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Software Businesses Apple

NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac 200

VValdo writes "Following a month or so of their Early Access Program, NeoOffice, the free Office suite for OS X, has just released NeoOffice 2.2.1. New features include support for the native Mac OS X spell-checker and address book; support for high-resolution printing (more than the 300 dpi that previous versions allowed); the ability to open, edit, and save most Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; and the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, which is the code base for NeoOffice. X11 is not required, but for those of you who actually want to use X11, check out the new RetroOffice."
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NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac

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  • by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Sunday August 26, 2007 @11:43PM (#20367943) Journal
    Like many other Macintosh users, I downloaded the iWorks '08 [apple.com] trial and promptly purchased it. I've used OpenOffice/NeoOffice (on Linux and Mac OS). iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.
    • by c_forq ( 924234 ) <forquerc+slash@gmail.com> on Sunday August 26, 2007 @11:53PM (#20368005)
      While I like iWork (especially Numbers) as a word processor I find it lacking. For layout it is easily the best program I have ever used, but for writing a research paper I would rather use Microsoft Word. Last time I did a research paper on Open Office it severely screwed up my footnotes (which on a 50 page document with 1-6 footnotes per page is kind of a big deal). Unfortunately Microsoft Office 2004 seems slow on my MacBook (I'm told this is due to it being a non-universal application and running through Rosetta) so I am still looking forward for Microsoft Office 2008. I still have high hopes for iWork to continue to progress, Apple seems to be very good at looking at what people are doing and want to do with programs, and have seemed to always put effort into serving students in higher education.
      • by Bluesman ( 104513 ) on Sunday August 26, 2007 @11:57PM (#20368031) Homepage
        Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later.
        • by c_forq ( 924234 )
          I tried to start using LaTeX when my primary computer was a Ubuntu desktop, but never really got it it figured out. Could you recommend an easy to use OS-X LaTeX editor with a nice tutorial?
          • by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:10AM (#20368097)
            TeXShop. I swore by it (when at university). Uses Quartz and PDFTex to render directly to PDF -- DVI + PS not necessary. Oh and did I mention that it uses the Mac UI and Quartz. Yeah.
          • by shking ( 125052 )
            Go to either MacUpdate [macupdate.com] or Version Tracker [versiontracker.com] for Mac software with user ratings and reviews
          • by linguae ( 763922 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:17AM (#20368139)

            I use TeXShop [uoregon.edu] for all of my LaTeX needs. It's not just a LaTeX editor, but also contains an easy-to-use environment to create PDFs on the fly. It is also bundled with a graphical BiBTeX editor to store bibliographies. Way better than the command-line tools that I've used on my old FreeBSD machine :).

            As for LaTeX tutorials, I use "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E." It's a very good tutorial that will get you started working with LaTeX code. I use LaTeX for all of my research papers except for those that employ the MLA format (LaTeX was designed for scientists and mathematicians, not keeping English and history majors in mind. But sometimes a science/math student needs to write an English paper, and I haven't been satisfied with existing MLA themes for LaTeX). If you must use MLA, just stick with Word.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            Texmaker is a nice multi-platform LaTeX editor that uses templates. Another option would be TeXShop. As for a good tutorial, the not-so-short guide to LaTeX is a great way to go. Long-short guide [tug.org] LaTeX is simply the best tool for working with research papers and the like with structured formatting and bibliographical information use BibTeX.
          • by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:22AM (#20368171)
            I've used LyX (used it for my doctoral thesis) almost exclusively as a LaTeX editor. I highly recommend it for just about anyone (it's available for OS X, Windows, and, of course, linux). It comes with its own tutorial.
            http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
          • by Trogre ( 513942 )
            BlueSky TeXtures is a lovely TeX IDE. Only problem is that they're still stuck in OS9 so you need to run it in classic mode. Though an OSX release will be out Any Day Now(tm).

          • I used LyX for a while, and it's great, but completely unnecessary. LaTeX is simple enough that you could learn most of what you need in a few hours, from tutorials you can find on the web, and then use your favorite text editor. (I like emacs in viper mode.)

            If you can write HTML, you can write LaTeX. They're essentially the same idea, only LaTeX is much more complete with nicer output.

          • For a good LaTeX tutorial, I highly recommend A Beginner's Guide to LaTeX [ctan.org]. It's a tremendous guide which is very useful both for learning LaTeX and as a reference. It's what I used to learn LaTeX, and I continued to use the guide as a reference throughout university in everything I wrote from essays to lab reports to research papers. Once you've got LaTeX and an IDE installed, hop into Chapter 2 and start reading.
          • A few others have recommended TeXShop. I used that for a while, and then went back to Vim; when you're dealing with a lot of text, powerful macro facilities are incredibly important. OS X currently ships with an ancient version of Vim, but the new one compiles and works fine (and comes with nice things like spell checking. I use a custom Makefile to build it.

            I'd thoroughly recommend the Not So ShortIntroduction to LaTeX [ctan.org]. That's the only thing I read about LaTeX before writing my undergraduate disser

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by pato101 ( 851725 )
            I personally do not use LaTeX directly:
            www.lyx.org
        • Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later.
          Interestingly enough, I just ran into a program called OcTeX [apple.com] which looking for a movie trailer on the Apple site. I haven't used it, but thought it relevant... and it's freeware.
           
        • I use LaTeX on my Mac for everything I hand out to my students. I'm an English teacher in Sweden. I've even typeset several books with LaTeX.
        • by gatzke ( 2977 )
          Or use LyX as a front end to LaTeX. A little closer to WYSIWYG with GUIs for most everything.

          LaTeX is amazing, but hacking a plain text file is a bit rough for 95% of the people out there. There are a number of editors out there, but LyX is the one I have used for years. Free, and .lyx files are plain text (like .tex files). Why are people still using binary formats for documents?
      • by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:25AM (#20368181)
        I had the opposite experience with my wife's Master's thesis. This had very strict requirements for formatting and MS Word kept doing very strange things with margins and footnotes. It would insert odd spacing and pagination and it was just impossible to get it right. Some of the pages were just grossly wrong and couldn't be fixed.

        Finally, I opened the document in OpenOffice and was able to easily fix all of the problems with margins and footnotes and I printed the final copies from OpenOffice. It would have saved me a lot of time to have started the project in OpenOffice.

      • by LKM ( 227954 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @04:32AM (#20369163)

        Last time I did a research paper

        I use Mellel [redlers.com] for papers and the like. If the thing you're writing is highly structured (wich chapters and footnotes and endnotes and citations), nothing beats Mellel, in my opinion. It's small, cheap, fast, and does everything you would want, easily. Rearrange chapters? Drag and drop them in the outline. Change the font of all second level chapters? Easy. Multiple languages? No problem, even mixing rtl and ltr.

        I know I sound like a shill, but I'm actually a paying customer and have no ties - financial or otherwise - to the company making Mellel. Check the app out. It's one of the reasons I use a Mac.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Zhe Mappel ( 607548 )
          I don't mind praising a great program.

          Mellel is fast, intuitive, powerfully adaptive, well-supported and affordable. The cream of the crop in indy OS X word processors.

    • I keep both iWork (06) and NeoOffice. I gave OpenOffice the boot because it required X11. I'll give iWork '08 a shot eventually, but I'm trying to avoid spending money for the moment. It's cheap enough, but then, it's something I don't have to have right now.
    • by linguae ( 763922 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:05AM (#20368077)

      Like many other Macintosh users, I downloaded the iWorks '08 trial and promptly purchased it. I've used OpenOffice/NeoOffice (on Linux and Mac OS). iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.

      After purchasing my MacBook last year (I was previously a Windows and *nix user, now my Mac is my sole computer), I tried (and eventually purchased iWork 06. I love Keynote (I bought it solely for Keynote, in fact) and believe that Keynote > PowerPoint > OO Impress, but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it. I like the concepts of styles and use LaTeX for all of my non-MLA papers, but whenever writing any other type of document, I prefer the more "free" structure of Word/OO Writer/AbiWord/etc. to Pages's strict enforcement of styles. My biggest problem with iWork (don't know about iWork 2008, however) is its very imperfect compatibility with MS Office file formats. The basics are correct, but anything that requires tables, exact layout, more complex styles, etc. starts to look jarbled. So, I like iWork a lot (much speedier than MS Office 2004 due to my having an Intel Mac, not to mention cheaper [$49 vs $149 for students]), but for perfect compatibility, I don't trust it.

      I've also tried NeoOffice on my machine. As stated earlier, I vastly prefer Writer to Pages. NeoOffice was a necessity to me because of its spreadsheet (iWork 06 doesn't have a spreadsheet; that changed with iWork 08; I still need to try it). NeoOffice's compatibility with MS Office documents is superb, and I use NeoOffice to open and save documents where compatibility is very important. However, my complaint with NeoOffice is its speed (it is dog slow on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with 512MB RAM, but I plan on upgrading to 2GB). The fact that the widgets are non-native and fake-looking do not add to the problem, either.

      Personally, I'm waiting for MS Office 2008 to come out (finally a native version for Intel Macs). However, if iWork 08 is a major improvement with compatibility, or if NeoOffice makes big improvements with speed and its interface, then I might not have to shell out the cash.

      • by Swampash ( 1131503 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:37AM (#20368237)
        I love Keynote ... but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it.

        I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

        Keynote, of course, stomps Powerpoint in almost every possible way.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by MojoStan ( 776183 )
          I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

          I've read this (that Pages is not a word processor) in articles and on Slashdot. However, Apple still categorizes (misrepresents?) Pages as a "word processor":

          • "Writing comes naturally when you're using Pages '08, the streamlined word processor for the Mac." --iWork Overview [apple.com]
          • "Word processing never looked this good." --Pages Prod [apple.com]
        • > I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool.
          > Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

          I certainly agree for the previous version of Pages and it made it too complicated for the big "I just want to write a letter" crowd. But this has changed with the latest version. The new Pages' word processing mode is just this. Best word processor for the average joe, IMHO. Not so suitable for extensive scientific papers
          • by Macka ( 9388 )

            Totally agree. The new style draw has given me more (easy) control over the layout of my documents than I've ever experienced in MS Word or OO (NeoOffice). It's so easy to change an existing style to something else (for the whole doc) or even create new versions for yourself. Hint: when the down triangle next to a style turns red, click on it. You can adopt the change you've just made as a global setting or just save it as a new one. It's also interesting to import MS Word docs and look at the st
        • by mblase ( 200735 )
          I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

          IIRC, part of the redesign of Pages in iWork '08 was to give it a more word-processey mode you could toggle.

          Agrees on the "Indesign lite", but neither I nor my wife have ever had cause to use it that way.
      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Impress has one feature which made it invaluable to me recently - export to PDF. I had to scanned some legal documents and send them to someone. Since I don't have Adobe Acrobat to compose the pages, I was at a loss how to do it. I had the pages as .png images but it was huge pain to use Write and I gave up trying. But then I found I could add them as as slides to a blank Impress presentation and then reorder them. Once they were in the proper order I just exported them as PDF. Easy peasy.
      • by Lumpy ( 12016 )
        I also agree that Keynote kicks the living and utter crap out of Powerpoint and other presentation apps out there. I got a powerbook simply for presentations because using keynote makes all other presenters look like bumbling amateurs when they follow your presentation.

        The content and information should be what they make decisions on, but ever since I switched to apple and Keynote, My project proposals have been approved over others. It's interesting how you can sway a room of executives with pretty shiny
    • by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday August 27, 2007 @12:08AM (#20368087) Homepage Journal

      I'd gladly buy it if it supported ODF. But if I'm going with something other than MS Office, it's at least going to use open standards that the rest of the world is migrating to. Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity. What's the point in that?

      • by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Monday August 27, 2007 @01:08AM (#20368371) Homepage Journal

        How is that a troll? I don't want proprietary formats, and I just don't see the logic in creating new ones when ODF pretty much has word processing covered. If I were OK with proprietary formats, I'd chose the one that 95% of the population uses, not one that will only let me interact with a small subset of users of a still relatively little-used OS. I have a Mac and I wouldn't hesitate to buy iWork if it didn't mean being locked in yet again.

        • by tsa ( 15680 )
          It was a troll because you said something negative about Apple. Welcome to /. where moderators run wild.
      • by gutter ( 27465 ) <ian.ragsdaleNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday August 27, 2007 @02:27AM (#20368635) Homepage

        Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity.

        The huge difference between the iWorks formats and Office formats is that the iWorks formats are sane and well documented XML:

        [apple.com]http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleAppl ications/Conceptual/iWork2-0_XML/Chapter02/chapter _2_section_4.html [apple.com]

        So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

        • by roesti ( 531884 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @05:22AM (#20369351)

          So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future

          What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.

          It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.

          If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.

          • by shmlco ( 594907 )
            "What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats."

            Because it's a floor wax and a dessert topping? If it were just another WP I'd agree, but it's also an exceptionally easy to use and well thought out page layout program.

            Some people care more about the work they can do with their computers, and how easily, than whether or not a format is "open" or not.
            • by aliquis ( 678370 )
              So you are saying the program can't be logical to use because the document format are open?

              How does a good program make the format decision better?

              Apple makes a lot of good stuff, but the vendor lockin suck, and in some cases they get away with releasing inferior products due to it.
          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by MMC Monster ( 602931 )

            So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future

            What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.

            My guess is that iWork does stuff that is not currently defined in the ODF format. My hope is that the commission that is in charge of ODF will extend it to support everything available in iWork. (Those slide transitions in the iWork presentation software are pretty freakin' cool!)

        • you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

          If they are that congruent, then I wish they'd have just used the ISO standard format rather than an alternate, less compatible form.

        • So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

          In my experience, these things are never simple. You'd think "hey, turning OOXML or ODF into AbiWord's format should be a simple XSL transform or a few simple scripts. They're all XML formats, after all." Where in reality, it's more like 10k lines of C++ code to do a halfwa

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      Problem with iWork is the same AppleWorks has, it is not entirely exportable or cross platform. I really like AppleWorks but now it's discontinued and no avenue to convert DBs and drawings (two of the best parts of AW BTW)

      I had been looking for something a bit less of an eventual dead end. OpenOffice/NeoOffice certainly has similar features - OO Draw is superb (but they need to fix tiling on printout), and the DB looks even more capable than ApplWorks DB. Not only that it works on Macs, Windows and Linux
      • by NMerriam ( 15122 )

        Problem with iWork is the same AppleWorks has, it is not entirely exportable or cross platform. I really like AppleWorks but now it's discontinued and no avenue to convert DBs and drawings (two of the best parts of AW BTW)

        With the slight difference that iWork's file formats are specified, openly available, and all the component files are stored in open, native formats rather than locked up in mysterious BLOBs.

        iWork is perfectly safe to store things in, at least in the sense of being able to get things bac

      • I agree. I would only recommend iWork for write-once documents. Keynote is ideal for me, since presentations I write tend not to need editing in the future, and either get exported as PDF or thrown away after delivering them. If I needed any kind of guarantee of future availability of my documents in an editable form, I would not use Keynote, and I don't use Pages.
    • Oh, I dunno, I'm always open to useful tools. A bit of fanboi dramatics isn't enough to deter me.

      Just out of curiosity, does iworks grok ODF? There's also the price point, but either way I intend to check them both out on my macbook and see which gives me more bang for the buck.
      • by gutter ( 27465 )
        Nope, it doesn't read or write it unfortunately - I just tried. Since they're both XML, I wonder how hard it would be to write a converter?
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Pecisk ( 688001 )
      iWorks has serious limitations and even Apple doesn't market it as full fledged office suite suited for Enterprise or SMB use. However, I agree in in it's own merits (aka small suite) it rocks and looks seriously cool, specially Keynote.

      However, as many of people who use OO.o all the time in other OSes, I need ODF support. Apple is in bed with Microsoft in this one (even supporting Microsoft ego driven ISO screwing), so sorry Jobs, not this time. And all my supported Mac boxes (both PowerPC and Intel ones)
    • by tsa ( 15680 )
      Can iWorks handle ODF? Of so I might be tempted to switch from OpenOffice. I'm a bit sick of not being able to read my old files after switching office suits.
    • by sakusha ( 441986 )
      I saw your message and realized I hadn't taken Pages for a spin yet. It reminds me of the old MacWrite, a simple basic word processor that gets the Mac UI. I liked it.
    • I've downloaded the trial as well, and I'm considering buying it as an upgrade to iWork 05 which I have at the moment. Pages seems to have improved drastically in terms of usability since then, and with Numbers I now have no real reason to open NeoOffice at all.

      I think all the iWork/OpenOffice/LaTeX arguments (and occasional fanboyism) are a bit beside the point, because they're all going after different markets. iWork is perfectly acceptable for writing documentation for internal company use, which is

    • Numbers isn't as powerful as the OpenOffice/NeoOffice spreadsheet yet. Even for me, who only uses it to keep track of hosting costs, the lack of autofilter on Numbers means it can't cope with my fairly simple needs (large block of data which I need to see subsets of pretty quickly). You -can- filter, but it's via a long-winded dialog not a nice set of drop-downs a la autofilter.

      Others have mentioned ODF, but there's also password-protection missing from iWork. There's ways round of it course - you can cr
    • by Alioth ( 221270 )
      I've just tried this new version of NeoOffice and it's a huge improvement in consistency with Mac OS X over older versions - it does look and feel native now, at least in the cases I've been able to try so far. It's also a lot faster to load and run on my PowerBook G4 than older versions.
    • by Macka ( 9388 )

      iWork 08 is my first choice now too. But realistically there are some things its apps can't do or don't handle too well (yet). And if you want to share spreadsheets from Numbers you have to export to Excel and then edit again to get rid of the default Table of Contents sheet Apple add, and sort out the sheet renaming that Numbers gives you no control over. You need either MS Office or NeoOffice for that. NeoOffice can also handle much bigger spreadsheets than Numbers (today).

      So as good as iWork 08 is,
  • The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent? Using Google I can find the 1.1 torrent on the site, and a few 2.0 and 2.1 torrents on other sites.
    • by friedo ( 112163 ) *
      Here ya go [friedo.com]. That's the PPC version -- I didn't download the Intel version so I'm not gonna seed it.
      • by friedo ( 112163 ) *
        Oops, that probably won't work. My power went out last night and my NAT got all hosed. I don't have time to fix it right now. My bad.
    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by itwerx ( 165526 )
      The download site says it'll take forever.

      Not that slow - I just got it down from between 300KBs and 1.7MBs. Took a grand total of about 5 minutes.
    • by Temkin ( 112574 )

      The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent?

      They publish torrent seeds on the download page. I'm not going to publish the links here to be fair to them and make people click thru the donation request. These guys are doing a great job on a shoestring budget. Please consider making a donation. Even a couple Dollars/Euros helps!

      I have bt running on a hosted server, and am donating bandwidth to them (The counter rolls at the end of the month anyway...). It's pushing ~1M

  • I've downloaded and noticed it looks better. It didn't take too long to launch on this seven year old Mac. Over then next few days I will put it through its paces to see if it runs as good as it looks.
  • Framemaker (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HockeyPuck ( 141947 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @01:12AM (#20368383)
    For single author, single file documents, MSWord, Openoffice work fine, but when your working on books, larger documents that are comprised of "1 file per chapter" and require easy to use templates (MSWord creates new font templates automatically) so multiple authors can work on the document at the same time. I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well).

    With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.

    The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.

    • I loved Framemaker. I still help someone with a Mac, who loves Framemaker and still does most work with it.

      But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.
      • by NMerriam ( 15122 )

        But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.

        I feel your pain. my sister is a tech writer and can't believe FrameMaker is EOL, I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead. Adobe has a strange habit of killing prod

        • I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead.

          WHAT? That's horrible. Almost every task can be done in Freehand in about half the time it takes in Illustrator. I can't believe they killed it. Well, yes I can.

          Here's hoping the last version of Freehand keeps working in newer versions of OSX. The day it doesn't is the day I stop doing drawing on the computer.

      • But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker.

        To clarify, Adobe did EOL Framemaker and stopped supporting all but the Windows version. Then, they un-EOL'd Framemaker and are releasing a new version (Windows only). This new version is mostly fixes for flaws and deficiencies and is developed by a team outsourced to India who seem pretty clueless (I met a few of them while they were demoing the new version). I think they're responding to MadCap's new Blaze program which is being marketed as a direct competitor to Framemaker with all the features and a b

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )
      (MSWord creates new font templates automatically)

      Yes, and I hate that feature. Usually it means that if you recieve a document, it has 100s of styles from all sorts of manual changes, mangled "Header 1" and "Overskrift 1" (English and Norwegian respectively) and if you ever try to unfuck it chances are the document will go suicidal on you and even if you did, it'd fuck up just as quickly as you send it out again. Most documents should allow only a few styles, headers level 1 through x, normal, table, bullet
    • by bazorg ( 911295 )

      I'm a professional tech writer and [...] Framemaker has it's place.
      Ha-ha!
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      What moved me away from MS Office was it lack of support for single author multi file documents, or indeed documents in which an author was in strict control of the content of a single file. OO.org does a very good job of bringing this multiple files into a single master document and creating a cohesive unified document.

      The key, as is often the case, is separating the responsibility for content from the visual formating. Each author is responsible for content, while the master document is responsible fo

  • Bandwidth abuse? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Monday August 27, 2007 @01:27AM (#20368443) Homepage
    I appreciate the religious purity of putting both the binaries and source code in every download package, but wouldn't it be a bit kinder to the internet in general, the mirrors in particular, and all the users on non-infinite-speed connections, to allow you to download ONLY the binaries?

    I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.
    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      ...or download the source and compile yourself - a 132MB saving for the Internet...
      • Last time I compiled OpenOffice.org was on a 1.3GHz Athlon, and it took about a day. You'd have to have a really slow connection (slower than dialup) for that to be faster than downloading the binary.
    • Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project.

      The reason to include the source code is both moral and practical.

      From a practical standpoint, it ensures that everyone providing NeoOffice needs to take no special action to comply with the GPL. According to our interpretation, anyone who provides a binary that is licensed under GPL is also obligated to provide the source code for that program. By placing the source code package within our disk images, anyone and everyone who provides the disk image

  • What is the deal with half of the world not spelling the various names of Office applications correctly?

    iWork, not iWorks
    Excel, not Excell
    Word, not Words

    Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?
    • by mkiwi ( 585287 )

      iWork, not iWorks
      Excel, not Excell
      Word, not Words
      Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?

      Exactly, we've been polluted be a product that does exactly the opposite of what it is named.

      For some reason, Microsoft does this. Another example is (in the old days) typing "win" to start windows. I mean there was the solitaire game, but that was totally rigged so that you lost and had to start over all the time. I hardly call it winning when one of Microsoft's core system components is essentially a b

  • by raju1kabir ( 251972 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @06:47AM (#20369719) Homepage

    I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.

    Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.

    I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.

  • iWork? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Andrei D ( 965217 )
    No, thanks. IWasteTimeOnSlashdot
  • NeoOffice rocks. (Score:3, Informative)

    by wheatwilliams ( 605974 ) on Monday August 27, 2007 @07:00PM (#20377641) Homepage
    NeoOffice is developed by a (very) small team of people who have worked very hard and acheived some wonderful results in the last year. The program has become much faster and more responsive. And it's quite Mac-like.

    If you use it, please donate a couple of $10 bills to their efforts through PayPal on their web page. I've made several small donations to them over the past three years and I think it was money well spent.

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