OpenOffice.org 2.2 released [LWN.net]

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Mar 30, 2007 0:50 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: OpenOffice.org 2.2 released by AJWM
Parent article: OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

People want to be able to edit the documents, so PDF is out and RTF lacks the formating capabilities.

Plus, it is not only the matter of documents which you generate. 100% of the documents which we receive from outside are .DOC. Sometimes we have to edit them and send them back. It can't be done reliably with OpenOffice, yet.

If you have to use MSWord just once (and you are running Windows anyway), you might as well use it all the time.

I tend to agree that spreadsheets are less of a problem, at least for us.

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OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Mar 30, 2007 2:39 UTC (Fri) by tcwan (guest, #42830) [Link]

The biggest compatibility issue between OpenOffice and MS Word is still the formatting. A document prepared in one won't print properly on the other. Granted PDFs are fine for 'view-only' documents, but not everyone sends PDFs, and 'work-in-progress' documents need to be in .doc format to be useful in a mixed environment.

Unfortunately I don't know how that can be solved. The problems as I see it (from a layman's perspective):

1. Font metrics compatibility (if you don't really care about using EXACTLY the same font)
2. Layout issues (complex tables and lists don't translate well from MS Word to OO)
3. Embedded objects. e.g., Visio drawings are not editable in OO.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Mar 30, 2007 2:42 UTC (Fri) by tcwan (guest, #42830) [Link]

To add to this, for technical documents, I'm learning to move slowly towards LyX (LaTex GUI frontend). Saves a lot of hair pulling when MS Word auto-reformats the hierarchical paragraph numbering incorrectly for the umpteenth time.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Mar 30, 2007 5:33 UTC (Fri) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

I tried LyX once, but it seemed clunky on my home hardware and the learning curve waaaaaay too steep. So I just stuck with latex-mode in Emacs :-) YMMV.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Apr 5, 2007 13:20 UTC (Thu) by danielpf (subscriber, #4723) [Link]

Kile provides a facilitated graphical introduction to LaTeX, with online help and highlighting editor, plus fast instant previewing through kdvi or xdvi.

The drawback of LyX is to introduce yet another set of particular macros, and doesn't encourage improving your knowledge of LaTeX. In contrast Kile guides you how to use plain LaTeX mode, and with time you learn how to use directly LaTeX. When being used to LaTeX you have then a chance to switch to a more powerful editor like emacs if needed to, because your past .tex files produced with Kile remain compatible with plain LaTeX.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Apr 6, 2007 21:30 UTC (Fri) by alstrup (subscriber, #24272) [Link]

The latest versions of LyX provide a "View source" option which will show you the LaTeX for a given paragraph, thus making it easier to learn LaTeX if you wish.

LyX also integrates with a bunch of other external tools, so if you need to include diagrams, pictures, chess boards, music, EDA, or whatever, LyX is your friend because it handles all necessary invocations of programs, conversions of formats, generating previews, and what not. In the unlikely scenario that LyX does not support some strange format and tool, it's simple to add a new template, and there you go.

LyX 1.5.0, which is in beta right now, is also Unicode enabled.

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Apr 11, 2007 0:46 UTC (Wed) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Yes, and it's not neeed to announce kerning as a "new and exciting feature" like in this Open Office announcement.

Well, we have that in TeX since 1978. (And yes, I used TeX when it was still written in SAIL Pascal and not this new-fangled WEB language that Don used for the rewrite in '82. We changed our own Pascal compiler to be able to compile TeX.)

OpenOffice.org 2.2 released

Posted Mar 30, 2007 8:04 UTC (Fri) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link]

This is a real concern - having to interact with outside companies.

There are several solution to this (not necessarily realistic ones).

1. Be hardline ;) If you are the source of the document, use OOo formats - after all the program is free. If the other company is the source just send raw text of the changes and let them do the formatting.

2. Use some other software that suited to the task. Latex/Lyx, DocBook, other.

3. Work with companies that use OOo.

4. Just use MS Word when necessary.

There are one reason I don't like using word. I don't trust it. Early versions were OK featurewise, but was very buggy. Now it does many things behind my back that it is just annoying. And it is still with the odd bugs. Word has screwed up so many documents for me which cost so much extra work that it just doesn't make sense to use it for serious work.