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LibreOffice 4.0 released
The free office suite the community has been dreaming of for twelve years Berlin, February 7, 2013 - The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem. LibreOffice 4.0: a community on fire In less than 30 months, LibreOffice has grown dramatically to become the largest independent free software project focused on end user desktop productivity. TDF inclusive governance and the copyleft license have been instrumental in attracting more than 500 developers - three quarters of them being independent volunteers - capable of contributing over 50,000 commits. The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty five thousand lines of comments from German to English. All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community. "LibreOffice 4.0 is a milestone in interoperability and an excellent foundation for our continued work to improve the User Interface," explains Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board of Directors. "Our project is not only capable of attracting new developers on a regular basis, but it also creates a transparent platform for cooperation based on a strong Free Software ethos, where corporate sponsored and volunteer developers work to attain the same objective." LibreOffice 4.0: the new features LibreOffice 4.0 offers a large number of new characteristics, which are listed on this page: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-0-new-features-and.... - Integration with several content and document management systems - including Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others - through the CMIS standard. - Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to several new features and improvements like the possibility of importing ink annotations and attaching comments to text ranges. - Possibility to import Microsoft Publisher documents, and further improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of 2013 version (just announced). - Additional UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) to give LibreOffice a personalized look. - Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for a much improved user interface. - Different header and footer on the first page of a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style. - Several performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new spreadsheet functions as defined in ODF OpenFormula. - First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android, supported only on some Linux distributions. (The second release, coming soon, will be supported on all platforms: Windows, MacOS X and all Linux distros and binaries.) - Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files. - Improved code contribution thanks to Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using Git version control system (although this is not specific of LibreOffice 4.0, it has entered the production stage just before the 4.0 branch). LibreOffice 4.0: under the hood There are a number of fixes and improvements primarily of interest to developers: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0#API_.... Overall excellent backwards compatibility is retained for legacy extensions, but moving forward TDF is committed to a more pro-active approach to evolving the UNO APIs, with more functionality to be deprecated, and eventually dropped, in due time - according to the six month release cycle - throughout the LibreOffice 4.x release series. During the last seven months, since the branch of LibreOffice 3.6 and during the entire development cycle of LibreOffice 4.0, developers have made over 10,000 commits. On average, one commit every 30 minutes, including weekends and the holiday season: a further testimonial of the incredible vitality of the project. How to get LibreOffice 4.0 LibreOffice 4.0 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center. Changelogs are available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC1 (solved in 4.0.0.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC2 (solved in 4.0.0.2) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.0/RC3 (solved in 4.0.0.3). Support The Document Foundation LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to grow the infrastructure, and support marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at global and local level. Short link to The Document Foundation blog: http://wp.me/p1byPE-mG. About The Document Foundation (TDF) The Document Foundation is an open, independent, self-governing, meritocratic organization, which builds on ten years of dedicated work by the OpenOffice.org Community. TDF was created in the belief that the culture born of an independent foundation brings out the best in corporate and volunteer contributors, and will deliver the best free office suite. TDF is open to any individual who agrees with its core values and contributes to its activities, and warmly welcomes corporate participation, e.g. by sponsoring individuals to work as equals alongside other contributors in the community. As of January 2013, TDF has over 150 members and well over 2.000 volunteers and contributors worldwide. Media Contacts Florian Effenberger (based near Munich, Germany, UTC+1) Phone: +49 8341 99660880 - Mobile: +49 151 14424108 E-mail: floeff@documentfoundation.org - Skype: floeff Charles H. Schulz (based in Paris, France, UTC+1) Mobile: +33 6 98655424 - E-mail: charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org Eliane Domingos de Sousa (based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, UTC-3) E-mail: elianedomingos@documentfoundation.org - Skype: elianedomingos Italo Vignoli (based in Milan, Italy, UTC+1) Mobile: +39 348 5653829 - E-mail: italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org - Skype: italovignoli - GTalk: italo.vignoli@gmail.com -- Italo Vignoli - The Document Foundation mob +39 348 5653829 - skype italovignoli italo.vignoli@documentfoundation.org (Log in to post comments)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 7, 2013 21:35 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]
I just hope that "improve the User Interface" doesn't mean "make it look more like Microsoft Office".
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 7, 2013 22:07 UTC (Thu) by aryonoco (subscriber, #55563) [Link]
Yeah, cause layers upon layers of hidden menue items is so much better than clearly laid out toolbars.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 11:22 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] The trouble with those toolbars is you can fit only so many choices in them, and if what you want is not the software designer's idea of a common operation, you have to hunt around in some other way, which at least in Microsoft's ribbon implementation gets frustrating. I much prefer well-designed dropdown menues. There can be a toolbar, but it must be easy to configure so the user can put there just what he considers frequent operations. (In fact, this pretty much describes the current OOo interface, except the placement of items to menues is not always so logical).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 15:14 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
Just a point of fact, it's not developer whim which determined the order and size of buttons in the MS Ribbon but massive user data collection to show which operations are the most used.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 20:45 UTC (Fri) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link]
This. And you can also add things to the ribbon. The ribbon is inexpressibly better than than the old system.
(Tangentially, I'm pretty sure I'm the only reader of LWN who gets paid to use Word all day, so if you're going to respond to this comment telling me I'm wrong, you better bring the data. ;)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 5:53 UTC (Sun) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] I think the ribbon is a genuine, major improvement, but that a lot of experienced users took a long time to warm up to it because it's such a big change. Once you get used to it, though, it's clearly better, especially if you're doing a whole series of operations that use the same class of commands (e.g. a whole bunch of formatting).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 12:12 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>I think the ribbon is a genuine, major improvement, but that a lot of experienced users took a long time to warm up to it because it's such a big change.
I agree, but I think a large part of the problem is that it was released half-baked. In Office 2007 the ribbon was barely customisable, so you ended up with the worst of both worlds; in 2010 I think it's a great example of good UI design which is both relatively user-friendly and relatively powerful. It's not outstanding in either regard, but I think it *is* outstanding in how well it's made the trade-off.
Office 2010 is the first Microsoft product that to me feels like a real professional tool, despite its remaining flaws.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 16:38 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
Not sure about data, but whether I like it or not my days also contains a substantial amount of time with both Microsoft Office and LO/OO. At the beginning (this was some years ago) I forced myself to use OO over time to get over the initial hurdles. My employer jumped on the ribbon bandwagon quickly, so I have had daily exposure to it for years now. I hate them, I really hate them. They occupy way to much space vertically, a show-stopper in itself. More annoyingly, I find them hard to navigate. Even very frequent operations are spread across different ribbons, forcing me to navigate them. I can place about three rows of LO icons (haven't measured, but I am surprised if I am far off here) with the same space occupied by one ribbon, but two rows are sufficient to cover all of my the most common operations. Again without checking, I would guess you need about three ribbons to cover two rows of LO icons.
With respect to menus, just about any other software in the universe uses them. Hence, the data is overwhelming, we all know how to maneuver them. We all know how the shortcuts go.
As for most people MS Office is but a tool, my day is filled with other stuff too, so there is a limit to how much time I want to spend learning how to use ribbons effectively. After years with ribbons, I still prefer the traditional ui, and I am pretty sure I am more productive with it. On my laptop I avoid MS Office totally, it takes too much screen to be useful at all (I know I can hide all the functionality, but kind of defeats the purpose).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 20:16 UTC (Sun) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
Ribbons are about easy discoverability, and fundability (for things you already know about). You have a series of labeled tabs, and in those tabs are a series of grouped controls. The most common ones, with very recognizable icons (such as bold/italics/underline) aren't labeled and just have an icon... the more obscure ones, with less descriptive icons (such as "Insert Citation") are given a label as well.
Having used Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and KOffice a decent chunk over the 2000s, of the three I preferred using KOffice the most (OO had an absurdly slow start time). And then I had to use Office 2007, which introduced the Ribbon. In no time at all, I already preferred the new interface, and was using features I didn't even know existed (such as managing citations). The Ribbon creates tiered, logical 2D groupings of controls. With a toolbar, you sort of have 1D groupings of icons... which is fine with a half dozen icons, but becomes worse and worse the more icons you introduce.
When I've talked to various technical people, they'll often bash the ribbon... but then they tend to always opt to use ribbon-based interfaces instead of non-ribbon. Based off the non-technical users I know... they tend to be able to do more with post-Ribbon versions of Office than pre-Ribbon versions (they'll use a wider feature set, instead of just basic font editing, like would happen before).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 21:13 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
> Ribbons are about easy discoverability, and fundability (for things you already know about).
Maybe it is just me, but I find myself lost in the ribbons searching for basic functionality. Hence, my experience differ from yours here. When I ask my colleagues where to find said stuff, they more often than not do not know either.
> I preferred using KOffice the most
Nice to hear. Generally I love the KDE stack, so I am kind of waiting for Calligra to mature. I am planning on giving it a serious try when the developers claim it is ready.
> The Ribbon creates tiered, logical 2D groupings of controls. With a toolbar, you sort of have 1D groupings of icons... which is fine with a half dozen icons, but becomes worse and worse the more icons you introduce.
I think this is where we differ. I really want to keep it simple. 1D is simple. I hate when people start going overboard with the features in MS Office, it always leads to a terrible mess, where I (after having waisted three days with a well-meaning support person somewhere in Bangalore) need to copy and paste page by page into a fresh document, and hurry off to make a pdf of it before anybody mess up the formatting again. Citations, or more generally cross-referencing is one of the problem spots that have given me grief. Sometimes I wonder whether the proponents of MS Office ever have had any experience with serious documents. To me, a hundred pages was always a hard limit before everything went nuclear.
Actually, it has consistently been so bad that I have stayed away from large Word reports the last years. Instead, mediawiki has provided a much better way of communicating results, and preserving knowledge. The added value for the employer is just tremendous, I cannot imagine how ineffective the old word reports were at preserving knowledge. Preserving knowledge is the main challenge of technology companies today, and MS Office is not helping. Don't even get me started on Sharepoint.
Spreadsheets are if possible even worse. Seems some people try use them for developing full graphical applications, producing advanced reports, and doing complex calculations and data management. It is my firm belief that such endavours are best undertaken in more tailored environments.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 19, 2013 21:42 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
The ribbon makes a fine replacement for a stack of toolbars, but a poor replacement for the menu bar (IMHO, of course).
People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 10:07 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
> People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
And with this comment, you've just shown that you're totally biased and not worth listening to, thanks.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 12:38 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
You say bias and I say regrettable. The amount of hair-tearing frustration involved in trying to make a document done in MSWord look good approaches incredible as complexity or size increases.
There are a lot of people who don't have or don't know about better options, but nobody who has a choice uses Word for anything that requires sophisticated layout or styling. If some places require .doc submissions... so much the worse, they'll get poorly formatted input.
A word processor isn't a typesetting/page layout program and isn't supposed to be. Word compounds this by making even simple things harder than they have to be.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 12:46 UTC (Wed) by renox (subscriber, #23785) [Link]
Your post mistake/miswording is this: "serious work" == "sophisticated layout or styling".
Yes Word isn't the good tool for sophisticated layout or styling, but in most case people don't care they can do their "serious work" with basic layout/styling.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 20, 2013 10:11 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]
> People needing to do "serious" work mostly don't use MS Word in any case due to its abysmal styling and layout controls.
I keep hearing this, but that might only be true in your world. You'd be surprised how many e.g. academic journals in the social and management sciences accept *only* .doc[x] for submissions, for instance. (where often the backoffice converts the files to latex files as part of the typesetting).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 15, 2013 8:41 UTC (Fri) by MortenSickel (subscriber, #3238) [Link]
In my former job I was using MS office a lot, and never really got used to the ribbon, one of my main annoiances was like you said "They occupy way to much space vertically, a show-stopper in itself." - especially when working on a not-too-large widescreen laptop - but somehow I discovered that by clicking the bottom of the ribbon, it get minimized .- so then it was possible to Get Work Done (tm) - despite the ribbon. Just clik on it again and it is back to it old space-waste.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 0:36 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
From what I have seen, "improve the User Interface" is "use a Glade generated flexible layout instead of the old clunky fixed layout", at least so far.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 3:21 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Glade? Hardly, LibreOffice uses its own GUI Toolkit (VCL), not Gtk.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 6:17 UTC (Fri) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link]
No, he's right. LibreOffice has begun moving to using .ui files:
http://blogs.linux.ie/caolan/2013/01/24/converting-libreo...
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 8:14 UTC (Fri) by Uraeus (subscriber, #33755) [Link]
How it works is that you create your dialogs using the Glade tool, and save it as a .ui file, which is a XML file. Then there is another tool that converts the XML file to use VCL instead of Gtk+.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 8, 2013 4:38 UTC (Fri) by amosbatto (guest, #52567) [Link]
I have long thought that the poor office suites available in Linux have prevented many people from switching to Linux. I first installed Linux in 1999, but I didn't switch to Linux as my full time operating system until 2006 because I couldn't give up WordPerfect. Although I have used OpenOffice/LibreOffice almost exclusively since 2006, I still think that WordPerfect is better than LO Writer, Excel is better than LO Calc and PowerPoint is better than LO Impress. If I didn't firmly believe in the ideology of free software, I would use a proprietary office suite.
For me, the development of LibreOffice is the *one* thing in the world of software that substantially improves my life. New features in the FireFox, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, GIMP, etc., don't have much impact on me, because those pieces of software already do everything that I need. The only other software development that truly impacts my life are the drivers in the Linux kernel that support new hardware.
For that reason I'm really grateful to all the people who are donating their time to improve LibreOffice. I'm really hoping that all the code refactoring and the growth of a community around LibreOffice will make it easier for LibreOffice to eventually catch up to the proprietary suites.
The new regular expression search engine and the better quality export of charts in Calc are new features that I will use in LibreOffice 4.0, but I find it so frustrating that there aren't more new features. The changes being made to the code (such as the use of Glade to design more flexible dialog boxes and PO files to handle translations) look very promising. I keep hoping that these types of behind-the-scenes changes will make it easier to develop LibreOffice in the future, so it can eventually equal and surpass the proprietary suites. I'm hoping that all those behind-the-scenes changes will make it possible to eventually use LibreOffice in web pages and mobile phones.
So I keep hoping. I have been disappointed and frustrated for so long with OpenOffice/LibreOffice, but I keep hoping.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 11, 2013 12:21 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>I first installed Linux in 1999, but I didn't switch to Linux as my full time operating system until 2006 because I couldn't give up WordPerfect.
That doesn't follow - in 1999 WordPerfect was already available for Linux.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 11, 2013 16:50 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
Yeah, I bought that (used it to write the IPChains Quick Reference). I think it's more correct to say that slower-than-snot, seriously crashy word processor that looked a lot like WordPerfect was available on Linux.
But, it you switched platforms to use it seriously, you'd switch back before the end of your first day. It was that bad.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:37 UTC (Mon) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
My wife did a couple of translations with wp for Linux, but she was always peeved that it was a stupid X11 application, instead of the really nice terminal wp client that was around on other unices.
Because, as you said, it was crashy as hell. Just not as crashy as staroffice was back then, or max-something, or weird like angoss smartware.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 12, 2013 15:26 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>slower-than-snot, seriously crashy word processor that looked a lot like WordPerfect
Oh dear; well that would explain it alright.
That can't have made a good impression of general application quality on people trying Linux for the first time :(.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 12, 2013 15:29 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
To be fair,the first gui versions of WordPerfect for Dos and Windows were also very slow, extremely crash-prone and likely to corrupt your data. My wife wrote a book on the first Windows version of WordPerfect and used 5.1 for DOS for that.
Importance of LibreOffice Posted Feb 13, 2013 18:53 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Having used them (WP5.0 for SCO, WP5.1 for DOS, WP6.0 and WP6.1 for Windows, and supported WP5.1 and WP5.2 for Windows) my feeling was that ALL of them were rock solid ... UNLESS
You made the mistake of letting MS sabotage them. 5.1 and 5.2 for Windows were fine. Just a bit clunky, and I never had any desire to change from 5.1 for DOS.
6.0Win was great provided you ran it on Windows 3.1. Problem is, we were just introducing networking at the time, and MS slipped a bomb into the TCP/IP stack that killed it. It took 6.1 to fix all the "bugs" MS introduced.
And then, of course, MS sabotaged that with Office 95. If you installed 6.1 on top of Office 95 everything was fine. If, however, you installed Office over 95, well, ... the only way I ever found to fix the mess and get WP working again was "format c:".
Cheers,
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 13:11 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
If interested in LibreOffice, recommend following the blog from Michael Meeks. See for instance this entry: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2013-02-07.html
In that blog he links to the slides of his FOSDEM talk. I unfortunately did not attend that talk, but slides gives a good idea on what is happening behind the scenes at LibreOffice. It gives the impression that a huge amount of work is done by a large group of people.
Slides:
LibreOffice might not work nicely at the moment, but all this code maintenance hopefully will result in nice improvements in their applications. I use Microsoft Excel a lot and last time I looked, Calc is really lacking (features, keyboard shortcuts, etc).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 14:03 UTC (Fri) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]
> If interested in LibreOffice, recommend following the blog from Michael Meeks.
There is also http://planet.documentfoundation.org/, which includes that blog and many others (but if you follow the blog from Michael Meeks on it, always scroll to earlier dates a bit, since his posts sometimes seem to be backdated).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:22 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> LibreOffice might not work nicely at the moment, but all this code maintenance hopefully will result in nice improvements in their applications.
Given the ugliness of those slides, I can only hope you're right.
And the pointless attacks continue Posted Feb 8, 2013 18:13 UTC (Fri) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]
This account, like the "Slashdot" one before it, does nothing but post negative and usually uninformed commentary on the work of others. Would it be too much to ask that it too be disabled?
Chris
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 18:54 UTC (Fri) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
Better to judge on substance than just solely on appearance.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 20:52 UTC (Fri) by louie (subscriber, #3285) [Link] For slides, appearance matters. It would be an excellent exercise for an LO developer to buy a copy of a modern text on best practices for slide-based communication (say, Presentation Zen) and try to create slides in that style using Impress. Even the most basic techniques recommended for making slides that are persuasive and informative are often somewhere between painful and impossible. (It isn't just slides; doing the basics recommended in Typography for Lawyers to make documents that look professional and are maximally readable has the same net result in Writer- somewhere between painful and impossible.)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 23:18 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I didn't find them that bad. In fact, I found them to be pretty good. There was a lot on each slide, but then the man clearly has a lot to say. Another thing is that the slides were probably designed to be useful as a standalone resource, so that in front of an audience they are there for reference but people are supposed to listen to the presenter and allow him to direct their attention to the more pertinent points.
I wasn't at any of the presentations where these slides were shown, so I can't say anything about the means of presenting them itself, but as a downloadable resource I found them informative. Certainly a lot more informative than slide decks consisting of 150 single-word slides ("performance", "fast", "cool", "shiny"...) where you really had to be there, and where even nice photographs would be more communicative to those who weren't or who downloaded the slides later to refresh their memory.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 3:16 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> I didn't find them that bad. In fact, I found them to be pretty good.
I just noticed that okular uses a very poor algorithm to scale the screenshots on those slides. When viewed with evince, they look a lot better.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 16:21 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I noticed that it is rare to see that combined.
I often see various presentations. At most they are created by a small. What I noticed is that unless it is meant to be announced, there seems to be a difference in presentations. Some presentations look really smooth, but substance wise they are lacking (you cannot tell due the amount of time spend on the presentation). The presentation by Michael Meeks is more like what I value more: focussed on details, but the resulting presentation is not as smooth (things like different font sizes, too many colours, too much text, more difficult to follow structure, etc).
It does not really matter if there are lots of guidelines, templates, etc. Often the nicest looking presentations are lacking content wise.
It would be nicer though to have the combination of good content as well as really nice presentation. But if it is just one person, give me the inconsistent presentation any day over something smooth but lacking (if the presentation is smooth, make sure to be critical and ask loads of questions :P).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 17:54 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
The point is that a presentation program is supposed to make it easy to create good presentations, even for people who don't want to invest a huge amount of effort. That's the reason why many people like LaTeX so much: you can obtain a reasonable result without worrying a lot about layout. LibreOffice doesn't seem to do well in that regard.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 18:02 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
I find various things strange in your argument.
For one, I disagree with the purpose of a presentation program. Sometimes you just want speed. Secondly, if you see a presentation which does is not nice it does not imply that the presentation program was at fault. Lastly, I don't find LaTeX easy at all, though you didn't specifically suggested that as a good presentation program (right?).
Include a chart/graph/table from some other program in your presentation program and it is going to look out of place (different fonts style/size, it being a picture instead of vectors, etc). A program can also do so much.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 9, 2013 20:24 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> For one, I disagree with the purpose of a presentation program. Sometimes you just want speed.
So a presentation program is a tool to quickly create something that sucks? I'm not interested in such a tool.
> Lastly, I don't find LaTeX easy at all, though you didn't specifically suggested that as a good presentation program (right?).
> Include a chart/graph/table from some other program in your presentation program and it is going to look out of place (different fonts style/size, it being a picture instead of vectors, etc).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 19:20 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> If your presentation program forces you to use raster graphics, then I suggest you use another one. LaTeX interoperates with a variety of vector formats such as SVG or PDF. Also some programs (such as Gnuplot or QtiPlot) allow you to export the graph in PGF/TikZ format, making integration with LaTeX trivial.
I had a paper to do for a class and I used circuitmacros[1] to convert from m4[2] to eps and embedded a our circuit diagram right into the PDF as a vector drawing. I'd like to see any presentation editor do that…
[1]There's some tedious work to get the wires laid out right, but once the shape is set, components can be moved around without an issue.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 20:46 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
We did something similar (with graphviz files) using VB macros back in 2001 (I think).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 14, 2013 23:28 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
People just don't spend time on presentations and things will go wrong.
If you copy/paste while creating presentation you'll end up with differences. Vector graphics is nice, but try getting that working nicely while copy/pasting from various programs.
E.g. creating a control chart in some program (forgot the name, need to check @ work). You can paste but by default it just pastes an image. Even as vector it'll look off: different fonts, colours, etc.
I don't really see a presentation program fixing arbitrary copy/paste things.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 23:19 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Seems like a faithful implementation of MS Office to me, then. :)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 19, 2013 13:04 UTC (Tue) by ssam (subscriber, #46587) [Link]
if you want to use latex for presentation, but dont want to type so much, have a look at wiki2beamer.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 16:50 UTC (Sun) by Del- (guest, #72641) [Link]
I have been trained by professionals in how to make good slides, so at least I know a good one if I see it. I have to admit that within the free software world that training is sourly missing. Too often slides are filled with text as if the presentation itself is supposed to be documentation, speaker notes are often not distributed at all. Probably this is partly due to trying to make the slides meaningful to people who did not attend the presentation. However, I have never had any trouble with LO in that respect. I would rather say to the contrary, all the bling in powerpoint tends to lead to horrible presentations. Moreover there are several slides in Michael's presentation that are prime examples of excellent slides (while others are horrible). Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 23:43 UTC (Sun) by el_presidente (subscriber, #87621) [Link]
> Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
The lack of a guide on making good presentations?
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 23:59 UTC (Sun) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
>> Exactly what problem do you have making good presentations with Impress?
> The lack of a guide on making good presentations?
I think it's even more fundamental than that.
The lack of agreement on what makes a good presentation.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 11, 2013 0:38 UTC (Mon) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
> The lack of agreement on what makes a good presentation.
Surely we can agree on that!
If you are depending on a tool to make a good presentation, then you are missing the point - and should probably stick to cat photos :-)
And if people come away from your presentation thinking that the slides were really good, then they probably were distracted by them and missed your point.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 15:50 UTC (Fri) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] It would appear that LibreOffice is still unable to import any non-proprietary vector graphics (PDF, SVG, Fig or similar) without rasterization, making it unsuitable for high-quality import of external graph creation tools. I think that OpenOffice at last has gotten actual SVG import (rather than rasterization), though quality seems to be spotty. LibreOffice apparently is trailing behind, and no, Microsoft Draw formats and similar are not a suitable alternative.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 16:46 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Umm? Did you miss something? LO since 3.6 imports SVG as vector graphics. It works quite well. I love LibreOffice. I've donated $100 because it makes my life so much easier.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 12:31 UTC (Sun) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]
Just checked it. Took an SVG generated via LilyPond (definitely outlines here), inserted it as a graphics into LibreOffice 3.6, zoomed by 600%. Jaggies and rasterization artifacts all over.
That does not look _anything_ like SVG imported as vector graphics.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 13:49 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
Don't use Insert -> Picture -> from File to insert an SVG image, just open it using File -> Open. Then you'll get vector data.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 15:16 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] Huh. Insert : Picture : from File worked for me. I imported an SVG image and it came in as a vector image. Weird.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 16:28 UTC (Sun) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> I imported an SVG image and it came in as a vector image.
How do you know? When I "insert" an SVG image with diagonal lines and zoom to 3000%, those lines are jagged. When I "open" the same image, the same lines are perfectly smooth, and I can also tear the image apart, which isn't possible when "insert"ing it. To me these are strong hints that LibreOffice essentially treats the SVG like a raster image.
This is with LibreOffice 3.6 on Fedora 18.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 17:43 UTC (Sun) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]
> This is with LibreOffice 3.6 on Fedora 18.
Just upgrade to LibreOffice 4.0 already! :)
I just tried with both 3.6 and 4.0. LibreOffice 4.0 seems to handle SVG smoothly while 3.6 did seem to show some stuff as "raster images" indeed.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 13, 2013 8:56 UTC (Wed) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] So why is this not mentioned in the release announcements? A lot of stuff of minor importance is mentioned. Being able to create documents that don't toss the quality of the original material is much more important than all the candy they think important enough to announce. It is a dealbreaker for many serious uses. It takes quite a bit of diligence to work out a quality-preserving toolchain around documents processed with TeX/LaTeX. Everything is there, however, since people care. And then you switch from an old dinosaur like that to a "modern" application, and print quality becomes a "can't be interested in that" item. This is so embarrassing. About a year ago, I made a magazine article using standard LaTeX/PDF toolchains. Then people ask me "can we get a .DOC file for that". "Ok." Import the texts as plain text into LibreOffice, import the graphics... TILT. There is no way to import the graphics in a manner where they remain usable for preprint purposes. There is no vector graphics format whatsoever produceable by Free Software that will survive in LibreOffice. I had to send the document and the graphics files separately and tell the editor to see how he gets the stuff together on his side. Now purportedly, this has changed. I am sceptical. But if it has changed, why for heaven's sake was it not even newsworthy enough to announce?
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 13, 2013 21:02 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] And then you switch from an old dinosaur like that to a "modern" application, and print quality becomes a "can't be interested in that" item. You do know that't the raison d'être for the very TeX existence, right? It was quite literally created because "modern" applications (modern in the end of 1970th, mind you!) were unable to create anything comparable in quality to what was available before! Being able to create documents that don't toss the quality of the original material is much more important than all the candy they think important enough to announce. In a world where serious analysts publish diagrams in JPG? No, they are not. The fact of the matter: very few LibreOffice users care about that stuff. Most don't even understand what's the difference between SVG, PNG and JPG. There is no way to import the graphics in a manner where they remain usable for preprint purposes. Really? You can't create 10000x10000 pixels picture and then insert it in your document? That's how Joe Average solves these problems, you know. Now purportedly, this has changed. I am sceptical. But if it has changed, why for heaven's sake was it not even newsworthy enough to announce? Because Joe Average does not care? You do know that neither .doc nor .docx files support SVG (only .odt does - and then it does that in a weird way)? They support two competing different Microsoft-sponsored vector formats instead: VML and DrawingML. Thus I would not be surprised to see a lot of SVG files mangled when imported to LibreOffice then exported as .doc file. If that even works at all.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 13, 2013 21:54 UTC (Wed) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] You forgot EMF, a vector format supported by all versions MS Office and also by LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 13, 2013 21:56 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Oops. Yeah. So there are three vector formats, but SVG is not among them.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 14, 2013 11:36 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
And EPS which is probably more relevant from the perspective of the LaTeX/PDF toolchain.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 14, 2013 21:33 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] You can not embed EPS in the MS Office document. You can only convert it which may or may not work - exactly as you can do with SVG.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 18, 2013 13:06 UTC (Mon) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
Thanks for the clarification - in MS Word it appears to be possible to embed it directly. It does appear aliased on screen, but it's obviously using the vector data as it seems to be arbitrarily resizable and zoomable, and when saving to a PDF it's clearly not just embedding bitmap data as the output is fully zoomable and antialiased.
My experience of vector graphics in the day-to-day office world (ie. amongst non-FOSS people for whom that's not their job, but might come up as part of it) is that there are two vector formats that exist: EPS and AI. Since MS Word appears to work with EPS pretty well, it would be very useful if LO did too.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 19, 2013 18:55 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Thanks for the clarification - in MS Word it appears to be possible to embed it directly. Not really. It's possible to import it - but this process has different levels of success depending on what kind of program you have use to produce said EPS file. Wikipedia contains all the gory details. The only thing you can reliably do with EPS is to embed it in your document as kind-of "blackbox": you know dimensions and you know how to print it but that's all. My experience of vector graphics in the day-to-day office world (ie. amongst non-FOSS people for whom that's not their job, but might come up as part of it) is that there are two vector formats that exist: EPS and AI. Since MS Word appears to work with EPS pretty well, it would be very useful if LO did too. Correction: EPS produced by some applications works fine with some versions of MS Office for some operations - if you are lucky. In the end it's trial-and-error implementations which handle some usecases essentially without documentation and guidelines (or, rather, there are tons of documentation and huge amount of guidelines - basically one for each program which can produce EPS file). Sure, it may be good idea to produce something which will successfully parse at least most common EPS files out there, but that's huge undertaking and it does not look like LibreOffice team has the resources for such undertaking. Especially if you want to correctly handle more esoteric cases with alpha-channels and other "interesting" bits (which are implemented using different extensions in different programs).
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 24, 2013 18:17 UTC (Sun) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
It should be possible to import EPS (and other formats like CorelDraw) by using the UniConvertor Python library. (Inkscape and Scribus are already using this library.)
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 20:42 UTC (Sun) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] How do you know? It seems we are both right. In the word-processor, importing an SVG image does indeed convert it to a bitmap. However, if I do the same thing in the drawing program, it comes in as a vector image. I can right-click on the picture and select "Break" which breaks it into its vector components that I can manipulate further in the drawing editor.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 10, 2013 15:29 UTC (Sun) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
So 'Picture' is code for 'Raster Image'?
LO should always import SVG (and other vector formats) images as... vectors! It's likely the right choice in 99.9% of all situations. For the rare exceptional case, the user could just rasterize it before bringing it into LO... or if the LO developers really insist, just provide some functionality to rasterize a selected vector image.
LibreOffice 4.0 released Posted Feb 8, 2013 23:38 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
I read that it also includes some fonts that require proprietary software to be built (the Adobe ones):
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