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?

[TheRaven64]

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

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:PDF import?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

I was thinking rich mans Adobe Acrobat. Say you bought MS Office and Adobe...$1000?

Put $1000 in the bank, each year take out $50 and spend it on beer. With interest, that could last a long time!

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: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?

[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:PDF import?

[Knuckles]

Just FYI, Acrobat can do a million things more than just creating dumb display-only files.

Re:PDF import?

[rbanffy]

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

I would rather say a free man's Adobe Acrobat. It's not about the cost - it's about the freedom.

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?

[genesus]

Never used fillable forms? Acrobat's ability to change and manage the form data and the advanced editing features are a godsend, especially working with locked government pdf forms that are not set up properly at all.

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?

[nurb432]

Acrobat sux for reading in and editing existing documents. You would be better off editing the original document and re-exporting to PDF.

Re:PDF import?

[corky842]

Do you consider 219 MB portable?

Re:PDF import?

[mhall119]

Which is essentially what the GP was saying, you can't edit a PDF as a text document in Gimp, you can only edit it as an image.

Re:PDF import?

[sarhjinian]

I wish I could go longer than a week without someone saying "My Adobe doesn't work!"? Your Adobe what? Reader? Acrobat? Photoshop? Baked mud brick?

Re:PDF import?

[Teun]

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

Re:PDF import?

[Heembo]

Agreed. Acrobat does a great job of leading you down the road of depending on Abobe's proprietary world of advanced PDF functionality that is better left to other technologies.

Re:PDF import?

[Omestes]

$50 a year on beer? Thats less than a dollar a week, that means I don't even get malt liquor (Mickeys), much less a single can of PBR at the local pub ($2 not counting tip). $1000 sounds more like a fun night in Vegas, sans hookers and blow.

Re:PDF import?

[Knuckles]

Be that as it may (and I think it's a good point), fact is that it allows non-experts to do very fancy stuff that I wouldn't even know how to do with other means. Maybe the non-proprietary alternatives should simply try to be better, this approach seems to be more promising than simply being annoyed about PDFs impressive feature set.

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.

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: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! :)

Re:Mac Version

[Quixotic Raindrop]

If it's a known hold, then the download page should note that and not just spin wheels waiting for Bouncer to time the download request out. Yes, I reported that to OOo.

Also, Neooffice 2.2.3

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, NeoOffice, a Mac Os X port of OpenOffice.org just had a new release last week. It's based on the 2.2.1 code and adds Quicktime video support, import from scanners and cameras, Mac OS grammar checking in Leopard, and some more stuff. Details here. Don't forget if you download it to grab the latest patch too.

The insane thing is NeoOffice only has two code developers.

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.

Thank god!

[Digi-John]

My life has been empty without the ability to switch between slides in STUNNING 3-D! I seriously just peed a little in excitement.
Come on; there's not even a reason to have *any* transitions between slides. Nothing says "Oh god, what an amateur" than seeing slide after slide spiral into another one, or slowly dissolve, etc. Transitions are just a way to waste your time trying out different possibilities instead of polishing your content or doing something else useful.

Re:Thank god!

[stuporglue]

Nothing says "Oh god, what an amateur" than seeing slide after slide spiral into another one, or slowly dissolve, etc.

Depends on the transition, the material and the audience. For example, if you're switching between a before and after slide (eg. with photos) using a crossfade can make it more clear what the differences are. Also, some suits prefer a smooth transition to a blocky sudden switch.

Re:Thank god!

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, for that matter, we should just go back to using transparencies and overhead projectors. REAL professionals don't embed video or audio or anything in their presentations either. Just an outline. Why, back in my day, we just wrote on big sheets of paper with a marker!

C'mon, don't be such a luddite.

Re:Thank god!

[Colonel Korn]

The GP's complaint against transitions is that they serve no functional purpose. One reply pointed out that in some very limited cases, they do (before/after photos benefit from a crossfade), which is reasonable. Your reply equates transitions with video and audio, which is absolutely unreasonable in the framework of the GP's post. Video and audio have obvious utility. Transitions are almost always decoration, and I agree with the GP that they're usually a distraction from the material.

Re:Thank god!

[claus.wilke]

I would argue that if you are preparing a presentation that is running by itself, without a human presenter, a simple but elegant transition effect will work better than no effect at all. This might be quite useful for exhibits at tradeshows and similar occasions.

Re:Thank god!

[Thornburg]

Hey, this is Slashdot! You're not allowed to use interpretive thought or intelligible communication. Please go to some communication-nerd website and post your well-reasoned, level-headed thoughts there. We don't want them here!

(For those completely devoid of sarcasm detection skills, the above post may be used to calibrate your Sarcastometer--it should score 8.6).

Re:Thank god!

[xtracto]

Transitions have a specific use and is to "inform" your audience that you have changed the slide. Even a very discrete fade out transition is sometimes useful. When you give a presentation people are usually looking at you and hear you talking. They just refer to the slide when it is shown at first *or* when you point at a specific feature of the slide.

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.

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.

Re:Only one comment

[vertickle]

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

Re:Only one comment

[snilloc]

Tools Menu --> Customize --> Keyboard

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

Re:Only one comment

[zappepcs]

I do. Also contribute to EFF, Chronix Radio, Ubuntu, and several other F/OSS applications. I don't think everything should be free, but I feel damned comfortable paying what feels comfortable to me in a value for dollar kind of way. I happened to pay $45 for OOo and think it was a damned good deal at that price.

Re:Only one comment

[MojoStan]

OTOH, I have given up powerpoint altogether -- it's safer to have open office presentations + OOo installer on a CD than to have a powerpoint presentation and hope they have the right version of MS office. I might be missing something, but why can't you just put the free PowerPoint Viewer on the CD along with your PowerPoint presentation? Wouldn't it be nicer (to them) to install the 2 MB PowerPoint Viewer on "their" computer than whatever needs to be installed to view OOo presentation files? (OTOH: I wouldn't be surprised if there were simple "viewers" available for OOo presentations.)

• PowerPoint Viewer 2003 (1.9 MB) (for versions 97 thru 2003)
• PowerPoint Viewer 2007 (25.8 MB, requires 5 MB of hard disk space)

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...

New features include [...] bug fixes

[phaunt]

Since when is a bug fix a new feature?

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?

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).

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.

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)?

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:I wish OOo would sign (PGP or authenticode)

[Zadaz]

a number of companies won't install anything on their machines unless the files are cryptographically signed in some way

Sure! Just like my copy of Windows, OSX, Photoshop, Acrobat, Office, Toast, and... every other commercial application that I've ever had are cryptographi--

Oh, wait. Hell, even Firefox doesn't have a sig. to download.

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.

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: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.

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.

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).

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.

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:hopefully

[compro01]

the GP did ask for an "outlook-like" email client. ;)

Re:bad timing

[Tranzistors]

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

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?

OpenGL 3D effects before antialiased graphics????

[wpegden]

Openoffice still doesn't do good anti aliasing of vector graphics (for example, in a presentation). It seems idiotic to implement OpenGL "eye candy" before dealing with this half-decade old issue. Who is going to put up with crappy-looking drawings, just because they can now transition between them smoothly?
Here's one thread on the issue: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=33584

Get rid of modal dialog boxes

[xiox]

One of the most annoying features of OpenOffice are all those modal dialog boxes. Why do I have to keep closing the formatting dialog whenever I switch between different bits of text? It really slows down repetitive operations. Many of the dialogs could become non-model, giving a much smoother feel to the whole program.

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? 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.