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."
too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
where is it? (Score:2)
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MLA package for LaTeX... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/mla-paper/ [ctan.org]
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
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If you can write HTML, you can write LaTeX. They're essentially the same idea, only LaTeX is much more complete with nicer output.
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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
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www.lyx.org
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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
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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For writing papers, check out Mellel (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Mellel is fast, intuitive, powerfully adaptive, well-supported and affordable. The cream of the crop in indy OS X word processors.
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Yeah, because only math and engineering students do research...do you honestly think the average medical student (for instance) is using LaTeX for their research papers?
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No, but they should be.
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Your average medical student doesn't need to write equations... to them, equations are HOLY THINGS which no one should ever handle. Once an equation is established it is like a HOLY TRUTH.
All the mathematics they will ever need in their papers are the (holy) p values (which has to be less than 0.05 --- a threshold which gives their results the status of HOLY TRUTH).
\end{flamebait}
Post anonymous to continue to get medical treatments...
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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":
Not any more. New word processing mode. (Score:2)
> 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
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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
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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.
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I don't think Apple could just take NeoOffice and do whatever it wants with it without a huge outcry from the community. But to reach something like Keynote, you need to do exactly that.
Not sure how you think Apple working with the NeoOffice guys would work...
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I don't think Apple could just take NeoOffice and do whatever it wants with it without a huge outcry from the community. But to reach something like Keynote, you need to do exactly that.
I don't know about NeoOffice, but they could take OpenOffice Aqua, support that. The problem with NeoOffice is that the interface is slow, although they made enormous improvements. I hope 2.2 is another speed improvement. I'm curious how OpenOffice Aqua will perform. Apple could help here really good. Furthermore NeoOffice is really slow with large documents with many pictures in it.
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What good would throwing money at an open source project do? They would be able to clone Microsoft Office faster? Yay. Thanks, but I'll take iWork over an Office Clone.
I actually prefer a simple, well-designed works suite over a perfect Office clone.
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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
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
this cures the symptoms but not the disease (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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!)
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If they are that congruent, then I wish they'd have just used the ISO standard format rather than an alternate, less compatible form.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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)
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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 not up to scratch yet, plus no encryption (Score:3, Informative)
Others have mentioned ODF, but there's also password-protection missing from iWork. There's ways round of it course - you can cr
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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,
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As long as we're spouting homilies, how about "too many cooks spoil the broth?" Or any of several dozen about anything designed by a committee?
Torrent? (Score:2)
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Not that slow - I just got it down from between 300KBs and 1.7MBs. Took a grand total of about 5 minutes.
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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
Neo Office (Score:2)
Framemaker (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Framemaker is so EOL though... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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)
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.
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Makes everyone GPL compliant & guarantees free (Score:3, Informative)
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
iWork, not iWorks (Score:2)
iWork, not iWorks
Excel, not Excell
Word, not Words
Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?
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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
NeoOffice opens its web site on launch (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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iWork? (Score:2, Funny)
NeoOffice rocks. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:also of interest to mac users: (Score:5, Interesting)
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Then never browse beneath 0.
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I think doing that would screw up the research of future generations of archaeologists studying privative herds of geeks.
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Then I clicked the "Parent" link.
Now, I think it would be nice if Slashdot added a feature in which a post could be modded down enough that the poster was actually deleted.
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I've been an Apple guy my entire life, except for cutting my teenage teeth on Timex/Sinclair 1000 & 2068. My first Apple was an Apple IIGS, and after that PowerBook 520c, Blue & White PowerMac G3, and finally PowerMac G5 with dually 2.7 GHz PowerPC processors. OpenOffice 2.2.1, which requires X11, is my main office suite of choice after NeoOffice fell behind last year with releases. I like using OpenOffice, and it's nice to have a word processor that actually has the 'home' a
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