Take That Open Office

[itlnstln]

Oh, I know that it was a sponsored study.  I don't care.  I have used both, and know from experience.  Many others agree, even OS junkies.  OO.o is a piece of bloated, java crapware.  If you read my OP you will see that I linked to that same Ars article.  Don't try to troll the troller.

[Shawn Stanford]

I use OO because it's free and because there's a Portable Apps version.

[bigpook]

I use OO because it  does what I need it to do. If it didn't then yes, I would purchase and use MS office.

[Mercen_505]

I like the concept behind Open Office, but it is too slow. And before anyone spouts ye olde "get a faster computer" tripe, let's just say that there's no excuse for a word processor chugging on any modern computer. I'm being extremely generous at this point: I have an old copy of Powerpoint that absolutely flies on a 386. Same thing for Wordperfect.

Is it functional? Yes. Is it responsive enough to make me want to use it? Not even close.

[timw4mail]

I like the concept behind Open Office, but it is too slow. And before anyone spouts ye olde "get a faster computer" tripe, let's just say that there's no excuse for a word processor chugging on any modern computer. I'm being extremely generous at this point: I have an old copy of Powerpoint that absolutely flies on a 386. Same thing for Wordperfect.

Is it functional? Yes. Is it responsive enough to make me want to use it? Not even close.

Adobe software is exactly the same way: slow and super-bloated. At least OpenOffice/LibreOffice is free.

Although, to be honest, I'd really like to see Word Perfect come back.

[itlnstln]

Word Perfect in the DOS days was nice.  It was an absolute tank job when Corel took over.  Outdated features and crash city.

[Shawn Stanford]

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was t3h sh!t...

[timw4mail]

I'd take Word Perfect 5 on Mac Classic over any DOS version.

[itlnstln]

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was t3h sh!t...

It's what I learned on.  That was a hell of a powerful program back in the day.  So was Harvard Graphics.

Damn, I didn't know Harvard Graphics was still around.

[wap32]

Moar LaTeX.

This.

OO is fine when you need something quick with basic functionality, for anything more serious, it gets too cumbersome.

[unicomp]

I use OO because it is free and I really don't do much in the way of office-style work. However I think that OO runs too slowly for my liking, and as others have commented this is not really acceptable for a very fundamental piece of software.

[itlnstln]

Multi-processor support in Office 2007 and 2010 is nice, too.  Oh, and 64-bit Office 2010 is the bomb.

[keyboardlover]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office). So, I really don't get how anyone can get away with using 'just' a command-line (or other minimal-feature) word processor/text editor.

[unicomp]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office). So, I really don't get how anyone can get away with using 'just' a command-line (or other minimal-feature) word processor/text editor.

By ensuring that the software being used supports saving in a format that MS Office can open?

[wap32]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office).

Why not use PDF?

[keyboardlover]

By ensuring that the software being used supports saving in a format that MS Office can open?

If it's not a .doc, that won't look good. And if your document looks pretty much like a text file, that won't look good either.

Why not use PDF?

You could - but if you convert it from a text-file-ish looking document it's still going to look pretty crappy.

[pikapika]

all office softwares have crappy design, totally non intuitive, and produce horrible documents that never keep a clean layout
pdf has the advantage to keep a uniformed layout
i'm happy not to have much to use those kind of softwares and that editors like emacs or vim suffice my needs

[ch_123]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office). So, I really don't get how anyone can get away with using 'just' a command-line (or other minimal-feature) word processor/text editor.

I think any serious CV I've ever seen was in PDF format, which is what LaTeX spits out in the end.

[mike]

I think any serious CV I've ever seen was in PDF format, which is what LaTeX spits out in the end.

If I were sending out CVs, I'd be sending them out in PDF format to prevent any slimy critters from altering them. It's not totally unheard of for CVs to be fiddled with before being passed around.

[zefrer]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office). So, I really don't get how anyone can get away with using 'just' a command-line (or other minimal-feature) word processor/text editor.

You write in latex and can export to anything, pdf, html, doc whatever. This is a format that's been around for decades and will be supported pretty much forever. Write professional documents in proprietary formats at your own risk.

[keyboardlover]

To those who reccomend PDF - I agree that PDF is fine, that's a good point. I guess my point is that if you can't style it much and it just doesn't look good (like a basic text file) then you wouldn't really be doing yourself any favors.

If I were sending out CVs, I'd be sending them out in PDF format to prevent any slimy critters from altering them. It's not totally unheard of for CVs to be fiddled with before being passed around.

PDF can be reverse-engineering quite easily now. It's no longer considered a fail safe format for alteration of content.

You write in latex and can export to anything, pdf, html, doc whatever. This is a format that's been around for decades and will be supported pretty much forever. Write professional documents in proprietary formats at your own risk.

Hmm interesting...but can you style the documents in much the same way you can do with Word? Can you make them look nice? Or do they just look like basic text files?

[timw4mail]

Hmm interesting...but can you style the documents in much the same way you can do with Word? Can you make them look nice? Or do they just look like basic text files?

The point of Latex is the structure of the document, not the presentation. You tell it the structure, it worrys about the layout.

Latex is really the only way to have decent mathematical notes or reports.

[EverythingIBM]

Professional documents (including CVs, resumes, etc.) typically have to be in MS Word format (as nearly all the recruiters and hiring managers I've come across use Windows/MS Office). So, I really don't get how anyone can get away with using 'just' a command-line (or other minimal-feature) word processor/text editor.

Notepad can write resumes, look at this:


(I can't believe I wasted time writing that, lol).

[vicz]

Hmm interesting...but can you style [LaTeX] documents in much the same way you can do with Word? Can you make them look nice? Or do they just look like basic text files?

+1 trolling

See This PDF document for an example of typesetting by LaTeX.

It is indeed possible, with a lot of effort, to produce a nice-looking document in Word (by which I mean a document that follows the traditional rules of typesetting). Making an ugly Word document is much easier.

LaTeX is the opposite. It typesets beautiful documents by default, and you need to work hard to make it output something ugly.

It's as Richard Gabriel once wrote about LISP: the difference between Word and LaTeX is that Word is designed to help losers lose less.

[ch_123]

MS Office has styling? Anytime I use it for anything more than a basic letter, I find myself fighting against weird defaults that it has which cause it to throw text in random places...

[timw4mail]

MS Office has styling? Anytime I use it for anything more than a basic letter, I find myself fighting against weird defaults that it has which cause it to throw text in random places...

And this is why I had Word Processors.

[itlnstln]

MS Office has styling? Anytime I use it for anything more than a basic letter, I find myself fighting against weird defaults that it has which cause it to throw text in random places...

Use the ruler at the top.  It sounds like you're running into tab-stop issues.  That said, Word is probably my least-used app in the suite.  I spend much more time in Excel and Powerpoint for what I do.

[keyboardlover]

+1 trolling

See This PDF document for an example of typesetting by LaTeX.

It is indeed possible, with a lot of effort, to produce a nice-looking document in Word (by which I mean a document that follows the traditional rules of typesetting). Making an ugly Word document is much easier.

LaTeX is the opposite. It typesets beautiful documents by default, and you need to work hard to make it output something ugly.

I wasn't trolling...I asked a question about something I didn't know about. That LaTeX typesetting looks great. However, you are wrong that it takes a lot of effort to make a nice-looking document in Word. In Word 2007 it's quite effortless actually.

And putting [LaTeX] in my quote is lame since I wasn't really talking about it. I was talking about command-line driven and basic word processors in general in comparison to Word. LaTeX appears to be something quite different.

[timw4mail]

I wasn't trolling...I asked a question about something I didn't know about. That LaTeX typesetting looks great. However, you are wrong that it takes a lot of effort to make a nice-looking document in Word. In Word 2007 it's quite effortless actually.

And putting [LaTeX] in my quote is lame since I wasn't really talking about it. I was talking about command-line driven abd basic word processors in general in comparison to Word. LaTeX appears to be something quite different.

Yeah, LaTeX is a weird beast, as it's basically a markup language that's an interface to the TeX document-layout language.

[zefrer]

To those who reccomend PDF - I agree that PDF is fine, that's a good point. I guess my point is that if you can't style it much and it just doesn't look good (like a basic text file) then you wouldn't really be doing yourself any favors.



PDF can be reverse-engineering quite easily now. It's no longer considered a fail safe format for alteration of content.



Hmm interesting...but can you style the documents in much the same way you can do with Word? Can you make them look nice? Or do they just look like basic text files?

I really think you should give it a try.

Basically the point is that you type stuff in without doing anything specific with regards to layout, ie you don't bother with spacing, paragraphs, chapters, where the page ends, endnotes, bibliography or any of that stuff. You just type the content.

Then you tell LaTeX how you want the document to look like based on what it is. Like there's layouts/styles for books, articles, CVs, technical reports etc. Or you can define your own layout. LaTeX then does all the formatting and shows you the output.
What you see on screen and what you type in is _not_ what it will look like and nor should it. It's "What You See Is What You Mean" instead of "What You See Is What You Get".

Compare that with having to bother with spacing, layout, page margins, document end and start points which if you change you then have to re-do all your other layout changes and so on.

The exporting to pdf/any other format is really just the output part of it. The real power and time saved comes from the rendering of the text into something which looks nice and is right for what you want (book, letter etc). Ie typesetting.

It's not an editor, it's a language. The link I posted above is for the Lyx program which makes it easy for you to use without having to learn the language and has all associated helper utilities bundled in for keeping track of bibliography, export to various format and etc.

[keyboardlover]

Having to learn a markup language in order to create documents seems like a lot of work. People seem to think developers just like to code constantly but I'm of the opinion that software should automate, not obfuscate.

Even so, I'll check it out.

[zefrer]

Having to learn a markup language in order to create documents seems like a lot of work. People seem to think developers just like to code constantly but I'm of the opinion that software should automate, not obfuscate.

Even so, I'll check it out.

The link I posted above is for the Lyx program which makes it easy for you to use without having to learn the language

Sigh Try it man, you'll see what the deal is. Why would I recommend something you need to learn a language to use

[keyboardlover]

Sigh Try it man, you'll see what the deal is.

I'm checking it out now =)

Why would I recommend something you need to learn a language to use

Because you're EVIL

EDIT: Thus far I'm impressed...LyX is pretty kickass! I'm going to install it at home.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of a better alternative to OO for free Powerpoint-like software?

[vicz]

However, you are wrong that it takes a lot of effort to make a nice-looking document in Word. In Word 2007 it's quite effortless actually.

For a one-page memo, maybe. But the way Word hides and mixes layout information with content, and its poor support of styles, makes it hellishly difficult to ensure typographical consistency in a long document (or even a short document with many authors). Word uses a simplistic hyphenation algorithm that often produces awful word spacing. It has little or no support for microtypography. It has no concept of vertical rhythm. If you need to typeset tabular material that doesn't look like ****, you have to do everything manually, and redo it again and again whenever you change the layout.

And putting [LaTeX] in my quote is lame since I wasn't really talking about it.

If you go back one page, you will find that the question of yours that I quoted was indeed about LaTeX.

[mike]

Having to learn a markup language in order to create documents seems like a lot of work. People seem to think developers just like to code constantly but I'm of the opinion that software should automate, not obfuscate.

Even so, I'll check it out.

Admittedly I got started with making documents with markup languages, but I don't see too much of a difference in concept between LaTeX :-

\begin{quotation}
    Some text.
\end[quotation}

And the Word way of doing it - write 'Some text", find the Styles palette, scroll down to "quotation" (or make it), and select that style for the paragraph (or selected text). In both cases you're telling the software that "Some text" is a quotation and needs to be formatted as such.

The trouble with markup languages such as LaTeX is that most (all?) editors for it won't show you a visual preview of the formatting whilst showing the markup code. Something like LyX (which I greatly appreciate) shows you the formatting without the code; everything else I've seen with support for highlighting LaTeX markup makes it look like you're writing code. Seeing on screen exactly what you get on the printer is vastly overrated, but a reasonable approximation is pretty important.


One area where markup languages really shine is in large and complex documents - particularly if it is convenient to pull information out of a database over there, include some source code from this repository, etc. Having just come out of a 2 year project which involved writing lots of large documents (plus a little bit of thinking), it does seem that Word results in spending lots of time trying to figure out formatting issues. This is partially at least due to Word allowing people to ignore styles when formatting text.

[keyboardlover]

For a one-page memo, maybe. But the way Word hides and mixes layout information with content, and its poor support of styles, makes it hellishly difficult to ensure typographical consistency in a long document (or even a short document with many authors).

Which version of Word are you talking about? What you're saying doesn't apply to Word 2007. I wrote my masters thesis in Word 2007 and it was quite easy to make styles consistent across the entire 100+ page document. Took very little effort and it was quite intuitive. More so than LyX I would say.

If you go back one page, you will find that the question of yours that I quoted was indeed about LaTeX.

Quote where I mentioned LaTeX then. If I had, you wouldn't have had to insert it into your quote of me. Fail.

[ch_123]

I hear only poor people like LaTeX.

[HaaTa]

I hear only poor people like LaTeX.

I'm not poor, and I use LaTeX. And I can happily say that I've never purchased MS Office, nor had OpenOffice installed in the last 8-10 months.

If I absolutely find that I need some sort of WYSIWYG editor for documents, something like Google Docs is usually fine.

[keyb_gr]

In my experience, having good templates is crucial when getting started in TeX. It helps a lot when you don't have to mess with the details too much at first. (As far as LyX is concerned, the idea seems good but you do lose some flexibility in return.) That being said, it's a complex system with lots of history in it, so I guess it'll always be most attractive to those who really benefit from its strengths and are not afraid of complexity, mainly academics.

[mcdonc]

A great tool that's a bit higher-level than raw LaTeX or HTML is Sphinx.  It lets you write your stuff in reStructuredText (plain text with some markup in a collection of files), and then you can generate HTML or LaTeX from it.  It was useful for a recent project (a technical 500+ page book) because Sphinx has tools for introspecting and source code syntax highlighting.

OTOH, most publishers still expect you to submit chapters as Word documents. I only got away with using Sphinx because I was able to submit a PDF to the publisher.

[TexasFlood]

I hear only poor people like LaTeX.

\section{Trolls and baiting techniques}

Trolls and the use of comments regarding the financially disadvantaged.

\subsection{Troll use of the term `poor people'}

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.  It is thought to be a truncation of the phrase trolling for suckers.

Use of the term `poor people' associated with one side of an existing debate is such an attempt to evoke and emotional response for entertainment value.

[TexasFlood]

I have to admit, one of the cool things about WordPerfect was that besides DOS and Microsoft Windows, it was available for a wide variety of computers and operating systems, including Mac OS, Linux, the Apple IIe, a separate version for the Apple IIgs, most popular versions of Unix, VMS, Data General, System/370, AmigaOS, Atari ST, OS/2, and NeXTSTEP.

While not as comprehensive in this regard, OO binaries are available for Linux, Solaris (Intel and Sparc), Microsoft Windows and OS X.  In fact if it wasn't for this, quite honestly I probably wouldn't be using OO right now.  I have some Linux boxes and it's handy to have on them.

[TexasFlood]

Admittedly I got started with making documents with markup languages, but I don't see too much of a difference in concept between LaTeX :-

\begin{quotation}
    Some text.
\end[quotation}

And the Word way of doing it - write 'Some text", find the Styles palette, scroll down to "quotation" (or make it), and select that style for the paragraph (or selected text). In both cases you're telling the software that "Some text" is a quotation and needs to be formatted as such.

The trouble with markup languages such as LaTeX is that most (all?) editors for it won't show you a visual preview of the formatting whilst showing the markup code. Something like LyX (which I greatly appreciate) shows you the formatting without the code; everything else I've seen with support for highlighting LaTeX markup makes it look like you're writing code. Seeing on screen exactly what you get on the printer is vastly overrated, but a reasonable approximation is pretty important.


One area where markup languages really shine is in large and complex documents - particularly if it is convenient to pull information out of a database over there, include some source code from this repository, etc. Having just come out of a 2 year project which involved writing lots of large documents (plus a little bit of thinking), it does seem that Word results in spending lots of time trying to figure out formatting issues. This is partially at least due to Word allowing people to ignore styles when formatting text.

I think you nailed it, it's not the basic functionality, it's the WYSIWYG aspect.  I generally think of LaTeX being used mostly by academics, mathematicians & scientists.  Not so much average folk like me.  My primary exposure to it was when I was in school.  Might be worth boning up on it though, might go take a look at LyX in particular and maybe also MiKTeX and/or TeXnicCenter.

[mcdonc]

Fuel to the fire:

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/10/microsoft-gives-its-blessing-to-openofficeorg/index.htm

[TexasFlood]

Fuel to the fire:

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2010/10/microsoft-gives-its-blessing-to-openofficeorg/index.htm

Right.  Micro$oft attacking OO clearly demonstrates enough concern to take a shot at OO.  It's a threat, either current or emerging.

And thanks for mentioning Sphinx.  I'm aware of it but really never looked at it, maybe should do.

[keyboardlover]

Did someone say "Sphinx"?

[TexasFlood]

Did someone say "Sphinx"?

Show Image

"Mcdonc said 'sphinx' huh huh huh  huh huh huh"

[NewbieOneKenobi]

OpenOffice is great when you can do with .odt files or .pdf exports. However, when you do have to save and sometimes to load a .doc file properly, you're in trouble. Particularly when it involves tables but sometimes also lists. I've been able to pull off working as a professional translator for 1.5 years using OpenOffice but the time has come I will need to buy MS.

For example, the last project I did was an express translation of a heckload of public procurement documentation. Open Office managed to shift my lists around, change bullet to number and/or vice versa and change the font on number lists to Wingdings, resulting in mailbox icons and similar pleasantries that I mostly was able to fix but some inevitably must have gone to the client to see because of the haste. I didn't like that.

I still haven't discovered how to break out of a list, either, and starting the numbering anew doesn't help prevent OO from thinking your current list is continuing your previous one (that you have switched off) and this is done even between numbered and bullet lists, resulting in font changes on digits when you select an arrow bullet for what you think is a separate list. This has exhausted my limit of patience. If I don't find any fixes for download, I will buy MS Office. This is not to say it's OO's fault, it doesn't have to be. But I can't afford this kind of thing to keep happening.

MS, however, should shut up instead of taking shots at free software. For whomever just needs to go from keyboard to printed sheet, OO is an excellent alternative.

[porgo]

OpenOffice is pretty bad, but the god damned bastards haven't ported MS Office to Linux yet. So I use LaTeX

[WhiteRice]

Open Office isn't compatible with OneNote notebooks, and I don't want to bother migrating all my notes to Evernote/google docs.