LibreOffice Going Online and Mobile 114
itwbennett writes "News from the LibreOffice Conference in Paris is trickling out. Blogger Brian Proffitt has a roundup of the conference announcements thus far. Notably included are plans for a browser-based version of LibreOffice called LibreOffice Online; and ports of LibreOffice to the Android and iOS platforms."
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
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Maybe you should look at fixing your computer.
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Writer opens in less than a second on my very ordinary Dell laptop.
Maybe you should look at fixing your computer.
I second that. It opens up faster than Office '08 on my several year old MacBook in OS X and similarly fast in Ubuntu. There are no performance issues while it runs. Of all the OpenOffice variants I have installed - OOo, Symphony, KOffice, LibreOffice, and NeoOffice - Libre runs the best.
Like the parent I would prefer them to focus on the desktop version but that's mainly because I have no interest in a mobile version. Having said that, I can understand why having a mobile version may be important for the c
Re:Or... LO still sucks after all these years. (Score:3)
This past week, as an English speaker, with an English OS, I had to write a five page document in French libreoffice. Should be straight-forward. It crashed four times before I
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Opened LO Writer, clicked "Tools/Language/More Dictionaries Online".
Clicked "Afrikaans spell checker" from the list of plugins, clicked "Get it" from the explanatory page, then "Open with Libre Office" from the popup.
My conclusion: Simple, obvious and unchallenging.
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I suspect you're trolling here.
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Why don't you try reinstalling LO? When you get to the bit where you can choose to drop multi-language support, change your setting.
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I havent had any problem with it. I use it at home exclusively, but I also use it at work when MS Office can't do the job. Just the other day I started writing a VB script for Excel (office version 10) got halfway through and remembered that the functionality I wanted was in Calc by default. But crashes? I just dont have them, could be I only use Linux versions.
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I haven't seen any bugs in the Windows version, on the other hand it loads a bit slow, and the scripting API is just horribly convoluted, and underdocumented.
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I've had OpenOffice crash on me with two (I think) different documents, both written in Word for Mac. Both documents also crashed Word 2003 for Windows. Perfect compatibility with a rubbish document format aside, it's been very stable.
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Challenging interface.
Right. The Open/LibreOffice developers have gone to some trouble to make their suite pretty much idiot-proof. But I guess the trouble, as they say, with that is that idiots are becoming so ingenious... :-|
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This is true. I begrudgingly use $PROGRAM. Challenging interface. Not a big fan of the random bugs. With the last two versions I used, $USING_FEATURE_X guarantees a crash. It's very unfortunate. I try to live with hope.
Look everyone, it's standard boilerplate to talk about any piece of FOSS you want!
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This is true. I begrudgingly use Windows. Challenging interface. Not a big fan of the random bugs. With the last two versions I used, using any of my old hardware guarantees a crash. It's very unfortunate. I try to live with hope.
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Out of curiosity I just tried on the last two versions but sorry to spoil your rant, no crashes.
It's not me it's you. (Score:1, Interesting)
sorry to others but OO did suck, and unusable for instance when setting up the margins your told to use that styles thingy which has never laid out the header correctly and never will. I have visited this open office on and off for years and they never fixed such a simple thing that has kept an untold number of students from working with it. if the school says the lay out the paper a certain way that is what you do otherwise you no grade
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Is this an attempt at making a false argument irrefutable through poor grammar?
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Yeah, it really needs a ribbon thing so that one can hide all the menu items behind huge icons and 'mouse over' moves. It is important to have huge icons, since people who use a word processor obviously cannot read and therefore cannot use menus...
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Yes, i second the call for a skinnable interface...
Some people prefer the current interface, some prefer the ms2k7 style ribbon etc. You can't suit everyone with the defaults, so make the interface flexible, let users choose the skin and provide a handful of sensible defaults to choose from.
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Are you serious?? (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the competition? (Score:3)
I've used both MS Office and Open/Neo Office - and my impression is that OO was about as annoying as Microsoft Office (pre-ribbon).
I think the introduction of the abomination that is the Office Ribbon has left it ahead of the game (OK, some people like the ribbon, but then I know one person who liked Windows Vista, and another who liked the Apple hockey-puck mouse...)
One possible criticism of OO/LO is that the style system, though flexible, can be a bit hard to get your head around. OTOH, there again MS h
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So, what's the easy-to-use but flexible opposition that LibreOffice should be competing with?
I'll concede the point that LaTeX/LyX is probably still king for technical writing, and that there are other products aimed at people writing "pure text" - but what is a good role-model in the realm of general purpose WP/DTP-crossover?
LaTeX/LyX is a nice project, but 'king for technical writing'? Technical writing generally means user guides and other product manuals, and LaTeX is a niche player at best in that market. FrameMaker is popular, and content management systems like AuthorIT are gaining traction. This market is all about reuse of content, and LaTeX doesn't offer that, as far as I know. LaTeX is aimed more at academic publishing.
For a good role model WP/DTP package, look no further than FrameMaker:
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LaTeX/LyX is a nice project, but 'king for technical writing'? Technical writing generally means user guides and other product manuals, and LaTeX is a niche player at best in that market.
Several publishers produce technical and user manuals with LaTeX.
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Interesting. In about 13 years in the industry I've never come across a client who used it. Then again, most of our clients do very small print runs (all the way down to custom manuals for every individual machine) for large numbers of related machines. That's when you need reuse facilities.
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LaTeX/LyX is a nice project, but 'king for technical writing'? Technical writing generally means user guides and other product manuals, and LaTeX is a niche player at best in that market. FrameMaker is popular, and content management systems like AuthorIT are gaining traction. This market is all about reuse of content, and LaTeX doesn't offer that, as far as I know. LaTeX is aimed more at academic publishing.
It may be true that LaTeX is more used in academic publishing, but how is LaTeX not about reuse of content? Define your own commands to write similar equations, easily and portably generate documents from a simple script or program, \include{subdocument}, and a thousand other ways of reuse content makes LaTeX the working environment which allows the MOST reuse, as far as I can tell. Auto-generation of all sorts of references, an index, and so forth also reduces manual labor to an extent I have never seen Wo
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Is \include{subdocument} workable when that subdocument is one paragraph long and you have 1000 subdocuments in your book?
In FrameMaker, you have 'conditional text' which allows you to tag text with a condition. During publishing, you select the conditions you want shown or hidden. This allows you to have one master document to describe a series of related machines (or what have you). All WYSIWYG. Autogeneration of all sorts of lists, and a scripting language are available.
AuthorIT and other document manage
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Is \include{subdocument} workable when that subdocument is one paragraph long and you have 1000 subdocuments in your book?
I've never tried, but why shouldn't it? LaTeX is a compiler; surely a project of 1000 files could be compiled. Also, there are other ways, such as defining 1000 macros in a single file.
In FrameMaker, you have 'conditional text' which allows you to tag text with a condition. During publishing, you select the conditions you want shown or hidden. This allows you to have one master document to describe a series of related machines (or what have you). All WYSIWYG. Autogeneration of all sorts of lists, and a scripting language are available.
WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface". Also, you can have conditionals in LaTeX code. Oh well, people and their preferences differ, so secretaries probably disagree with me. Of course you could chuck text strings in a database if you wanted to avoid files in a filesystem, t
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WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface".
It's a general interface, but it's also one that doesn't use a large chunk of the available bandwidth of your information channel (a bitmapped display). Text that use visual cues to convey formatting information is more readable than text that uses [emphasis]textual[/emphasis] cues to convey the same information.
WYSIWYG has a bad name because of the likes of Word, where formatting is just that: formatting. In FrameMaker and AuthorIT, each paragraph is assigned a functional tag. That tag is visualized using
LibreOffice Online... (Score:3, Insightful)
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If it's GPL, you can always just host it on your own server. Or maybe just run it on localhost - being run in a browser solves most of your platform-compatibility issues (assuming you don't give a shit about IE).
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I think you all are missing the point here.
You fear they do it to serve a closed version as a service. I don't see that scenario. Why? it is too expensive.
What you see there is LO binary running on a server transmitting its looks through an engine which uses GTK internal redraws to transmit the changes to a client with websockets, which in turn has a canvas capturing input and an engine which knows how to draw the deltas into place. Funny nobody yet thought of doing that with VNC.
Imagine a service where eve
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Did you reed the article? (I suppose this is slashdot so the answer is obvious...)
GTK has an output method that allows it to write to a HTML canvas over the web, rather than to the normal windowing system, so yes they are using GTK on the server but that still does not mean you need it installed on your client machine. personally I prefer the portable apps version when I do have to use windows, but this works on anything with a new web browser.
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That's bullshit. There's many open source software, especially security and crypto stuff, that only has open source client but they've never given away the server software. And it's fully within GPL license.
All true, but one would hope that the people behind LibreOffice would release the server-side code under some form of OS license.
A good open-source online/collaborative office suite that let people run their own servers could be really, really useful - and addresses one of the main worries (Google Can Haz Ur Data) about cloud computing.
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I missed that, I'll have to give that a whirl. I assume this is the one you mean: http://code.google.com/p/ooo2gd/ [google.com]
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I wouldn't worry about cloud service providers at this stage when the product doesn't even exist. Taken the fact how sucky the existing commercial office suites are it might be a while until it works... They should first develop it so that everyone can run it like in own servers etc?
When it works (in words real meaning) there will be no shortage of cloud service providers, I'm sure.
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Simple, to make money. That isn't a dirty word folks. They can make money hosting services for companies that don't want run their own infrastructure. No different than all the ISPs around the planet that sell web hosting and entire websites that run on Apache, Linux, PHP, Perl and so on.
That can support paying programers to make the software better. If they make the software available to under GPL as well so people can host it locally then no one has any room to complain about the concept.
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(Libre|Open)Office is well known to be a bit heavy for most office PCs. I'd be quite happy to move that load to a medium-sized server of my own, with the benefits that derive from shared libraries loaded once for all instances/threads, and that CPU load in a office app is impulsive so a few cores can serve a large number of seats.
OTOH, I expect to lose some functionality in areas such as graphs, at least in not-quite-HTML5-compliant browsers. * looks at IE9 >_> *
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I'd be surprised if it happens anytime soon. Libreoffice is still a fairly hefty download, and space on hand helds is still somewhat limited.
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not really my tablet has 8gb of flash with around 6.3 GB free to use as you wish + another 8gb mini sd
my netbook has an 8gb sdd and i run libre office on that everyday. The bigger question would be how much ram is needed/ available to run libre office.
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Which LibreOffice has had since day one. Even Base has an Access-like database.
I can't see why that wouldn't be in the port.
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'Functionally complete' as a goal is a good end in itself...but equally important is the fact that it must be a pleasure to use by first being a pleasure to look at.
I haven't looked at the latest version but my memory of earlier ones planted a bias in look and feel that will be hard to erase. On Windows XP, the 'beast' took forever to load and once it did, you wouldn't admire its interface.
An Access-like module actually exists but is very clunky to the extent of being unsealable. These folks should borrow a
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Bull... shit...
When contractors are shopping for tools, they don't buy the one that's pretty, they buy the one that fucking works the best. Asthetics be dammed.
Give me black and white icons, I don't care. Mac OS was beloved with its primitive scheme for years. Put me in front of a Windows 7 system, and Office 2007 with it's god-dammed awful ribbon that makes it hard to do the basics, and impossible to do
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Have you even used it?
LibreOffice has had pivot tables since day one, they call the feature DataPilot. And you can do a polynomial regression with the LINEST function. And the import/export gets better with every release.
About time (Score:1)
It's about time we get a real document app for mobiles. I'm surprised it took them this long to announce it, but I guess they've been busy with all the other drama. I hope the web version allows collaborative document creation/editing as well, otherwise, I don't really see the point of pursuing BOTH of these projects.
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Nice answer fucknuts, no proof, not even any experience with the product, just "nu uh!".
Sigh...
I own an HD7. Office on it is just another cut down mobile Office-a-like that has a small fraction of the features of its desktop counterpart. Editing documents on it is torture on a tiny screen, you can't even switch fonts. Nobody cared about Office on Windows Mobile judging by its dismal performance in the marketplace and it's not a compelling selling point on wp7 because if it was, the damned things would be selling. In short, nobody cares about Office anywhere except on their desktops. Next
More like a recompile [was Re:About time] (Score:1)
A developer got it to compile successfully, on different hardware. There are no intereface changes and the article makes it clear they are more targeting tablets anyway than mobile devices with really small specialised interefaces. It is techincally a "port" but that is misleading and suggests a lot more than has really happened.
LibreOffice Online - now with free seats (Score:4, Funny)
I assume it will be accessed via a series of pipes?
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LibreOffice.org
Now we go full circle ;)
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English inherited even more than other European languages words and expressions from Latin and Libre is a widely understood example of such.
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When that's your opinion on the name LibreOffice then you suffer a serious lack of culture and language skills.
Sadly, when choosing a name for a product, if you want success you have to win the hearts and minds of people with small hearts and even smaller minds. Intellectually, Software Libre is a much better term than "Free Software" but out in the real world, "FreeOffice" would probably shift more copies than "LibreOffice".
...and its important to remember that, whether software is Free-as-in-speech or Free-as-in-beer, if you want impact you still have to market it as if it cost money.
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Re:LibreOffice (Score:1)
I, for one, really enjoy that name. It really conveys the right feeling, as seems to be confirmed by the onslaught of the schills against it.
Disclaimer : I'm a French programmer
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But your writing doesn't match etymological facts. Of the languages based on Germanic grammar the English has with in excess of 50% by a good margin incorporated the most vocabulary of Latin origin.
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Lee-bruh
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"Where did you put that TPS report?"
"It's in the LOO!"
Reminds me of the time when we were naming our servers after planets, and I made the mistake of naming a file server Uranus. The jokes were going on for months.
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iOS Version? I thought that didn't work (Score:3)
If you use proprietary Apple API's, I don't believe they allow you to release your source code. It wouldn't be open source. They would have to release that version closed source, which they can't do if they don't own the code.
Re:iOS Version? I thought that didn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
It is LGPL, so they can use their existing code as a library and write a closed source iOS UI.
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Can't believe I never noticed that. Thanks for clarifying.
Mobile Viewer (Score:4, Interesting)
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FreOffice does a good job for that on my Nokia N900.
What About Android in the Browser? (Score:2)
I know I'm talking about kinda the reverse of this story.
But is there a way to run all of Android in a browser? With apps embedded in it. So all of the apps I have installed on my Android phone I can also install on my (or someone else's) server. I'd just hit my webpage with Android and its apps embedded in the page, and use the same apps. I'd use apps that all save their state to a DB on my server (or through my server to a cloud). I could flip between phone and other machines at will.
I could use "my phone
Just the Components for Android? (Score:2)
Can we get right now the LibreOffice components to run in Android apps we write?
Embed Writer features like the text editing pane and file format import/export, and Calc features like Excel format formula calculation and at least .XLSX import/export.