The first stable release LibreOffice 3.3 | Hacker News Reader

The first stable release LibreOffice 3.3

blog.documentfoundation.org

56 pointsUncle_Sam38 comments

In my opinion (and personal experience), if they want to endanger the monopoly of MS Office, they would need, first of all, to provide 100% compatibility with the MS Office formats [read them and write to that format flawlessly].

At least for me, that was the reason my repeated evaluation of OpenOffice always failed - it couldn't handle more complex MS Word files I received from my colleagues, and it just didn't make sense to use both suites. I gave it a chance again and again, but it never worked for me despite my honest attempts to like OO.org.

Please file your issues in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment.

Even better, save as PDF on MS Office as it looks, and a save as PDF as it looks to you, while you describe the difference. It is very hard to find the compatibility mismatches otherwise -- especially the ones you need.

This doesn't seem like a realistic possibility. There isn't 100% compatability even between different versions of Office itself.

I think the point is valid and the possibility realistic if we don't assume a literal interpretation of "100% compatibility".

"Not assuming a literal interpretation of 100%" seems about as sensible as not assuming a literal interpretation of "the coin flip came up heads". Presumably if the poster had meant 80% (or whatever number) they would have said that instead.

"The coin flip came up heads" is provable. I'm not certain 100% compatibility with an MS product is provable.

I don't expect an arbitrary precision like "98.3%" to convey wanting full compatibility because I understand statement's intent. To each their own though.

> I'm not certain 100% compatibility with an MS product is provable.

In order to be provable, you would require it to be properly defined. I don't think even Microsoft has an adequate definition of what an Office document should look when stored on disk.

I believe the on-disk is pretty well defined nowadays by their open document promise.

However, HTML is a published standard, too, yet every copy of IE renders in its own special way. I think that is a far better analogy of what is expected here.

Reading MS's Office Open XML is no trivial exercise without having code from previous versions of Office built into your own program. Not many companies can do it that way.

I agree, but this is harder said than done. And, MS makes it hard by making it a moving target.

And it's not even necessarily complex. Almost any MS Word doc that I get will be rendered incorrectly in OO if the document contains imbedded graphics (e.g. a logo). And vice-versa.

Please file this embedded graphics issue in https://bugs.freedesktop.org//enter_bug.cgi -> LibreOffice with an example attachment of your document (e.g. the logo).

There is no reasonable justification for any individual, institution, or business to be using the newer MS office file formats.

But they already are, so we have to support them now. That is the problem.

The world would be a much better place if people were reasonable.

Unfortunately, lots of people use Office formats like fashion. They don't want to use "outdated" formats.

How about wanting to support more than 65k rows in Excel?

From TFA, "1 million rows in a spreadsheet"

Dear gods, please, someone give it a better name.

Sadly, superficial things like names are important if you want to compete with better-known products.

I can't even pronounce LibreOffice fluidly -- there are no words in English (I think) with a schwa followed immediately by a short 'o' sound, so no native English speaker is phonologically equipped to deal with it.

It's a great name, it prominently displays Liberty. This is much better than Open because the word 'open' is being used for all kinds of software that isn't (Open Document Format vs Office Open XML)

It may be a 'great' name ideologically, but the fact that there are three other comments in the thread giving three different ways it's pronounced, shows a certain degree of name fail.

EDIT: Sorry, five different pronunciation suggestions at last count.

Ideologically it's good, aesthetically and phonetically not so much.

Interesting. I never thought of it as "liberated office", I thought of it as "without charge office / free office" and I despise the name LibreOffice.

Hey. Why don't they call it LibertyOffice? That would be awesome.

"leeb-roffis" works for me

I take the "libre" as (sort of) a Spanish "lee-bray", so it's no more difficult to pronounce than "payoff" or "layover".

Does it even need to have the word 'office' in the name?

They could have just picked a short web 2.0 missplelled-on-purpose-with-missing-vowels name, that's easy to say and search for.

Then MS Office users who aren't computer geeks wouldn't associate it with MS Office at all. In the IE vs. Netscape battle it probably was a big factor that "Internet Explorer" had the work "internet" in it - if a computer-illiterate person wants to surf the internet, which icon will they click?

Good point. I have seen some linux distros rename apps according to functionality. So instead of a "Firefox" entry in the application menu they'd have "Browse The Internet" or just "Internet".

Libr?

Just put a soft glottal stop between the schwa and the o, or just pronounce them as two words.

yes - please. I wrote about it previously : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129846

Not sure where you are from, but this definitely doesnt work in Asian countries.

Libre is from French, so it would be said "libroffis" which works fine.

I suggest Red Stapler Office.

If you are on Snow Leopard, it is imperative to install this one. NeoOffice and OpenOffice (Goo or otherwise) have struggled on Snow Leopard with either extreme sluggishness or an inability to reasonably render all documents with acceptable loss of fidelity. Things have been considerably better with LibreOffice 3.3 so far.

A bit more background: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/LibreOffice-3-3-final...

I will also remind our technically savvy readership that they offer BitTorrent downloads, if you wish to save them some hosting costs (and speed up the downloads for your neighbors).

Interestingly enough, they offer torrents for the source code, too, but per archive, which is kind of a drag.

Transmission and I are seeding until 300%.

If on Ubuntu 10.04 x86:

Install via update script will fail. Manually install one deb package than re-run update script which fixes the problem.

This is great news, I too have been upset by the lack of ugly office suites. I am glad there is another product on the market flying the flag for open source and great user interfaces.

This is not a "me too" product. It is a fork of Open Office by former Sun employees and community contributors who have had an active role in Open Office before the Oracle acquisition. There is now more active development under this liberated model than there was when Sun was the steward of the project. The project is moving forward as never before. This is a good thing.

If you don't care for Open Office, then there is nothing here for you here. But for those of us who do care, and use Open Office every day this is good news. It means that the project will not be impeded by the heavy hand of Oracle, a corporate interest who is only interested in promoting open source in so far as it keeps away the bad press.

FWIW: Libre Office finally displaced Neo Office on my Mac, which is to say that the code base has improved quite substantially.

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