SoftMaker Office 2008 vs. OpenOffice.org 3.1 214
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'" Note that SoftMaker Office is not free software — it costs $79.95 — and there is no version for Macintosh.
Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7 (Score:5, Insightful)
All that OpenOffice bashing and SoftMaker Office boasting and there's only a negligible scoring difference between them?
From reading the article you'd think OpenOffice was crap (less than 5) and SoftMaker Office was the greatest thing next to sliced bread (8+)...
Slashvertisment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why this has made it to the frontpage.
Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Are we using the reviewer's scale where anything better than notepad is a 4? If so that could actually be a real difference... Anyway, I wasn't aware this company was trying to take on Office so interesting news. A bit of a slashvertisement but it gets very one sided when we get all the OSS releases/raves and nothing else.
Re:What timing (Score:2, Insightful)
To be fair, I had one Word project crumble because the damn program wasn't compatible with itself, after five minutes of sitting around. This is something even Microsoft can't get right 100% of the time.
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.
Re:What timing (Score:3, Insightful)
It just always really irks me that people ask for finished documents in an editor's format. If people would just stop having this dumb expection, then it wouldn't matter if my tool of choice was Word, Ooo, Pages, Correl, html, or LaTex. They're all able to send out postscript files, and usually able to generate pdf these days.
The only time
Why are you calling it an article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why so few contenders? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not hard to write a better one. It's hard to write one that's still compatible with the a) unpublished, b) quirkily implemented, c) voluminous spec that is MS word. At least sufficiently well enough to be a modest replacement.
I'm sure the folks at OO.o have been trying VERY hard to match Word behavior, but it's obviously not that simple.
I've run into several issues where OO.o doesn't render word docs properly and many more where an OO.o saved doc doesn't render properly at all in Word.
A shame, really. But that's the reason that we still have MS Office in the house. My wife and I use it for work just often enough that we can't afford not to have it.
Re:What timing (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been using Word for like 20 years, and this has happened maybe once or twice.
Lucky you. Too bad I run into that issue on a regular basis every time I go print something by one of the nearby libraries or computer labs. What a nightmare.
"Word isn't perfect so you might as well gamble on OpenOffice" is a frequently used argument, but not a very compelling one.
Neither is "OpenOffice isn't perfect so you might as well just forget about it and pay the money for Word."
I have no problems with anyone using either program; use what works for you. It just not fair to pick on one for having the same exact problem as the other with incompatibility.
Re:What timing [PDF stinks] (Score:2, Insightful)
But PDF is annoying in many ways. First, it's difficult to copy-and-past from. Second, the page navigation system is different from both typical word-processors and web browsers (HTML), at least for Adobe. And third, the fonts always look blurry to me.
Re:SofMaker (Score:3, Insightful)
> Why would I use a Office suite which is free of features?
Because your actual requirements are meagre and more resemble the sort
of word processing programs that existed for home computer users before
Word Perfect wannabes became the forced defacto standard.
> When did it happen, that features became somehow uncool to a small but loud subset of the people (I guess)??
Once people realized they were being perpetually charged over and
over again for the same thing and when relatively pointless features
like the macro interpreter became a vector for malware.
Sometimes a simpler device that meets your need is better than using an overpriced corporate tool.
Re:What timing (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I find the whole "it slightly reformats my text" argument less than compelling anyway, regardless of which office suite is being advocated at the time.
For 99% of the cases, it doesn't matter. Heck, anyone who works in a company with both US and European offices probably gets their documents reformatted between A4 and US Letter paper sizes fairly often, and that's particularly amusing since many of them will only ever be displayed on-screen where such sizes are pretty bad for readability anyway.
For the other 1% of cases, well, that's what PDF is for.
Re:What timing (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been dealing with a rash of OpenOffice compatibility problems with MS Office that I hope don't cause my business plan to bomb in a local business plan competition. I've been discovering that the way it saves .doc files doesn't quite match with how MS Office reads them, so things end up misaligned - tables broken up, images out of place, etc. And don't even get me started on docx... I'm going to try to get a revised (MS Office-saved) version in, but I hope it's not too late.
BTW, the problem is just as bad with Microsoft Word rendering other Microsoft Word files.
This is of the course the heart of the problems with OpenOffice.org; Microsoft Office compatibility. When you strive to be compatible with an enormous, twisted, inconsistent, poorly designed and abominably implemented bug, well, you have no choice but to be a bug. Worse, the bug is a constantly moving target to ensure that even relatively clean and architected "bug emulation" becomes twisted and destructive after a while.
What we need is something completely different. But it's already been pretty much proven that nothing that's not compatible has a chance because of Microsoft's monopoly-driven stranglehold. Catch-22. Either you die (or eke out your life in a small niche, as many do), or you mutate and grow into an enormous ugly bug that can never have quite the same properties as the monster it strives to exceed.
Still, given the choice between an enormous ugly expensive bug and an enormous (and albeit slightly more ugly) free bug... I'll go for the free bug. OpenOffice.org ain't all that bad... for the price.
Re:What timing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Scores: OpenOffice 7.4 vs SoftMaker 7.7 (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to know how Softmaker gets an 8 for value and OO.o only gets a 9. It's free (and Free). If the scores are so close, shouldn't OO.o get a 10?
Re:What timing [PDF stinks] (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not difficult to copy and paste from. I probably do this on a daily basis. The only time you can't copy and paste is if the document author was an idiot and blocked the copy/paste/print functions, or if the source content for the PDF was a scan of an older printed document.
No, you're wrong. In PDF text is stored as small chunks to be printed at the current point with the current font. There is no concept of a paragraph or a column. So if your text is even marginally complex - for example, you have superscripts, multiple columns, text labels on an image beside the text of your document, manual kerning, font substitution for some characters, bidi text... then you have lots of disconnected text chunks. In order to copy these, the reader needs to guess what the original formatting was. And I haven't even started on ligatures and mathematical formulae yet.
For this reason PDF readers often have 2 copy modes: rectangular and reading-order. The rectangular option tries to preserve position information (fairly easy), while the other option tries to guess and preserve the reading order (fairly hard). The rectangular option works well on tables, but poorly on multicolumn text; the opposite is generally true for reading-order selection. Evince's text selection is rectangular, Acrobat used to have both but seems to have only reading-order selection these days.
I happen to know this because I've done some work on fixing text selection in poppler; but its not just poppler-based readers that have a problem: its just as bad in Acrobat and (on the mac) Preview. Its not very hard to find documents with problems like this, and its one of the most-duped poppler/evince bugs.