OpenOffice as an alternative

On 11/12/05 00:29, "cheshirenekomac.com" <cheshirenekomac.com> wrote:

When the switch to Intel Mac comes, I am not looking forward to the literally thousands I will have to cough up to upgrade all my software.  After a few months of casual use, NeoOffice looks like it may let me avoid having to shell out for MS Office.

Um, considering how little MS Office cares about Altivec, why would you immediately have to buy a new copy? Unless you have critical software that requires Altivec or drivers, it should run more than acceptably under Rosetta. In fact, I'm not even going to start moving to MacTel until all the software my users need that won't run under Rosetta is ready to go natively

-- John C. Welch Writer/Analyst Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions jwelchbynkii.com

On 12/11/2005 7:29 PM, "cheshirenekomac.com" <cheshirenekomac.com> spake
thus:

> This gives it a number of
> advantages over OO, including a more Mac like interface,

Only superficially --- most of the interface still uses X11-style widgets.
All you really get UI-wise is the menu bar in the correct location and
Mac-style windows (nothing to sneeze at, of course). Apparently 2.0 is a bit
better.

> They are now estimating early 2006 for a version of NeoOffice based
> on OO 2.0 code.

I heard on the Fink mailing lists over the weekend that Mac nightly builds
of NeoOffice 2.0 are now available if you want to live on the bleeding edge.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

FWIW, I rarely ever use MS Word anymore, although it is still on my computer. Last winter, while I was working on my MA thesis proposal, I got so frustrated with MS Word that I finally switched to NeoOffice/J. Now, after several months of everyday use, I recently switched to OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 after having gotten tired of the slow Java-based interface of NO/J. The X11 interface is OK (I currently have a Linux box in addition to my PowerBook G4, so X11 is somewhat familiar), and OOo is certainly a lot faster than NO/J.

Having recently moved to Mac after many years as a MS user, I faced the challenge of having to be able to interoperate with my work colleagues all using MS Office.

A Mac user friend sugggested OpenOffice and in particular NeoOffice to avoid having to run X Windows. However, after a number of weeks and many documents, I found NeoOffice was just not up to it from a compatibility perspective. Anything other than basic text, such as bookmarks, tables of contents, paragraph formatting etc, continually failed to convert from Neo to MS and caused both myself and my colleagues alot of wasted effort fixing them. In the end I bought MS Office for Mac.

If you don't need to interact in a serious way with MS Office users however, it is quite a reasonable product.

Well, first, someone told me that TextEdit in Tiger did a really good job
of opening Word documents. I found that hard to believe, so I tried it.
The first document that I tried opened perfectly. It was a document that
only had light formatting, though. So I found a Word document that had
some heavy formatting. TextEdit opened that right up, but graphics were
missing, and one text box was gone. So, it does a pretty good job of
dealing with Word files, but not a great one. And, of course, TextEdit
isn't the application that you would want to use to create or edit
complex documents.

But that brings me to an application that was just translated into an
English version (from German) and I wanted to let folks know about it.

PAPYRUS OFFICE is a sophistocated Microsoft-compatible office suite from
R.O.M Logicware in Germany. Papyrus Office consists of an integrated
word-processing program (Papyrus WORD) and a powerful database (Papyrus
BASE). The product includes word processing features such as:
non-continuous text selection, format and copy, micro-kerning of text,
DTP control of text and graphics, tables with spreadsheet-capable
formulas, rotate text and objects at will, output to HTML, import and
export to MS Word format, etc.

PAPYRUS OFFICE is only $99. This product has been available in Germany
for years, but it took a long time to port it to English. It very much
appears as if this product is a decent competitor for Microsoft Word for
the Macintosh. Check out the screenshots (screenshots for the German
version are the only ones on R.O.M. Logicware's site). The interface is
quite attractive!

R.O.M Logicware
Soft-& Hardware GmbH
Raschdorffstraße 99
13409 Berlin (Germany)
Fax: +49 / (0)30 / 4999 73 72
Telephone: +49 / (0)30 / 4999 73 73
E-Mail: <inforom-logicware.com>
<http://www.rom-logicware.com/>

Screenshot of German version:
<http://www.rom-logicware.com/pap_pics/Mac_WORD.gif>

Free downloadable OS X demo:
<http://www.rom-logicware.com/demos.htm#Mac>




Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

  NeoOffice kinda sorta looks somewhat like a Mac application.
OpenOffice doesn't even try. With both the text display is pretty
awful, too. The apparent kerning is way off, even though it seems to
print fine, Mac X11 or Windows. Both versions also follow the Windows
convention of stuffing the menu bars with redundant icons. There may
be excellent functionality and pretty good compatibility with these
versions of OpenOffice but there is no Mac elegance here.

I really don't see OO or NeoOffice making any real inroads with the
general Mac population. I run OpenOffice on my old Windows laptop and
even there it is clunky compared to MS Office. NeoOffice is only
marginally more attractive. When you start by emulating inelegant
bloatware and create an even more inelegant version, free or not, I
doubt that it is going to win too many Mac hearts outside of the Unix
crowd, for whom the idea of Open Source lends its own beauty. Except
for the spreadsheet, there are much nicer Mac alternatives. And, for
free, most of us can use Appleworks. Since that's not enough, I'll
still pay Bill my Office upgrade toll. Microsoft wins here by
offering the more Mac like user experience.

best wishes,
michael mckee

michael's designs
Quality, affordable web solutions
www.michaelsdesigns.com

On 16/11/2005 10:49 AM, "smp" <smpnetins.net> spake thus:

> I got so frustrated with MS Word that I finally switched to NeoOffice/J

MS Word continues to drive me bonkers every time I try to use it. Just a few
minutes ago I had a table followed by an auto-numbered section title, and I
wanted to insert a page break between the two. Do you think I could do
something that simple without losing the section number? Noooo. I gave up in
the end because it wasn't that important.

I've actually had more success opening "problem" Word documents from Windows
machines using OOo than with Word Mac. Go figure.

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

I have had very limited experience with NeoOffice/J. But it works fine
for me, especially for languages other than English -- in my case,
Chinese.

Last year I did a project that involved working with somebody in China.
He would send me large Excel files in Chinese. I have MS Office X, but
for some reason, the Excel program is unable to read the files. After a
bit of searching, I found a web site dedicated to Chinese on the Mac
and downloaded a patch. After that I could read about 80% of the text,
but the formatting was all askew. We finally had to communicate using
html. He was understandably a bit annoyed.

I started using NeoOffice/J a few months ago, and found that it can
read all of the troublesome files, properly formatted.

NeoOffice/J starts very slowly, and it saves documents in its own
format. Saving the document in MSWord format will destroy part of the
formatting. But at least I can read the files.

Just my 2 cents.

Ka Tai

On 11/16/05 12:40, "Nigel Stanger" <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

>> I got so frustrated with MS Word that I finally switched to NeoOffice/J
>
> MS Word continues to drive me bonkers every time I try to use it. Just a few
> minutes ago I had a table followed by an auto-numbered section title, and I
> wanted to insert a page break between the two. Do you think I could do
> something that simple without losing the section number? Noooo. I gave up in
> the end because it wasn't that important.

That, by the way, is one reason MS is making XML the default file format
type in Office 12. The current file structure is almost ten years old, and
has been hacked to heck and gone to get it to work with things. The things
Word has to do to stick an image in the middle of a paragraph are quite
scary.

However, there is one thing that I found will help...Word is all about the
paragraph. Page breaks and other delineations are rather unimportant to it,
and are just ways to flow paragraphs. Everything in Word is based on the
paragraph.

But yeah, the Word file format is an overmodded unholy mess, and it cannot
go away too fast.

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

At 3:50 PM -0800 11/14/05, Nigel Stanger wrote:
>I heard on the Fink mailing lists over the weekend that Mac nightly builds
>of NeoOffice 2.0 are now available if you want to live on the bleeding edge.

On reading this, I installed openOffice.org 2.0 from source via Fink, just for kicks. If you can't wait for binary installs, be prepared to wait for the source compile; mine took well over 24 hours on a dual-1.8 G5.

Once it completed, I finally answered my question: What does OOo do with a document which has been edited with Word's "Tracking Changes" features? Comments aren't displayed; new and deleted text is displayed in colors for each auther, and attributed via tooltip.

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

On 18/11/2005 11:43 AM, "Andrew Laurence" <atlaurenes.nacs.uci.edu> spake
thus:

> If you can't wait for binary installs, be prepared to wait for the
> source compile; mine took well over 24 hours on a dual-1.8 G5.


...and have plenty of free disk space. I've heard reports on the Fink
mailing lists about people using up 10GB of disk space just compiling it.
(However, I think this was because it was compiling *all* the language
modules, even if you didn't need them, and this has since been fixed. I
think :)

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://public.xdi.org/=nigel.stanger

At 10:05 AM -0800 11/18/05, Nigel Stanger wrote:
>...and have plenty of free disk space. I've heard reports on the Fink
>mailing lists about people using up 10GB of disk space just compiling it.

I only have the main source tarball, 262.9 MB.

It also drops a stub Mac OS X app into /sw/Applications that acts as
a launcher for X11 and OOo, called "OpenOffice.org 2.0". Cool!

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

At 10:40 AM -0800 11/16/05, Randy B.Singer wrote:
>But that brings me to an application...

        Another free (as in speech as well as in beer) program that might
be of use is the word processor AbiWord. AbiWord seems to have a Mac OS X
version that is comparable to the versions for other platforms. The latest
versions of AbiWord support at least some of the OpenDocument format - so
you should have some confidence in the future accessibility of your
documents, and I gather that it does a good job of working with MS Word
files (maybe using the same code as OpenOffice.org?)

<http://abiword.org/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument>


--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://public.xdi.org/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

An alternative to using Fink (or DarwinPorts) to get OpenOffice 2, is
to just download an already-compiled version for Mac OS X. it comes in
a DMG file, has a nice icon... but runs in X11.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/2.0.0rc3.html

I've tried this, and NeoOffice. To be honest, either method of trying
to shoehorn OpenOffice onto the Mac OS X is a bit of a quagmire.
There's still serious issues either way.

With those 2 options, I'd pick The Real Thing: Microsoft Office
(Student Teacher edition even better for cost). BTW there really isn't
much difference between v.X and 2004. My experience is v.X still runs
on 10.4.3.

3 things to consider though (not recommendations):

1. Hopefully file import/export problems will be lessened if there is
industry-wide adherence to the OASIS OpenDocument format. Which in an
ideal world would mean wider choice of software, and seamless file
translation. The idiosyncrasies of porting software from a platform to
another (nee Microsoft/OpenOffice) is avoided. Each software (e.g.
Pages) can be written to leverage the advantages of the underlying OS,
while still create documents compatible with applications on other
platforms.

Worst case scenario: RTF part II.

2. The Intel Macs should in theory allow improved Windows software
emulation within the Mac OS. Including OpenOffice, and Microsoft
Office. This will occur either via VPC-type software, or WINE-type
software, or CrossOver Office. How acceptable this will be is
indeterminate at this time because there are too many unknown
variables, among them: look-and-feel issues, performance, font/printer
support, and user fussiness.

3. Google Office/Microsoft Office Live; which frankly doesn't fill me
with much enthusiasm. But machines get faster, and pipes get fatter
all the time—may be an option later later.

Universal Binary is still best. Otherwise, there's still Rosetta.

On Nov 21, 2005, at 12:37 PM, Chik Foo wrote:
> 3 things to consider though (not recommendations):
>
> 1. Hopefully file import/export problems will be lessened if there is
> industry-wide adherence to the OASIS OpenDocument format.

In an interesting development, an Financial Times article today
reports that the EU has forced Microsoft's hand, and Microsoft is now
opening up access to the Office file formats. Basically, the EU
ruled that EU citizens must be able to access electronic documents
published by the EU governments without having to buy a specific
company's software, and basically threatened MS that the EU would
stop using MS Office to create any public documents and would
recommend its member governments to do likewise unless MS opened up
its document format.

As a result, MS will now submit its Office file format to ECMA
International (the standards body), which would document it and make
it available. The FT article is predicting that the document specs
should be available in 18 months or so. This is good news if it does
come to pass, since it would hopefully end the import/export and
cross-platform issues.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e9f5c0f8-5ab7-11da-8628-0000779e2340.html

Tn

> It also drops a stub Mac OS X app into /sw/Applications that acts
> as a launcher for X11 and OOo, called "OpenOffice.org 2.0". Cool!

The earlier 1.x version of OOo had this feature as well, and at first
I also thought it was cool. Until I realized that quitting that
"launcher" would not quit the application, and vice versa. IMHO, it's
even more proof that sticking with X11 for OOo is _not_ the way to go.

Generally speaking, after playing around with OOo for some time, I
was impressed by the sheer feature set of that thing, but I'd say
it's just as buggy, and its overall look-and-feel just as terrible,
as its commercial counterpart, StarOffice 7, whose Windows version we
use at the office.

Add to that the X11 widgets, and what you have is probably the most
important un-Mac-like application ever to hit our favorite platform. ;)

Because I don't need the spreadsheet features, I've since shed out a
few bucks to buy iWork, and, even though it can be unnvervingly slow
at times, it's just what word processing and slide show presentations
should look like on the Mac. Still, OOo is definitely worth a test
drive due to its pleasantly "low price."

Of course, YMMV...


Jochen.


--
A Polytrope's Musings <http://www.polytropia.com/musings>
Polytropic Flickr Pix <http://www.flickr.com/photos/polytropia>

On Nov 22, 2005, at 1:36 PM, cheshirenekomac.com wrote:

> As a result, MS will now submit its Office file format to ECMA
> International (the standards body), which would document it and make
> it available. The FT article is predicting that the document specs
> should be available in 18 months or so. This is good news if it does
> come to pass, since it would hopefully end the import/export and
> cross-platform issues.
>
> http://news.ft.com/cms/s/e9f5c0f8-5ab7-11da-8628-0000779e2340.html

Unfortunately, there remain serious patent issues. Microsoft could
fix those if they want to (which seems unlikely to me).

<http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051122-5608.html>

   --John

 

Sorry, I have not "heard". It works. OpenOffice.org 2.0 works natively on Mactel : <http://eric.bachard.free.fr/news/>

-- ericb2

> OpenOffice.org 2.0 works natively on Mactel

But NeoOffice won't until version 2, sometime this year.

<http://trinity.neooffice.org/>

On Jan 23, 2006, at 11:51 AM, Tom Robinson wrote:

> But NeoOffice won't until version 2, sometime this year.

On the other hand, openOffice.org 2.0 is somewhat easier to deal with
than was 1.1, in Mac OS. I've switched to it from the older
NewOffice. I might well switch back when the newer NeoOffice
appears. No Start OpenOffice application, and auto-launching of X11
when an openOffice.org document is double clicked.

The menus, of course, are still in the "wrong" place.

   --John