Am I the only one whose noticed OpenOffice suddenly got a whole lot better? I’ve been trying to switch to Ooo for a while but always seemed to into issues during a session on how to get something done. I tried using 3.1.1 spreadsheet yesterday and everything (though different from OXP) was really obvious and intuitive, from data entry to formatting to plotting with X-Y plots. (I always used to get hung up with moving the data into a plot.) Good work, guys! I’m glad I donated…
Of course, I’ve known for some time that it’s more stable that OfficeXP’s spreadsheet. In the past when my OXP spreadsheets get larger than a certain size (about 25 worksheets), it begins to throw font-cache errors. I usually just reopen them in Ooo and the errors are gone - I can just keep growing the spreadsheet in Ooo.
I have found the spreadsheets / graphs to be improving rapidly. My sticking point with openoffice is that some bugs just do not ever get fixed.
Put a long line of text into writer, so it wraps. Move the cursor to the end of a screen line, and press space. It gives you no visual indication of how many spaces there are there.
This, as far as I’m concerned, is a really stupid, annoying, important bug. Sure, it isn’t earth shattering, but it’s the sort of thing that will impact every user of OO writer.
It was first noted during the Great Cattle Drive of 1856. I know you shouldn’t complain if you don’t contribute. I know managing open source projects presents all kinds of complexities. I don’t care, I’m going to say it: it should blooming well have been fixed by now.
Apparently it’s because the code base is arcane, and there are parts of it that more or less nobody understands. They have my sympathies, but at some point they need to just bite the bullet, and drop the code base. It’s upheaval, sure, but KDE seem to have survived it.
Personally, I’m itching for something else to come along, and give them some serious competition, so they have to start again from scratch (or just take the base from the other project), get rid of the bits they can’t fix, and then move the useful features - of which there are many - over.
My really annoyed about that bug still being there two pence.
KOffice looks pretty good, but it is limited to some degree with the KDE desktop. I know it has some project to move it to Windows too and will work in Gnome but the name alone marries it to KDE.
Abiword is perhaps the other contender. I don’t know - I’ve tried all of them, and I think they’re coming along, but still need work. I think Lotus Symphony is probably the closest to being usable, but I still prefer OOo - and Symphony isn’t open source.
It just gets my goat. I genuinely think open source is a better way to develop things. Although Opera is great, Firefox still eats IE for breakfast. The fundamentals of Linux just plain work better than the fundamentals of Windows. They’re efficient, secure, stable, and extensible - and all this comes about specifically because it’s open source.
But if you can’t understand the code base of open source, the advantage is lost. If the pre-eminent project for one of the most pivotal pieces of software on a desktop is impossible to fix things in, something’s gone badly wrong. It just seems like a rut - nobody uses anything other than OOo, because OOo gets more development. And OOo are sticking with what they’ve got, even if it’s broken. :\
I’ve compiled OO 3.1 aready. Doesn’t look alot different from the original but definately alot of bugs have been sorted out. I find it close to office.
I REALLY WISH they could do a PROPER Viso port to OOorotfl!
Are you sure you’re doing what I’m doing? You need a line of text that wraps, and you need to put the cursor at the end of a screen line, but not at the end of the line of text. Then hit space. Nothing happens, whether you’ve got ‘Display spaces’ set or not - which isn’t to say that display spaces doesn’t do anything, just that it doesn’t display these spaces at all, let alone visibly. The cursor doesn’t move - and it’s been like that since I’ve been using Open Office.
john hudson wrote:
> Confuseling;2042622 Wrote:
>> Doesn’t work on 3.1.1 on SUSE’s version at least. Haven’t tried it on
>> the standard OO - I’ll have a look.
>>
>> Thanks anyway.
>
> Strange, I have the openSUSE version of 3.1.1 installed and it works
> perfectly.
>
>
I have the same effect as Confuseling. The best I can get is a display
of “protected spaces” at the end of a line that has wrapped and, in that
case, any preceding spaces; otherwise, it works like HTML and all
spaces are converted to a soft-return.
–
PeeGee
Asus M2V-MX SE, AMD LE1640, openSuSE 11.0 x86-64/XP Home VBox
Asus M2NPV-VM, AMD 64X2 3800+, openSuSE 10.3 x86-64/XP Home dual boot
Asus eeePC 4G (701), Celeron M353, Mandriva 2009.0
I assume you mean Visio? I would like to see that too.
Now if they could also do something similar to Microsoft’s Publisher then that would be really handy. I know it isn’t “real” DTP software but it handles putting a project together and working with images and text a lot easier and handles labels (like business cards) and such very easy.
Scribus is too professional/technical. So far KOffice’s word processor offers the closest equivalent I’ve found so far.
But before that, I would love to see them build Base into an Access contender! That would be the balls!
I see what you mean. As it treats the spaces at the end of the line as redundant, it only displays them until you enter a character that causes it to word-wrap when it gives up displaying them.
Typographically, it makes perfect sense because, if you set it to left and right justified, it also ignores the spaces at the end of the line.
You cannot get round it by using hard spaces because hard spaces are conceptually different and Display>Spaces is only intended to deal with soft spaces.
So I don’t think it is a bug; the programmers have addressed the issues in a typographically correct way but you want to do something different.
I remember a discussion in which some people were claiming it was by design. Others said “Well, I don’t like it. I can’t see whether I have extra spaces at the end of a line, unless I experimentally delete them, then add one back. If it’s meant to be like that, make it optional.”
It was then stated that it wasn’t actually by design (at least as far as the present maintainers go) after all - they had no idea why it happened, or how to change it, because they didn’t understand the code.
I can’t vouch for the authoritativeness of this discussion - and I have no idea where it was (possibly their bug tracker…), because it was a looong time ago. But it seemed plausible enough to me. I’m not suggesting that you’re wrong, and that there isn’t a valid case for it having been written like that - but I honestly can’t see them not putting in the option if they knew how. People have been complaining about this for a very, very long time - and I don’t think I’ve ever seen another bit of software that handles it this way.
[In fact, here is some discussion of it. From 2001. :P]
Looking at the OpenOffice thread they are discussing it in terms of, e.g. WordPerfect having it.
Typesetters do not use fixed spaces; they vary the space and use different minimum lengths between words and between sentences.
Both the concept of a fixed width space and the concept of a tab only came with typewriters and typists used to be taught to use two spaces between sentences to mimic the fact that typesetters use a longer minimum space between sentences.
These traditions came into computing through the early wordprocessors which only had access to fixed space printers. Once proportional fonts arrived with the development of dot matrix, and later laser, printers, you inevitably got non-standard space widths between tabs and, theoretically, you should also have got variable spaces in sentences.
As far as I am aware only LaTeX abides by the typesetting rules - variable space widths depending on context and no tabs.
So, if you regard OpenOffice as a glorified typewriter, then what you are asking for is reasonable. But if you are wanting to create quality output, you never use more than one space between anything and you never use tabs.
If you need to see fixed spaces at the end of a line, you can use something like Kate which offers that as an option.
It’s not about deliberately putting multiple spaces into sentences - it’s about them creeping in, and the user having no way of knowing it. In fact, it isn’t really about the behaviour with respect to spaces at all as far as I’m concerned - in the sense that the document does come out the way you’ve specified (whether that’s what you meant or not…). It’s a user interface problem, to do with either the cursor needing to move accordingly, or with the need for some kind of bolted on indication.
That much is obvious in the bug reports - the vast majority of the people complaining (and there are lots…) are just saying they change their layout, or their font, or export the file, and suddenly realise their documents are littered with multiple spaces. If it doesn’t affect you, you’re lucky - might be something to do with typing habits. I don’t put double spaces in anything consciously, I suppose I just type something (often looking at a source document rather than the screen), pause for thought, and then am left wondering whether I’ve put a space in already. I’ve been wondering this for over five years…
