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LibreOffice 4.0 releasedLibreOffice 4.0 releasedPosted Feb 13, 2013 8:56 UTC (Wed) by dakas (guest, #88146)In reply to: LibreOffice 4.0 released by mjw Parent article: LibreOffice 4.0 released 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?
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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.)
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