KOffice Developers Reply to Yates

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[n2rjt]

Well, in addition to the obvious issue about compatibility with .DOC format, it's kind of like the difference between BASIC and C++.
Word Processors are less capable but more immediate, especially in the WYSIWYG area.
Sure, there's LyX, and probably other semi-WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX, but it's not the same.

When it comes to typesetting power, LaTeX wins hands down. It's like having a compiler with a full set of support libraries, compared to a simple interpreter with only the functions that came built in.

Personally, I have never learned LaTeX, although I used to use LyX quite a bit before OpenOffice. It was in many ways better than OpenOffice, but it took me quite a while to learn how to do new things. Also, of course, I could never share documents with others at work.

Re:Are Wallin's comments much more accurate?

[Rapsey]

koffice and every KDE program is built on top of QT which is platform independent and kdelibs which are not. Once they get kdelibs ported everything else is not a problem.

Office Formats Not That Good

[Comatose51]

The Microsoft Office formats themselves aren't that great. I work at a investment company which relies heavily on Excel. Over the years they've been using a few spreadsheets that has been around since Office 2000 at least. When we upgraded again to Office 2003, we had a few sheets exhibiting really, really strange behavior such the sheets wouldn't update unless you do a cut and paste first. We ended up having to simply rebuild those sheets cell by cell in Excel 2003. Once that was done, everything was many times faster and no more strange behaviors. The resulting file was also many times smaller. If we had access to those formats, at least we could have looked at it and see what was going on.

Some of the traders have become so annoyed by the degree of control Microsoft has over what an user can do that they joke, "Microsoft is trying to protect me from myself again".

Hi. Here. Us, too... :-)

[martin-k]

The upcoming release of TextMaker 2005 [softmaker.com] -- currently in public beta [softmaker.com] supports OpenDocument, too. And nobody ever accused us of using any OpenOffice.org or StarOffice code ... :-)

Martin Kotulla
SoftMaker Software GmbH

Re:What would be the best thing to happen

[Rogue Jedi X]

Well, I don't know about Apple, but I do know there's a Mac office suite ported from OpenOffice.org, so it should support the OpenDocument format. It's called NeoOffice/J and it can be found here. [neooffice.org]

Re:Word processing != Typesetting

[aussersterne]

Um, except gedit/wordpad don't offer tables, formulas, styles, graphics, or fields pulled from a database. Most geeks on /. work in technical environments where the bulk of work is either code or networks or research.

In the office world (i.e. the other 90% of the globe) the need to work with highly structured documents both visibly and rapidly on an ongoing basis is extreme, and Word/Excel are actually a very good fit indeed.

Re:Hi. Here. Us, too... :-)

[renoX]

You support Open document as read only, I've seen on the internet with maybe an export filter sometimes later.
Now I understand that an export filter is difficult/expensive to make but claiming that you support a file format while you support it read only is a marketing lie if I ever saw one.

Re:What would be the best thing to happen

[pp-costo]

Here [apple.com]

Re:K office reply also fud ?

[molnarcs]

Yeah, you missed it:

"I understand your worries, but fortunately I am able to put your mind to rest: KOffice is in fact not related to StarOffice or OpenOffice. It is a completely separate product, and a very fine one at that."

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[PeterBrett]

You might want to try the 1.3.6 version (latest stable), or, if you're adventuresome, the 1.4.0 in CVS. LyX is NOT designed for short documents, such as very quick notes or things of that nature. But it's phenomenal for long documents (several page letters, technical notes, books, theses, and, with the beamer class, even presentations which knock the crap -- admittedly not a difficult task -- out of PowerPoint).

I can vouch for the power of Lyx. :) I used it to produce a 105-page technical report a month ago -- it makes section numbering and generating tables of contents & lists of figures/tables effortless, of course, but the best thing is being able to just throw figures and tables at the document and having LaTeX position them in sensible places without having to do anything. It knocks the socks off trying to do the same thing in MS Office/OpenOffice/KOffice/etc.

Re:What would be the best thing to happen

[edalytical]

Thanks. I guess I didn't read the last ADC newsletter, or else I would have known, this was posted on 2005-09-08.

It's not as perfect as one might thinks though.

This document does not describe the complete XML schema for either Pages 1.x or Keynote 2.x. The complete XML schema for both applications is not available and will not be made public. Nor is this document, by any stretch of the imagination, intended as a comprehensive tutorial on how to customize or extend third-party applications that rely on the schemas of each iWork application.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[fossa]

I love LyX. And I did a majority of my college papers in straight LaTeX because of its beautiful output and because I just wanted to learn it (using octave + gnuplot to make "pslatex" graphs using the beautiful LaTeX font was a colassal pain but very pretty).

But if LaTeX does something wrong... its a pain to fix. And debugging a document is absolutely no fun. So, LyX is very nice... don't usually need to debug (unless you messed up an imported pslatex file), but has the same limitations of LaTeX where if it doesn't do something right then it's a big pain to fix.

Re:This is how you treat your users?

[manyoso]

I have a splitting migraine. Had one all day long. I tried to explain to you nicely that Inge's statement wasn't overly bold. You didn't like that and have been arguing throughout the thread over something you don't know anything about.

KOffice already has one application that runs natively on Windows: Kexi. The other large applications... KWord, KSpread, KPresenter don't have hard dependencies on X11. They have a hard dependency on kdelibs, yes, but this has already been ported to Qt4 which is already working just fine on Windows. If you don't want to take my word for it, fine. If you don't want to take Inge's word for it, fine.

Regardless, he only said it was 'likely', not definite. You want to knock him for it preemptively when his forecast hasn't even yet proven incorrect? Inventing future dialog between the Open Source community and Microsoft? That's on you, pal. But, do you realize how silly it is making you look?

Kill that myth: ".DOC" is not single format

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't keep perpetuating that myth. ".doc is not a single format. Each new version of MS Word has some changes to the file in order to keep sales up. Almost every other year you get a new version of MS Word.

Re:Word processing != Typesetting

[KayosIII]

Yeah thats fairly insightful... In for these cases you could use Mindmapping tools.

Since Kdissert http://freshmeat.net/projects/kdissert/ [freshmeat.net] became mature I have not needed to touch a word processor. It is a lot easier to play with the structure of a piece of information in a mind mapping tool than when using a wordprocessor.

I can output everything to Latex, OOo or HTML. The only place I can see myself using a word processor is to pretty up a document for hard copy and thanks to the fact that Kdissert generates styles this job becomes very easy.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[larry bagina]

if you're using inetd or ucspi-tcp or some other front-end that sets up stdin/stdout to the sockets, then yes you could.

Re:Open FUD

[strider44]

I've seen Linux based computers run unreliably.

I haven't in anything except a hardware failure. I live with my brother and his Windows XP machine crashes regularly even on something as simple as playing a game (it BSODed once and stalled completely once just yesterday). The actual computer including RAM seems fine according to the toolsets. My other flatmate actually said to me "does Linux crash? I've noticed that you just leave your computer on and it's on all the time and I've never seen it crash." I just said "no it doesn't crash."

Yes Windows has improved a lot in this case but it's still just not good enough.

Re:Why even bother with word processors?

[larry bagina]

is LaTeX a format or a program?

Neither... it's a set of macros for TeX. TeX is the actual program, though the latex command runs TeX with the LaTeX macros. LaTeX/TeX take an ascii text file with markup commands and convert it into a DVI file, postscript, or pdf.

\begin{enumerate}
\item Collect underpants
\item ????
\item Profit!
\end{enumerate}

is the LaTeX markup to create an ordered list, for example.

Can LaTeX create spreadsheets, access databases, interface with e-mail, and create clip-art?

No. LaTeX/TeX are typesetting programs. They can do some fancy stuff (like generating a list of figures, cross references, table of contents, mathematical equations, etc), but it's a command-line unix tool, not a GUI office software package.