OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released

Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.

Speaking of milk...

[Anonymous Coward]

Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series [madpenguin.org] (part 1 [slashdot.org] and 2 [slashdot.org] were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.

Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml [openoffice.org]

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[Bert64]

Because PDF has a lot in common with postscript.. PDF is basically postscript with more dynamic content (dynamic table of contents, hyperlinks etc) whereas postscript is purely concerned with appearance since it`s for printing.. So by doing a print to pdf (or print to postscript and ps2pdf) you can achieve a basic PDF without any of the more complex features... Often such PDF`s will be of very poor quality, and using rasterised text instead of properly rendered fonts for instance..
On the other hand OpenDocument is very much unsuited to being used in this way, you`d end up with pretty much everything (including text) being converted into images.

Congratulations Open Office folks!!!

[MCHammer]

A great accomplishment. I've been using the product for a couple of years now and really love it. My wife's entire business is based on Open Office as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[maxwell demon]

I guess the printed version would lack all logical markup. No problem if all you want to do is to view or print it, but a big problem if you want to work with it.

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[youngerpants]

However, these bittorrent downloads still point to the 2.0b product, not the new release

Re:Mac OS X

[fernique]

May be to use NeoOffice [neooffice.org] instead?

you eeeeediot moderators

[djdavetrouble]

Off topic my shiny metal ass... a simple google search for openoffice milk expired would have led you to this article. [slashdot.org] Now wait until after noon before you smoke any more crack.

Re:It's on time!

[VStrider]

Parent is not offtopic. :) See http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/1 0/12/1610249&threshold=-1&tid=102&tid=11 [slashdot.org]

the stable 2.0 release will come before any recently purchased cartons of milk expire in your refrigerator.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[DrXym]

When you print from an application you essentially open a device context and send it a bunch of instructions to draw text here, a line there and so on. This can be captured PDF but is totally unsuitable to printing out an .odt file for instance. In the process of conversion you'd lose all meta info, any revision history, digital signatures, styles, hidden text, rulers, margins, links to other documents / graphics and basically anything else which goes to producing a document but doesn't appear in the end result. In short, a "Print to OpenDocument" would be worse than useless.

On the other hand, an import / export filter for MS Word to Open Document would be very useful. I assume that such a thing is quite possible, but how far along anyone is with producing such a thing (as open source), I have no idea.

Re:OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that is a bug in their website. if you go to one of the mirrors http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/openoffice/contrib /MacOSX/ [psu.edu] you will see that this is an english version 1.9.130. Note that OO.o is not yet stable in OS 10, this is still a development version. Personally, I have not had any problems using it, but I do find it to be slower compared to other platforms. The lack of integrated Carbon/Cocoa/etc steers me away. OSX is supposed to be pretty IMAO! Nonetheless, kudos to the OO.o team on a significant accomplishment.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[julesh]

Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?

Simply put, the reason is this:

Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.

PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.

OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.

Re:Grrrr

[sucker_muts]

No problem, apart from it's name, RC3 is 100% identical as 2.0.

They just updated the version number thoughout and made sure beta was mentioned nowhere anymore. Once they were sure no (major) bugs were found in the latest beta they could push it as a final version.

Just keep your RC3, it's the same as 2.0 final.

Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[raitchison]

I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.

According to the System Requirements [openoffice.org] page it still requires the Sun JVM.

Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.

Re:It's in RPMs

[SimilarityEngine]

Try here [openoffice.org] - seems to be .tar.gz, about to download now ..... :-)

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Wornstrom]

I push openoffice on anyone who asks me if I have a "copy" of office they can "install" on their new computer. Now with the more advanced Access style database stuff and general improvements, I couldn't imagine the "need" for MS Office anywhere. Except maybe in schools where the classes they teach on basic computer skills require that students have a copy of the latest version of Office. That is one thing that needs to be changed. Users are getting their basic education in productivity applications without any alternatives. Amazon is preselling the openoffice 2.x resource kit for $32.99, which comes with the cd with several versions (MS, Linux, Solaris, Apple) of OOo, plus macros and such. Might make a good gift for someone with the in-depth manual that explains how to do everything.

Cool API, could become web services stack

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't know, openoffice has an excellent API. It will run in server mode with an open port on the server so you can query it and perform almost any operation including File conversion, pdf export, calculations, etc. Check it out!

http://api.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org]

HIT THE TORRENTS

[cerelib]

The have a link to torrents. I highly suggest that. I am seeding right now so come and get it.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[k98sven]

Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.

Red Hat is getting OOo to play with the GNU compiler for java (gcj). They shipped OOo using gcj with Fedora Core 4, and according to the blog [linux.ie] of the guy working on it, it seems OOo 2.0 will follow as well.

Re:OSX

[tuggy]

i'm using m133 now.
get it from here: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/2.0/ [ooofr.org]
its english :)

Re:OSX

[VValdo]

RC3 here [planetmirror.com]. Release to come soon no doubt.

W

Re:Mac OS X

[dmaxwell]

You have to do some digging but there are unofficial OS X builds that even do the ".app" stuff properly and launch X and so forth transparently. It looks and feels quite nice (though not "Maclike") for all that it is an X11 application. A major fly in the ointment is that it only uses fonts that come with it and can't recognize the Mac format fonts on the system (dfonts and so-forth). Additional fonts can be installed but the process is clunky.

Creating ods is darn trivial

[codepunk]

I created a program for here at work just yesterday that logs machine PLC data to a ods formatted sheet. I just created a ods template and my logger program written in python opens content.xml and feeds the log data into it. Now of course I could do that with office also but it would require either macro programming and or automating excel to do it, far uglier than just producing straight ods output from a program. Not to mention having to run a office suite on a server just to produce a document. For the developer ODF is a god send!

Re:Must not be for real

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it is in portage - /usr/portage/app-office/openoffice-bin-2.0.0

Re:Excellent!!!!

[joeljkp]

I haven't tried 2.0 yet, but I've found Excel to have far more advanced charting options that are simultaneously easier to use than those in OOo.

If they've revamped charting in Calc, I'll be very very pleased.

Detailed Comparison of OO Writer and MS Word

[L. VeGas]

Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here [nedwolf.com] that some might be interested in.

Anybody downloading with Bittorrent READ!

[Danathar]

If you are downloading via Azureus...PLEASE do the following

Post the Azureus Magnet URI to Slashdot by doing the following

Go to "My Torrents"

Right click on your torrent and choose "Copy Magnet URI to clipboard"

Please paste this in your post.

This will allow people to join the swarm without having to get the tracker file which is TOTALLY swamped at the moment.

thanks!

Re:Bittorrent / P2P download links

[Anonymous Coward]

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:DD3CA4757LNNLEMGSQIN5JMPK23B62 NB

Re:Excellent!!!!

[EpsCylonB]

http://ftp.idilis.ro/mirrors/openoffice.org/stable /2.0.0/ [idilis.ro]
http://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/openoffice.org/s table/2.0.0/ [roedu.net]

couple of mirrors

Re:Please POST bittorrent MAGNET links!

[sh0dan]

Ah - I'm not the best at these new fancy P2P features ;)
Found this in Azureus. It should work for the Win32 binary:
Win 32 binary [magnet].

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dominator]

One suggestion is to AbiWord 2.4 [abisource.com] on the command line. It's as simple as:

AbiWord --to=doc foo.odt
AbiWord --to=odt foo.doc

Re:Torrent Links

[Knuckles]

You might not remember, but before Monsanto [monsanto.com] took over [organicconsumers.org], farmers usually didn't purchase patented, genetically crippled (can't reproduce) seeds. Instead, they used part of their harvest as seeds for the next year. Thus, they would have most seeds at harvest time. ;)

Re:Office Key...

[digidave]

"If you only want to display MSOffice documents, MS have a free download of a viewer program on their web site. It's lighter and faster than OO.o, and probably opens a larger percentage of docs correctly."

It's reasonably safe to assume that he needs to occasionally modify or create a new document. Most people do.

I also wouldn't count on Microsoft's own reader opening older .docs better than OpenOffice. Word is notorious for failing to open its own documents when they are not created in the same version of Word.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[jamesshuang]

That is one thing distinctly missing in OO2.0. Charting options are the same as in OO1.0. In fact, almost all the features are the same, but the stability and the looks improved quite a bit.

As a college student in many labs, this lack of advanced graphing features is amazingly annoying- trendlines can't be extended, custom scatterplots are impossible. Hell, gnumeric does a FAR better job with graphing. Quite annoying in the end...

Re:Java problem? Not.

[rdieter]

According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.

Note: System Requirements say:

The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java(emphasis mine) ...

So, java is *not* required to use ooo. You get extra features if you happen to have it installed, that's all.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[cellocgw]

I haven't tried 2.0 yet, but I've found Excel to have far more advanced charting options that are simultaneously easier to use than those in OOo
True but not relevant. People use Excel for graphing only because it's there in front of them and they don't know any better. If you want high quality flexible format graphs, go get a graphing tool.
And to the poster who complained about extending trendlines and stuff like that: don't confuse data analysis with creating graphs. Get a real analysis tool, like MatLab or Regress+ or LabFit or aNova, do your curve fits and error analysis, then plot the results.

Re:What we need now is...

[dudus]

have you ever heard about evolution?

Re:Torrent Links

[squoozer]

Yes and no. I was thinking specifically about harvesting corn where you collect the seed. As such harvest time is when you have the most seed even though you are going to grind most of it to make flour. If you were thinking about carrots or some other such crop where you rarely let them go to seed then yes you are correct you would have no seeds at harvest time.

In my defence however I offer these two bits of evidence. Firstly, most (western) people consider harvest time to be when the corn is collected since that is the staple food stuff of most (maybe all) western countries. Secondly, since corn easily the most grown crop I think it would be a fair bet that the amount (number) of seed produced easily outweighs that produced for any other crop.

Re:Creating ods is darn trivial

[Tony]

If what you want is scriptability, you can do that with Office just fine.

Not on a non-MS-Windows server, you can't.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

PDF is actually less dynamic

[jonabbey]

PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.

People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!

PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.

Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.

So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.

OpenOffice (Win32) download sites without P2P...

[antdude]

Click here [filemirrors.com] if you can't or don't want to use P2P method. Note this is Windows version.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[MrKahuna]

Not French in fact. Agreement could not be reached on whether to use the abbreviation of the English word order, CUT (coordinated universal time), or the French word order, TUC (temps universel coordonné). So they compromised and picked UTC.

For more info see here: http://tf.nist.gov/general/misc.htm#Anchor-14550/ [nist.gov]

This concludes todays (off-topic) broadcast. Have a good evening.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dogfull]

uhm, no.

PS is turing-complete.
PDF isn't.

That's the only real difference.

Re:Creating ods is darn trivial

[codepunk]

In this case I am not using a macro, or scripting internally my program is outputting a
populated ods document based on a template I created with open office. One hell of alot easier than trying to automate ms office and my program is kept small and simple.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[dzafez]

Bullshit, postscript is a Turing-Complete programming Language! PDF is not, so the comparison lacks a bit of depth. For a nice comparison, ceck out:

page 4 of these slides :
http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/files/185 -inside-pdf-slides.pdf [www.ccc.de]

they belong to this interesting speech from last year:

http://www.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/event/67. en.html [www.ccc.de]

Re:More seriously, I'll check it out

[killjoe]

The fact that OO is unable to import and export undocumented file types protected by patents and other intellectual property is not their fault. You need to take this up with Microsoft. Perhaps they could support the OASIS standard in their product, I hear some of their customers have been asking for it.

OpenOffice on OpenBSD

[chrysalis]

Although there is no native build for OpenBSD yet, OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs fins on OpenBSD through Linux emulation.
Here are instructions to run it on OpenBSD: http://www.00f.net/php/show-article.php/openoffice _on_openbsd [00f.net]

Access is the answer.

[Burz]

The question is: How do tech-savvy office clerks and frontline managers automate data that is too extensive or dependant on forms/reports to handle in a spreadsheet? Especially when they need to apply this on a relatively small scale within a large corporation?

Of course, another answer is to impose a locked-down environment where very little is programmable and worker initiative is viewed with suspicion. I've experienced that too, in the form of mainframe- and Unix-centric environments. This MS-hater will happily take the Access-riddled workplace over that any day.

But finally having a widely-deployable (and FOSS) alternative to Access makes this a moment of great joy for me!

Re:MS Office vs. OOo

[evilviper]

Parent should be modded "Funny" if anything...

KOffice requires all of KDE to be loaded-up, which will eat more resources than OOo. If you already run a full KDE install, then you aren't loading all of it up just for KOffice, and it's tolerable. However, the same is true for OOo.

If you already have a GTK-based desktop environment loaded, OOo start-up time, and resources dedicated just to it, isn't so bad.

GNOME Office, I'm sorry to say, is like putting Wordpad, Paint, and Calc together, and calling it "Windows Office". The Gnome office apps are not at all impressive, I'm sorry to say. I'd love to have a GTK-based alternative to OOo, other than loading up all of KDE just to open a spreadsheet.