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I agree here. It's very hard to insert a comment and expect others to read it, since they're nearly invisible. As a developer says in the bug report:

Fortunately this issue seems to be something that a clever C++ developer should
be able to implement even without a deep knowledge of the Writer internals, so
we ask all interested people with development capabilities in C++ to help us
with this enhancement.

Of course some teaching will be necessary in the starting phase but support from
our side is guaranteed. Perhaps somebody would like to implement this in the
next Google Summer of Code?

Edited 2007-03-30 23:37

And you will of course claim Microsoft invented annotations (if you do that you don't know the history of software development) - or what's your point?

Does anyone know when OpenOffice 3.0 and KOffice 2.0 release schedules are I can't find them?

I do not know about KOffice, but in an interview with one of the lead OpenOffice developers/arch's when asked about OpenOffice 3.0, he explained that the flexability that the 2.0 arch provides them, allows them to fit considerably more improvements within the current infrastrucutre with out having to break backwards compatability.

So, I guess, they are in a very similar position to say GNOME, who currently have no need to migrate to a next majour revision, to be able to continue inovating and improving.

How about the joy of working? I really can't say that OOo can compare itself with MSO2k3 at all. It just "looks" and "feels" bad. FOr instance. When writing "misspelled text in MSO you get a nice red underlining which looks soft for the eye. In OOo it more looks like the text blopper out with some red mess.

Can all usability engineers please stand up

I couldn't care less for MSO. I haven't used it for 4 years and I really don't miss it. There are NO features that I use that I can't find in OO. Compatibility with MSO formats is ok for me, and I can export directly to PDF without Acrobat Distiller or PDF Creator.

Also it costs nothing ... while MSO is ridiculously overpriced.

The only complaint I have is that it starts in almost the same time as the OS

Edited 2007-03-31 07:25

The only complaint I have is that it starts in almost the same time as the OS

Yeah. There's lots of work being done on this at the moment.

On Windows, OO Writer kerns text acceptably (acceptably--it's not pretty by any means). But, for some reason, its text kerning is twelve times worse on Linux for me, so I seek shelter in TextMaker and Word 2000 on CrossOver.

You have to give OpenOffice some credit, though--their kerning is no where near as bad as AbiWord's.

WordPerfect has the best text kerning I've seen by far. It's a shame WP doesn't run acceptably in CrossOver and there's not an up-to-date Linux port of it. Otherwise, it would be my word processor of choice.

>> its text kerning is twelve times worse on Linux for me

That's because freetype cannot kern text worth a damn either - you run a word processor with kerning issues atop a font rendering engine that's also got kerning issues, it is going to be a factor worse.

Freetype handles text kerning a lot better than Windows. You might want to use a version of FreeType2 _with_ the patented BCI enabled. And use some good fonts (and no, not MS Corefonts, but real fonts like Humnst777 BT from Bitstream or fonts from Heidelberg - professional fonts).

OpenOffice has bad kerning on all platforms. It's bad on Windows and bad on Linux. However FreeType beats standard kerning in Windows anyday and is - with the patented BCI enabled - at Mac level.

>> Freetype handles text kerning a lot better than Windows.

You and I must have different definintions of 'better'. I'll stack Windows 3.1 and old school MacOS kerning of truetype against the latest freetype ANY DAY.

This statement really confuses me, you do realize that kerning is just the space between characters, right? The 'dancing i' syndrome being the most obvious problem in cleartype (and OoO), but other chara cter s al so en d up lo oki ng l ike th i s.

>> (and no, not MS Corefonts, but real fonts like
>> Humnst777 BT from Bitstream or fonts from
>> Heidelberg - professional fonts).

Frankly, if you have to use a special font meant JUST because of a specific font rendering engine, it's not a very good engine... Especially when BOTH Windows and MacOS work JUST FINE with MS Core fonts, translated postscript fonts, and most anything else you throw at them.

Edited 2007-04-01 00:55

I always am using fixed width fonts because I really hate the sight of proportional fonts so I had to loopup kerning.

at least, the kerning is on by default.

This is no longer true for OpenOffice

OpenOffice 2.1.0 just went "stable" (you might run into issues with STLport) in gentoo and I dare say it is much better now. Non eo fth eo ldk ern i ng pr oblem san ymore. The main menu now renders completely identical to rest of my Linux desktop and kerning issues are gone. Completely. No matter how much I zoom in or out there is no kerning issues.

It is much better integrated now. Using Tango icons by default, FreeType2 rendering by default and so on. It looks really smooth by now. And it loads almost as fast as Scribus

To be honest, I hope you're not the kind of type then who says "linux ready for the desktop". As long as devs and users with SMALL Office app needs start making generalisations about their needs and try to reapply it for others needs, not anything is gonna be ready at any time soon.

Sorry dude, OOo is not enough for daily Office work for any office poweruser. Powerusers are the ones defining what use in the business landscape, not those with the least needs.

It's a shame and I'm sorry to say, that OOo has a LONG way to go to reach adoption. Sure, it may be fine for some small business only using desktop for sending quotations for plumbery, but any real business will simply laugh outright at it's performance, looks and features.

I've used OOo on the side of MSO for 3 years now, and I'm not trying to be a bastard, I'm just hoping someone picks up the usability issues and iron 'em out. unfortunately, people keep putting their heads in the sand.

Ok I'll be quick.

Linux is ready for the desktop; Openoffice is ready for the office users. That it.

The reality is this post lacks *any* content. I hate the term poweruser(sic), becuase such things do not exist. I have spent *more* time showing people even basic features of *word* than I have real computer work, and I suspect an awful lot of people here have.

There is only one trouble with OpenOffice and the other office packages that can be had for less than the extraordinary high price of Microsoft Office, and that is Microsoft is *the* standard. All of them are *good enough*. The trouble is they are not Microsoft Office.

Please include some content in your posts. Rather than sweeping statements without reference.

Edited 2007-03-31 15:37

I have to disagree with you. I've used both MS Word and OOo daily for years for work and personal. I work on Linux (by choice, in a company that uses Windows almost exclusively) and I preach Open Source. But OOo does not achieve feature parity with MS Word. For standard use of just typing and formatting a document, yes, maybe. But there are some key features lacking in OOo in a work environment that makes heavy use of document creation and editing:

1. Annotations, as I covered above.
2. Merging tracked changes from multiple documents.
3. Bullets and numbering (implemented, but doesn't work as well as MS Word)
4. No equivalent of "normal view" in Word ("web view" doesn't cut it)
5. No support for VBA (not that VBA is better than OO Basic, plus OO has support for Python scripts, plus Java, which is very cool, but organizations have VBA scripts and they need to be able to easy port them to OOo)
6. Tracked changes (navigation, accepting/rejecting), not as easy to use as MS Word.
7. In MS Word you can assign a number of users to the document, email it to them, and it keeps track of who has edited it and who still needs to edit it. Nothing equivalent exists in OOo.

I'm not bashing OOo. I'm just saying that it's just not ready for document editing in a collaborative work environment. It's fine for home users or work that just depends on basic document creation.

4) The "normal view" in Word? You really miss that crappy thing? A leftover from the buggy textwriter part of MS Works?

That's a first... *sigh*

The "normal view" in MS Word is a bug. Not a feature. It's a bug.

An excellent overview! I miss exactly the same things, being a professional translator.

I'll list some additional deficiencies here:

8. Inability to search and replace styles based on content - for example, apply a bullet list style to a paragraph starting with a bullet inserted as char, which I often have to do with converted PDF documents.
9. Limited hotkey assignment: can't assign an arbitrary key combination, can't assign a hotkey to a special character.
10. Limited keyboard control:
* Can't select a paragraph with one keystroke
* Can't move one paragraph up or down with one keystroke
* Can't move a table row up or down with one keystroke
11. The visual model of a paragraph is broken. To select one paragraph (with associated para formatting) in a bullet list, you have to actually include a part of the next paragraph (namely, its bullet) in the selection. This is weird. In Word, to select a paragraph along with its formatting, you just include the paragraph break symbol in the selection, which is sensible.
12. No Redo as in "perform the same action on another object without creating a macro".
13. To whoever designed OOo Writer: bullets and numbering ARE a part of paragraph formatting!!! When I say "Clear formatting", it means that I want them to go, too.

As for 3: the most important problems for me are imprecise export (preventing para level changing in Word from functioning correctly) and inability to graphically set bullet<->text positioning. (Even Abiword has that right!)

As for 5: VBA is actually better than OOo Basic. It's more comprehensible and much better documented.

On the other hand, the best features in OOo for me are PDF export and regexp search - the latter is mighty quick! Also, OOo tends to be more stable on .odt documents than Word is on .doc files - at least, I've never seen OOo mangle numbered lists in the whole document because of restarting numbering in one place, which is common for Word.

Edited 2007-04-01 10:30

Oh, and one more:

14. Inability to copy styles between templates and documents one-by-one.

(Even Abiword has that right!)

No it doesn't, I stand corrected...

Alright Mr "Mod down because you don't agree with opinion" zealot.

Them features you claim to be worthless... from the top of my head, how about some easy examples.

1. Kerning has been mentioned.
2. I also mentioned the Look n Feel. Have you actually used both? OOo looks bad, it doesn't look appealing to work in. Especially the writer app. Misspell a sentence, do the same in MSO and see which looks clogged up.
3. Have a look at Impress. NOw open Powerpoint. Now make a Chart of any kind and try to enhance it's look. Simply compare the sorts of charts available. Let me guess, charts not used? Good day mr non business user. Charts are normally used all over the place, and people expect them to look good.
4. Open Writer again. Let's say you wanna make a document template in there. Say for instance your company profile always have a border on any side of that document in a colour extending from where the paper start to let's say 1 or 2 or 3 cm in from the side of the page. How does that look? Oh, no problem in MSOffice?

Just gave some examples of the top of my head. So OOo can't handle quite a few corporate profiles? It can't customize or for that sake draw a bunch of charts commonly used? How is that "Good enough"?

Don't give me any jibberish, and STOP modding people down because they criticize a product. I DO hope OOo get's somewhere, but with the Zealotry attitude enjoyed from you and many others, that just ain't gonna happen. I wonder who's sabotaging what here? DO you dislike OOo as you obviously wanna quiet critics down instead of emphasizing what they're saying and how to build a better product.

What's done here today proves to me that OOo won't be the thing "happening" the next 2-3 years. Attitude changes take far more time, so maybe in 4-5 years assuming attitude actually change.

The real problem is that the OpenOffice code is absolute trash, and it takes forever to implement changes in it. It's a shame, really. From what I've heard (and skimming some files myself) it's in worst shape than the Netscape scrapyard was back in 1998 or whenever.

KOffice is a good alternative: it has a great code-base but is far behind in features and doesn't receive nearly the corporate backing it deserves (which is kind of necessary since the office suite isn't exactly a hobbyist programmer's dream project).

The real hope is ODF -- the more organizations that demand it, the more money will be thrown at OpenOffice -- which is about the only thing that motivates this project, the code being as ugly as it is.

If Microsoft has ever been good at anything, it's in making Office and .NET. (They can have Windows, though, ugh).

Edited 2007-03-31 18:06

Linux IS ready for the desktop. Haiku isn't yet, though we all hope it'll happen soon.

If Linux (KDE/Gnome) isn't ready for the desktop neither is Windows or Mac OS X.

A newbie has fewer problems with using Linux than GUI power users from Windows. And that's because the latter group is unwilling to learn a different approach. Try plugging in a USB key in Linux. Works like a charm and way ahead of WinXP/2K3.

Package management is years ahead of Windows as well, since Windows has no management apart from a primitive installer framework which does next to nothing.

OO.o is a good office application and no worse than MS Office. Apart from the kerning (which only is a problem in certain resolutions - on all platforms btw.) OO.o is pretty much on par. For anything but simpler documents MS Word is useless. The same is true for all other office applications from MS. An Office power user DO NOT use MS Office.

I don't know what kind of work you do with Office applications, but in my experience, MS Office is quite a bit more advanced than OOo. OOo is not nearly on par. The only part of OOo that is almost on par is Calc. Writer and Impress are behind. Believe me, I want OOo to be on par and I use it daily for most things, but I regularly have to switch to MS Office (in a VM) for things that I can't do, or can't do easily, in OOo.

My opinion is, until OOo gets better: Casual user: OOo is fine. Power user: Use MS Office.

I don't like Windows and I dislike most Microsoft products, and their policies of course. But Office is one thing that Microsoft has done right.

Oh Christ, not *another* person who thinks because he knows 100 keyboard short cuts off the top of his head, and moves his mouse around at 2,000 metres per second, whilst having all 9000 buttons on his mouse programmed to do everything from close a window to scratch ones balls.

If there was *ever* something I would *love* to be stamped out, its employee's who think that *everything* in their office suite they need to get their work done - clue to the employee, you're here to work, not create an art assignment for your school newspaper, and there are no brownie points given to those who can make the coolest border and font type for the title.

Edited 2007-04-01 14:05

I wonder how much of it is due to the craptacular code generation of g++, beacuse when I run it on Solaris x86, I don't see the speed issues I saw on Ubuntu Linux and Fedora 6.

The Novell team working on OOo speed have submitted a few patches to GCC to improve startup performance.

Even so, maybe OpenOffice.org/Sun should start using the Sun Studio compilers for Linux rather than relying on GCC/G++, which might yield an improvement.

I can see how switching compilers would benefit OOo in the short term. But that is really down to the distros. You can't force (for example) Debian to compile it's ooo binaries using some non-standard(for Debian) compiler.

Also, by sticking with GCC, there is a big incentive to improve the optimization features. People are working on GCC optimization as a direct result of OO.o's sluggish startup. This is a good thing for the Whole linux community, and in the long run may also be a benefit to Ooo directly.

If you have Java enabled in OOo, disabling it will increase startup speed considerably. Also, on Linux you can add ooffice -quickstart -nologo -nodefault to your startup session for faster loading/creating of OOo documents.

Hmm, I know they're adding dtrace probes to Mozilla, hopefully they'll plow OpenOffice.org full of them to track down where the bottlenecks are.

Well for some of us money aint the problem...its the product. If something is good I will gladly pay for it no matter what the price cause you can always make more money. MSO is still miles better than OOO and I am talking about the 2k3 office suite. Not the latest one.

"I really would have liked having something like OOo available when I was going to college. Back then, our choices where basically AmiPro, Word, or Word Perfect. All of them were overkill for writing high school and college papers. "

LOL
I'm older than most here. When I was in high school and college, I made do with MacWrite, and so would've been content with today's WordPad (bundled with Windows) and TextEdit (bundled with OSX). Had to do footnotes/endnotes/bibliography by hand, but so what; I knew others that used good old-fashioned typewriters. LOL

Edited 2007-04-01 09:01

I remember the typewriter on which I did my first college essays...it could memorize a single line of text, which it displayed on a one-line LCD display, and only printed it when you pressed the carriage return (what kids today would call the "enter" key...)