ODF Support In Google Drive

An anonymous reader writes: Google's Chris DiBona told a London conference last week that ODF support was coming next year, but today the Google Drive team unexpectedly launched support for all three of the main variants — including long-absent Presentation files. You can now simply open ODT, ODS and ODP files in Drive with no fuss. It lacks support for comments and changes but at least it shows progress towards full support of the international document standard, something conspicuously missing for many years.

Comments

This is huge

[blind biker]

I have been wishing for ODF support in Google Docs since forever. This one feature is what makes it now really feasible for me to start using the Google office tools - becauses I can then open the documents with a myriad other suites that work with ODF!

Re:This is huge

[petermgreen]

Latex has it's good and bad points.

good points
maintains mental distinction between input and output
maintains a reasonable level of semantic information
reliable and reasonablly fast for large documents
produces really nice typeset output
handles equations well
handles captioning and cross-referencing well
makes a reasonable job at layout before tweaking

bad points
only a few image formats work, with traditional latex it's EPS or bust, pdflatex is a bit better but it still pretty limited with PDF being the only vector format supported (which is fun as most pdf creators don't want to create arbitary sized pdfs so you often have to print to pdf then use a seperate tool to remove the borders) and the only bitmap formats supported being png and huffman jpeg (at least in my experiance artimetic coded jpeg doesn't work and gives an unhelpful error message, that caused some head scratching)
the layout engine is reasonablly smart but not smart enough to get a layout i'm happy with without tweaking and the compile-build-view cycle gets annoying during layout tweaking.
the whole system feels like hacks built on top of hacks. The parameters to hyperef to avoid ugly boxes don't work in all versions (not sure if they work in the latest now, I certainly remember having to downgrade when working on my thesis because of this). Hyperref links go to the float caption rather than the float itself unless you add another hack package called hypcap but that in turn requires further hackery to work with custom figure types (such as figures placed by the side of the text rather than inline with it..
table handling leaves a lot to be desired requiring significant manual tweaking for any nontrivial table.
there are way too many markup sensitive characters, this means that significant editing is often required after pasting in plain text.
requires running a bunch of tools in the right order and sometimes multiple times to process a document

Thats my experiance from writing a phd thesis with the thing anyway.

Re:International document standard?

[Jdodge99]

You seem to be either creating an odd situation on purpose, or getting stuck on one you've come across. When you grab a section of formatted text from a PDF, LibreOffice considers it a unitary chunk -- and tries to keep it together. If you want to break this, or have LibreOffice treat it differently - there's a pretty wide variety of methods to do so:
First method: grab the bit above your graphic - paste it, then paste your graphic, then paste the text below it.
Second Method: paste as unformatted text, either by using paste-special "unformatted text" or washing in through notepad. If I want text, not formatting, I habitually wash it through notepad. Open notepad and paste in text, highlight and copy.
So I'm not sure which part you object to and I don't know what your desired behavior is, but for me LibreOffice's behaviour is very reasonable -- and when I want it to do something different, it's fairly simple to accomplish.

If you want to point out a real weak point in Libre Writer? Labels. Labels implementation is still (I think) both bad and confusing. I know it is confusing. I wish I had time to look at it and offer to help fix it. For now, I just hope someone else does.

                                            - Jeff