anything on their machines unless the files are cryptographically signed in some way. This is more of a legal CYA policy, but it would be nice to be able to use OOo in places like this and have validated, signed executables.

Re:Mac Version

[w3c.org]

Yeah I've been using the 3.0 beta for a week now, on my good ol' powerbook, and it rocks. Really. No X11, it's quick (can't tell how fast loading is from NeoOffice, but quite faster). I didn't run NeoOffice since. Sure, it can be quirky, it has its glitches, but it runs ok, and saves & restores document perfectly if it crashes (happened just an hour early, got everything I was working on restored). Great thing. Go, OpenOffice team, go! :)

What I hope for

[the_crowbar]

Two things that bug me about OOo 2.3:

1) On Linux Impress can not handle more than a few slides before using 100% CPU power. We have several digital billboards (50" Plasma Tvs) and I was tasked with making sure they had something to display. No prob I thought. I set up 3 media pc cases with Ubuntu 7.10 (i386, onboard nvidia gpu) and installed OOo. I was having some problems creating the slide shows with OOo Linux. I switched to my Windows box and was able to create a basic slide show. (1280x720 resolution maybe 10 slides) I tried running the show on my Ubuntu desktop (amd64) as well as the media pcs (Ubuntu i386) and OOo Impress would jump to 100% CPU after a few slides. In the end I used Wine and PowerPoint viewer to display the slideshow because it worked without killing the CPU. Here's hoping 2.4 fixes this bug.

2) OOo base is unable to open a new form from a button on a form. I was trying to use OOo Base as a quick proof of concept for a new HR database. It is easy enough to connect Base to a MySQL DB and create a form to modify records. The problem came when I tried to create a search page. The search was fine. I could display the results in a table, but then there is no way to select a result from the table and then open it in another form. This is not really a bug rather than a much needed feature. At this point Base is ok for only the simplest of things.

the_crowbar

I can't wait to try out OOo 2.4 to see if they have fixed these two things.

Smooth drawings?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wander if circles and such draws smoothly on the edges as MS Office does. i guess that is related to anti-aliasing on drawing objects.

Huuuge memory footprint, even when closed?

[tommyhj]

soffice.bin: 267 MB... And I even quit writer, so it's just the quickstart program using 267 MB... had the exact same problem with 2.3, can't believe they didn't fix something THAT obvious... It's got to do with the non-english dictionary I use. When I write a word wrong, it loads ALL included dictionaries into memory (german, thai, engrish, etc.) before deciding that it can't find the word, giving up and underlining the word. The 200 MB hogged memory is never freed either. There was an old bug-report about it, but they marked it "fixed" which I really don't understand. Anyone?

Where's SVG Support?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm trying really hard to run my small business on GPL/Linux/FOSS, and am taking the time to start everything in ODF and whatnot. I'm getting used to Inkscape, which is nice for drawing resolution-independent business images. I'm also doing all the docs in OOo. However, I'm hitting a roadblock with displaying my SVG images in OOo documents, such as Impress and Writer. There's apparently no integrated way to carry an SVG image in an OOo document. Right now I'm having to export into PNG, which loses a lot of the good reasons to use SVG.

ARRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!!