Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org [LWN.net]

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 13, 2008 8:30 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org by tzafrir
Parent article: Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

what's the rate of the presentations in recent Linux-related developers conferences that were made in OOo?

Well, those are made by the people who didn't master LaTeX beamer ;-). Last time I saw a presentation from a RedHat employee (a gray-bearded man with a pony tail), it was made with PowerPoint. People who do this sort of things are happy even with the limitations their tool provides. If you stop being happy with ooimpress or PowerPoint, you first look around if there's something better, something that makes your presentations look more professional (and that certainly doesn't mean "more silly animated effects"), and quicker to create.

My conclusion is that when you want to write a new "office suite" from scratch as free software, first make a good extensible typesetting and drawing engine ([La]TeX has some limitations, so be better than that - especially the programming language it uses is a nightmare; PostScript as drawing engine is not perfect, either). The user interfaces for the different programs should be frontends to this engine; they need to be extensible, as well (packages for the typesetting engine need to tell the GUI something, too). Make sure that writing an extension is easy, and that the foundation is stable and sane so that most of the work goes to writing extensions. Concentrate on good practice, don't try to imitate the bad user interface of the competition.

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Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 16, 2008 14:15 UTC (Thu) by kamil (guest, #3802) [Link] (1 responses)

No offense meant, but I think you must be very young...

I'm with you on the use of LaTeX for document writing. I too use gnuplot for my graphs, but I did switch from xfig to inkscape (the GUI of the former would drive me nuts).

I made a few presentations in LaTeX, but then I switched to OOo. Why? Because of issues with sharing. Slides are shared a lot more than documents. In a collaborative environment (aren't they all?), people exchange slides from each others' presentations all the time. Unless you don't have any co-workers, or they are all as huge LaTeX fans as you are (in my experience, unlikely, even among programmers), using something radically different for your slides than the rest of the crew is a big PITA. OOo is close enough to PowerPoint to make importing and exporting practical, and that really helps.

Meeks: Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

Posted Oct 25, 2008 16:27 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link]

I also use LaTeX for presentations, and my approach to the sharing slides problem is to first convert other people's slides to PDF (if they aren't already in PDF), then create a Makefile that uses GhostScript to splice and reweave the output of SLiTeX with the slides I want to import.

If someone wants to use my slides in PowerPoint ... well, they have the PDF, and PowerPoint can import PDFs as images at least, right?