Final Version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released

Ant writes "After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is golden master and ready for immediate download by all Mac OS X users. This release marks a major milestone. It uses the Unix standard X Window and takes advantage of the immense wealth of open source material. To name but one feature, fonts are anti-aliased, making documents look smooth and clean and wholly professional. If you use Mac OS X there is no reason to wait. This will address your needs. And, as with all in the OpenOffice.org 1.0 family, this free release reads and writes Microsoft Office documents and works freely in heterogeneous environments where one might find Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X machines working side by side. The next step is to finish the Aqua version."

Apple X11 clipboard

[Jimithing DMB]

Hmm. As far as I can tell the clipboard works just fine. Selecting text in an application will make it the PRIMARY selection and it can be pasted with the middle mouse button in to other X11 apps.

Using an X11 apps copy feature will place the selection into the CLIPBOARD buffer which will make it available to all applications (including Mac ones).

In GVIM you can do this by prefixing your commands with "+ (quote plus). As in 4"+yy or Vjjj"+y or "+P or "+p among others. With GNOME and KDE apps you simply use their Copy/Paste features.

If your X11 app does not support CLIPBOARD, then you can use xcutsel to transfer PRIMARY to CLIPBOARD which will allow you to paste into OS X apps. Likewise, you can select text in OS X, copy it, then transfer CLIPBOARD to PRIMARY and use middle-mouse paste.

Granted, I'd love to see middle-mouse paste implemented across the board in OS X. It's a feature that would not confuse novice users as all OS X apps already have normal Copy/Paste and novice users don't have middle mouse buttons anyway and it would really benefit those of us who appreciate having that extra quick select and paste a la X11.

It seems to me that Cocoa could easily support this as most Cocoa apps that do anything with text use the absolutely wonderful NSText system which could have this feature added quite readily.

I for one would be willing to live without the ability to do this from Carbon and Classic apps.

Come to think of it, I'd be willing to bet this could be done using an Objective-C category. Actually, I'm absolutely positive it could be done that way without even having Apple's source. Any takers?

Re:Selling points?

[mashx]

One of the most useful things about OO for me has been this: being the only TiBook user in a company awash with Compaqs and very many different versions of windows, I get many different versions of Word documents, and some of them would force Office 2001 and Office v.X to quit: open the document, application quits! However, when I opened them in OO, it accepted it perfectly. I could then save them (type a space, delete the space) in the same format, but OO would save them in a format that either MS Office would then play nicely. Incredible but true!

However, I wasn't able to use the last beta for my work, simply because it didn't support the number of features that I required for working e.g. version tracking, embedded tables, full bullet point customisation, spacing between bullets etc. It has some of these, but doesn't pplay the same way as office, and in this company I can get away with using a Mac, but for presentation purposes, I need to play the same unfortunately.

If there was one thing I didn't like which I couldn't forgive it for was that you had to set all documents the same size - at least - I couldn't find a way to set them differently.

Still. having said that I have downloaded this latest version, and will again see how well it works. The IT guys want to get rid of Office (purely for the licensing), and are waiting for OO to be possible as a replacement..

Re:Selling points?

[TheRaven64]

Is it actually good enough to fully replace Office v.X?

No. It's slightly better than Office '97, although 1.1 looks like it should be quite a bit nicer (and hopefully the OS X changes can be merged with the 1.1 changes without a huge amount of effort). The real problem with OOo is that it is a Win95 app in terms of look and feel, and so will be quite alien on a Mac, and to quote Greg Lehey (FreeBSD core developer) 'OpenOffice is not a good example of the UNIX way.' so it looks a bit out of place.

For my use it's fine, I don't do any really complicated spreadsheet work (nothing that a 16-bit version of works wouldn't be able to have handled), most of the presentations I give are printed for OHP (although the OOo powerpoint clone is much better than the one that came with SO 5) and I use LaTeX for any non-trivial documents. OOo does everything I need it to do, but I doubt that the same could be said for someone who uses it in a commercial setting.

Re:Unfortunately...

[TheRaven64]

No, the Quartz version will behave exactly like this version. There are three threads to the OOo on OS X development effort.

1. The first is to get the whole thing to compile and work under X11 on OS X as it would on any other *NIX. This is the one that was released today.
2. The next stage is to replace the X11 code with native Quartz code. It will still feel the same, probably look the same (although they may introduce some more Aqua-like graphics at this point) but it will be a native OS X / Quartz app, with no need for X11.
3. The final stage (and I'm really hoping that Apple will get involved at this stage and bundle the resulting office suite with the OS as iOffice, or something) is to redo all of the menus, dialogs etc. so that they look just like a real OS X app. Once this is done (The roadmap [openoffice.org] says Q2 2004) then it should be a competitive office suite on the Mac.

Hopefully now that the OOo OS X team has a working release build they will be able to keep it synchronised with the main trunk.

Re:which is better

[Jucius Maximus]

"If I have to chose do I download openoffice or staroffice? Do they bear the same relationship as mozilla and netscape navigator?"

I would choose OpenOffice -- StarOffice is Sun's own blend of OO.org. I find that OpenOffice tends to work more 'smoothly' and it has a better presentation program than StarOffice. Not to mention that you have to pay for StarOffice 6.0.