|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 3, 2023 19:13 UTC (Sat) by jzb (editor, #7867)
In reply to: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice by sionescu
Parent article: Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

“GDocs works for reading, but not for editing in a way that preserves the formatting that the counterparty expects.”

Sadly, Word doesn’t even do this between its PC, online, and macOS versions. I had a resume created in Word on Windows, and opening it in 365 or on macOS screwed up the formatting. (And, yes, LibreOffice, too.) The only way I could make slight tweaks without fully reformatting was on the same PC version.

It’s probably fine for, say, contracts without complex layouts. But the office formats do a terrible job at preserving fidelity between platforms.

LibreOffice is to be commended for doing it as well as it has all these years, but it isn’t doing a lot better than Google docs. It probably has different snags, but if you need perfect fidelity it’s not happening.


to post comments

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 3, 2023 20:14 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> Sadly, Word doesn’t even do this between its PC, online, and macOS versions

Or even on one PC to another using the same nominal version of Word.

I remember when selecting a different *printer* on the same PC caused formatting to shift slightly. For the same (ie US Letter) paper sizes.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 5, 2023 5:42 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (2 responses)

If you want to maintain the exact same print layout, you should use something like PDF that's designed for that purpose. Word processors are designed to constantly update the visual presentation of the document as you edit it, where editing it may include changes to the intended presenting medium, like changing printers. Word processing documents can be good for editing because they give you a good idea approximately what the final product will look like, but they are not designed to precisely set the exact position of every element on the page.

That said, MS Word is terrible even as a word processor. Its internal representation of the document uses markup that focuses on presentation, not on semantic content, and there's no way to see what the underlying model of the document is. If there are formatting problems, it can be very difficult to figure out exactly what kind. It would be much better to use semantic markup plus a style sheet, which as I understand it is how Word Perfect works. The semantic markup plus style sheet approach (plus the ability to see the semantic markup) makes it much easier to format a document consistently and to find and correct errors when they happen.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 6, 2023 8:28 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Word processing documents can be good for editing because they give you a good idea approximately what the final product will look like, but they are not designed to precisely set the exact position of every element on the page.

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a word processing document looks the same when printed as it does on screen (modulo resolution). Certainly for word processors that purport to implement “what you see is what you get”. AFAIR, the “slight differences” one would have to deal with in Word included page breaks ending up in different places depending on which printer one was using, but they may have fixed that now.

Having said that, I've been using LaTeX for the last 35 years or so, so I'm used to different standards as far as presentation is concerned.

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 6, 2023 15:27 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > Word processing documents can be good for editing because they give you a good idea approximately what the final product will look like, but they are not designed to precisely set the exact position of every element on the page.

> I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a word processing document looks the same when printed as it does on screen (modulo resolution).

If it was just that they weren't that precise, I wouldn't mind. It's that with Word "not that precise" means "add another word to your paragraph and your graphics just vanish".

The Word paradigm is "if you can't see it, you can't do it". If Word hides something, it's the devil's own job to unhide it.

That's why WordPerfect fanatics are WordPerfect fanatics. Over there - markup is a first-class citizen. Bar Corel's screw-up rewriting v9 from scratch (I *hope* they've fixed the worst of the mess), stuff just can't disappear because if you go into the markup window, stuff will be precisely where you left it, and double-clicking the markup brings up the dialog box so you can edit it.

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 6, 2023 11:59 UTC (Tue) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (2 responses)

> I remember when selecting a different *printer* on the same PC caused formatting to shift slightly. For the same (ie US Letter) paper sizes.

I wonder if it's because the page margins were too small for some of the printers and got automatically adjusted for that particular print job, causing a reflow of the layout?

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 6, 2023 13:26 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

In both cases the it was the same paper size, and the document margins were well within the printers' minimum margins.

And that this didn't happen using WordPerfect, only Word.

(Incidentally, it's been said that one of the main motivators for Windows was to make WordPerfect's compatibility with vast numbers of printers irrelevant..)

Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice

Posted Jun 6, 2023 15:32 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> And that this didn't happen using WordPerfect, only Word.

> (Incidentally, it's been said that one of the main motivators for Windows was to make WordPerfect's compatibility with vast numbers of printers irrelevant..)

As someone who ended up writing my then company's WP printer drivers, I can assure you this didn't come "out of the box". But the thing is, not only was it possible, but it wasn't that difficult.

Trying to fix printer issues today, on the other hand ...

Cheers,
Wol


Copyright © 2025, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds