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LibreOffice 4.2 Busts Out GPU Mantle Support and Corporate IT Integration
Billly Gates points to this basic summary of the features of the recently released LibreOffice 2.4, writing: "In catching up with MS Office, the new LibreOffice 4.2 now has full Windows 7/8 integration including Aero peek, thumbnails, jumplists, and recent documents all from the taskbar. In addition, one weak area for LibreOffice has been enterprise network support and the lack of active directory tools: LibreOffice now has GPO and active directory support for system administrators to deploy and manage LibreOffice over corporate networks. LibreOffice also includes an expert configuration Window to assist power users and system administrators when deploying to hundreds of workstation at a time." Read on for some more details about the release, including some information about support for AMD's Mantle CPU acceleration support.
Also of particular interest is AMD/ATI is expecting to finally release Mantle in the next coming hours for games like Battlefield 4. Surprisingly LibreOffice also supports mantle as well according to the release notes. However you will need the 14.1 driver which is being compiled and uploaded at the time of this writing to utilize this feature. Mantle will accelerate lower-end CPUs by up to 300% in some tasks while having modest improvements for those with more recent powerful CPUs. Real niceties for those like myself on AMD phenom IIs with the later 7000 series cards.
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering OpenOffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support."
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI. However, for recent articles about governments considering OpenOffice this release addresses shortcomings with the new active directory and GPO support."
4.2 not 2.4... are you messing with us intentionally, just to see who is awake?
It may be unwanted bloat for the home user, but it's absolutely essential features in the corporate world. All it really needs is a decent component selection in the installer though to have it both ways.
logic fails you
if a business used LibreOffice, the board would be using LibreOffice Impress to view LibreOffice Impress documents and giving presentations with the PC hooked to the big screen running LibreOffice Impress.
Maybe some loaner using PowerPoint would have their slide looking like garbage in such a company....
The only issue (some on Slashdot may say benefit ) is the lack of a ribbon UI.
The majority of Office power users I know (mostly lawyers) were disgusted by the replacement of the menu-driven UI with the infamous ribbon. It's not just left-brained Slashdotters that prefer an easily navigable interface.
I submitted the story.
While ATI has listed LibreOffice for one of the few programs that use Mantle I can not find any other information on this?
This begs to differ if LibreOffice uses GPU directwrite or OpenGL and does it work on platforms than Windows. Of course this is not critical unless you do multimedia heavy presentations I am somewhat curious. I wonder if anyone who develops it can care to comment?
Also I use LibreOffice in conjunction with MS Office. I can't afford publisher and it is nice to use it to repair office documents that MS Office says are corrupt. This is a highly recommended upgrade even if you use MS Office full time.
http://saveie6.com/
Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
Anyone who tried to move files between different versions, system with different system languages or, if you are really daring, different platforms knows this.
MicroSoft can't guarantee compatibility with a lot of formats either, including older versions of their own formats. Any major upgrade or change is going to give compatibility and training/skill issues, regardless of what vendor you had or will go to. Sure, it'd be really nice if OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice would actually be able to fully work with at least current MicroSoft formats without messing up some of the formatting some of the time, but if you're looking beyond that, you'll be fine once you've migrated.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Unclear if I can get a copy without all this unwanted bloat.
Yes, use vi for your documents. There's also a spreadsheet called sc, haven't tried it though.
Nobody can
Not even Microsoft, which is pretty funny. Transferring files between versions of MS Office or between Windows and Mac versions often results in garbage layouts/formatting. It's really quite sad on Microsoft's part. I worked years as an audio-visual tech to know that this is very true. When a client wanted do to a PowerPoint presentation with a laptop provided by us, we always had to ensure the versions matched.
Even Microsoft Office does not guarantee 100% compatibility with older documents. And I've personally witnessed simple things breaking between MS Office on a Mac or on Windows.
When I dug through some very old Office 98 docs of mine a few years back, Office 2007 broke rather badly, but OpenOffice was able to read them. I'm sure it wasn't pixel-perfect, but it was readable and more-or-less as intended, unlike Office proper.
As far as trading between various offices, I've noticed more problems with Office For Mac than with LibreOffice. Granted, most people in my office are using either Google Docs, iWork or LibreOffice, but we get a fair number of outside docs that were made in MS Office.
For most uses of Word (glorified RTFs), everything is compatible. I've even had no issues going from AbiWord to MS Word. If you get crazy with auto-summaries or embedded docs, it might get problematic, but do you really use those? Presentations are much the same, although I've not worked with them nearly as much (because I do real work).
For spreadsheets, its a bit more hit-or-miss. If all you're doing is glorified CSVs, once again everything works, but the crazier your formulae get the more likely it will only work in one program.
Yes and no. Even between Office 2007 and 2010, documents don't always look the same... we have run into this for pretty simple documents. I have no idea why it's so ridiculously complicated that even the software provider can't get it right, but I'm guessing it has more to do with trying to intentionally hurt interoperability than anything else.
Call me a cynic, but I've been around for a very very long time and I've seen a lot of poor sportsmanship in the Microsoft camp.
The funny thing is now we're intentionally using older versions of MS Office simply because everyone hasn't learned the 2007 version yet, so what's the use of overloading everyone by going to the newest version every 2-3 years? The couple of users who will benefit can have the upgrade. The rest can have an upgrade every x versions.
We manage to deal with the incompatibilities between different versions of Office, so I think we could handle LO/OO if my company chose to do so.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What about OneNote? Anything about a Libre OneNote? It's the only thing keeping me on Windows.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
... you still cannot perform a search and replace using manual page breaks. A simple shortcoming, but it keeps me from being able to dump MS Office.
Nobody can, at least until Microsoft opens up their entire API library. Until then, when someone gets close enough to endanger Microsoft's cash cow, they will change just enough stuff to keep them at arm's length. Repeat ad nauseam.
All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented. The binary documentation, I think, was released at the insistence of the European Union regulators.
Now, it is true that the formats are really badly designed and inelegant, and that there are a lot of MS Office "guts" spilling out of the specs. They are not easy to implement. But with enough time and effort, it should be doable. And MS is not introducing new breaking changes – to the contrary, they are finally introducing compliance with OOXML 'strict', which fully complies with the ISO standard. (MS Office 2010 can read 'strict' OOXML documents, and MS Office 2013 can both read and write them.)
Even MS Office can not guarantee 100% compatibility with other versions of MS Office Documents. This is especially important to know if you are more then 2 generations behind (Office 2010) is the break point. I've had issues with docs from Office 2003 being screwed up by 2010 and those are local to my system. So if I have problems with formats from 2 generations before (office 2007 doesn't give me problems) then how in hell can you ensure that your latest Office 365 hasn't been updated to actually corrupt anything other then the latest version of Office-xxxx? This is how MS locks you into using the fucking products.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The real answer. The code is the spec. Not even Microsoft can guarantee 100% backwards compatiblity. They only offer compatibility. The file format version for an Office product can only be read perfectly by the same version that created it, even down to the patch level sometimes. Every newer version offers compatiblity because the code in the new version isn't exactly 100% identical to the code in the original version.
If Office is made available on Linux Windows will get steamrolled.
The non-Microsoft office providers should all agree on a formal file format standards with compliance testing and a scripting language like VBscript and then start pushing that standard, but it will take years.
Guess the world shouldn't have thrown Word Perfect under the bus?
Or, how about Word Star? There was a time when its editing keystrokes were widely adopted, like in Borland's integrated development environments.
Or, why not use LaTeX? Admittedly, it's a bit of a learning curve, but you can just bang out text, and worry about formatting later, even change it around relatively easily.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
"All of the MS Office file formats, both legacy binary and OOXML, are publicly documented".
Great. Where's the explanation of "AutospaceLikeWord95"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Regex support in the Find/Replace dialog works in LibreOffice. It took a moment to familiarize myself with their implementation, but it works, and it's more powerful than anything else. Try doing that in MS Office.
>> Unclear if I can get a copy without all this unwanted bloat.
>
> Yes, use vi for your documents. There's also a spreadsheet called sc, haven't tried it though.
If it is a simple document, why not?
You also don't need the proprietary network effects and malware vectors associated with more 'feature rich" alternatives.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It took me 10 minutes of thinking and experimenting to figure out what you were talking about. Why would you have a phrase spanning a manual page break? Why are you doing formatting during authorship? Maybe your process needs to change to reflect the tools. Not the creative one, but the technical procedure you use to save, recall, and share your writing. And Word and Writer are both jack of all trades, master of none programs anyway. There's an article I can't find about how adding presentation features to the editor is a mistake. Not that your text shouldn't look pretty while you type it, but that you should never type extra spaces to make it look _just_right_. Or page breaks.
Sadly, the version of OOXML in 2007 (and I think 2010) is not the same as the released spec.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Right here.
logic fails you
Zealotry blinds you. An overwhelming majority of businesses currently use Microsoft Office products and therefore have their current collection of documents stored in Microsoft Office formats. Until LibreOffice can create, open, edit, save, or convert those formats with reliable accuracy, its adoption will be hindered significantly. Even assuming that a business had gone 100% LibreOffice, there's no guarantee any other business or individual they interact with would also be using LibreOffice, necessitating the need for compatibility with MS Office.
$20 grand and an escape helicopter.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Really? Pretty sure you're trolling.. because this is not really an explanation:
This algorithm typically results in the following:
An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
*Typically* results?
*Increase* in character spacing? how much increase?
*Certain* full/half width characters? Which ones?
It is pretty uncalled for to claim zealotry when you are uncompromisingly demanding an absolute 100% accuracy with MS-Office documents before LibreOffice could be used.
There are plenty of businesses where pixel perfect accuracy is not required when sending documents outside the company. If people really need to read my documents with absolute accuracy, then I can PDF it. If I want to test a slideshow then I can use the Powerpoint viewer (it even works under Linux using Wine).
Even without changing the version of Word, a document's pagination can vary wildly depending on the printer driver being used. You don't even change your software for Word to go wrong.
Excel can be a problem if you use complex macros, but 99% of the ones that I see are just being used a glorified table editors with basic calculations. I constantly move between different computers, using Excel, Calc and even the shareware spreadsheet Spread32 (when I want to view something quickly) and it all works better than I had expected. The bigger problem that I have is when a package doesn't implement a feature that you are used to. For example, if I want to search for something spanning the sheets of a workbook I will always use Excel because LibreOffice disables the "Find All" button when you choose the option to span worksheets.
But even you there may end up being some problems, you should not dismiss the use of LibreOffice within any business environment just because you might have some formatting problem.
Really? Pretty sure you're trolling.. because this is not really an explanation:
This algorithm typically results in the following:
An increase in the inter-character spacing added between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain full-width characters
No inter-character spacing between non-ideographic and/or number characters and certain half-width characters
*Typically* results?
*Increase* in character spacing? how much increase?
*Certain* full/half width characters? Which ones?
if you read entire link, you'd see the part where it says,
"Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as ideographic, even though those characters are full-width forms of non-ideographic text: U+FF10–U+FF19, U+FF21–U+FF3A, and U+FF41–U+FF5A. [Note: This results in the unnecessary addition of space. end note]
Characters in the following Unicode ranges should be treated as non-ideographic, even though those characters are ideographic: U+FF66–U+FF9F. [Note: This results in the omission of the intended additional space. end note]"