LibreOffice 4.1 New Features and Fixes
libreoffice.org
libreoffice.org
For example https://www.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/EN-Project_images... — the "Properties" button and "Line Type" drop down are completely misaligned.
These design issues add up and end up giving a poor impression of the software, regardless of its features.
Probably. They may need help though - it's a big project with a lot of code that runs on various platforms.
Did you file a bug report, or, if nothing else, drop them an email?
I'm not suggesting that this is horrible software, just that it gives a bad first impression. I am suggesting that these sorts of screenshots shouldn't be used in advertising material until they are polished.
This was an image that was selected for marketing purposes. My point is that doing such a thing can make a bad impression. Show only the polished parts of the app.
I wonder how many thousands have chosen not to install Inkscape as a result of this home page. The first time I went I assumed it was a URL squatter.
They're not targeting anyone, they're presenting their software and letting you use it under a free-libre & free-gratis license. In many ways it doesn't matter if you chose it or not. It's not being created in order to develop a need in you it's created to meet a need the creators have.
Inkscape is functional. Of course there's no problem with the website being worked on and perhaps made to answer questions one has more easily. But I wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away from making it more usable and functional.
Maybe I've misunderstood the economics of FOSS but that's how I see it.
Just to be clear, it doesn't matter to the project creators/authors. We don't know that for a fact, but their behavior seems to imply that. I'll admit, I find that a bit surprising, since I've never worked hard on a public-facing project without hoping people would use it and find it useful.
However from a global welfare perspective it clearly matters a great deal. The over-simplified but not-too-far-off math on the social benefit of a project is that global_welfare_added == (value_added_per_user) * n_users, so a positive multiplier on n_users is a positive multiplier on value so long as the value added is positive.
In this case, making the website look like an actual website isn't about "creaing a need", it's about informing people who have that need (designers who need to edit vector graphics) that the product might fill that need. Currently the site doesn't communicate that at all. Furthermore, that their demonstrated indifference to communicating the nature of their product to potential users makes me loathe to donate dev time or money to fund development of a product that will be little used by those who might value it.
> But I wouldn't really want to divert resources towards marketing it and away from making it more usable and functional.
The tiny user base undoubtedly restricts the project's access to resources in terms of donations of both time and money. Again, it's easy to imagine why the authors would be indifferent to this, and my only point is that's a shame for anybody who values a more widely-used project.
This is not incompatible with what I said. You can desire people to find and use a package without desiring to promote it in a standard marketing way. Perhaps the Inkscape team are happy with the ecosystem they have of supporters and users - that create such things as http://inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com/, http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/, http://screencasters.heathenx.org/ all easily found and all providing advocacy for the project. Along with their part in LGM.
>global_welfare_added == (value_added_per_user) n_users* //
Like you said that's simplistic. If you encourage users that wouldn't benefit, despite Inkscape being a great benefit for many, then you have a negative addition to your "global welfare".
Sounds like you're ready to take the plunge though ... http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Editing_Inkscape%27s....
Perhaps you'd take inspiration from sk1 (also part of LGM) - http://sk1project.org/.
I liked
> don't parse fourteen thousand lines of label descriptions on every startup, defer them until a sheet of labels is used
* Improved MS Office Interoperability
* Fixed bugs
* Reduced memory usage/improved performance
In fact, those are the primary reasons my company abandoned our plans to migrate from MSO to LO. I have filed several bug reports with both the AO/LO teams on issues such with incorrectly importing NetSuite generated Excel documents for our sales team. Most of the bugs were validated, opened, and then ignored for the past year.
The problem is that this is a moving target (and event more in motion due to Microsoft's need to port this to some mobile platform, so no matter how much is invested in this issue, they will never get close to acceptable.
I've written a bunch of Perl code (that I should open source.. maybe some day. anyone here'd find that useful?) for creating and editing docx files. It's not that hard -- it's all XML!
EDIT: I was using a LibreOffice daemon before, but I did this code just because Libre had so many bugs / missing features when converting a document to docx.
It's too bad the Oracle didn't take OO under their wings. With their resources they could have turned it into a true competitor to MSO. As it stands now, volunteers enjoy adding new features not bug fixing or scouring the 200 page OpenXML spec. sheet.
This is (most likely) not going to happen, at least for a (very) long time - the cause is that StarOffice was originally structured as a single giant application instead of separate ones.
Note that e.g. new volunteers working on build infrastructure things are not going to be happy that they aren't allowed to work on what they're good at. They're not going to switch to coding, they're not suddenly going to care about MS Office. Any company/project can do multiple things at once.
Anyway, just file bugs! In the release notes it said they fixed 3000 in this version.
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121429 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=15379 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=95039 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=119268 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=121430 https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=69633
Note the last one was fixed in AOO 4.0. Yay :) After 5 years, but better late than never! Unfortunately they only fixed the .doc import filter and it still exists in the .docx import filter. Asked them if I should post a new report.
The one big addition to OpenOffice was the contribution of IBM's Lotus Symphony sidebar properties dialogs. LibreOffice 4.1.0 adds these as well but considers them 'experimental' as they are new and largely untested. LibreOffice has a larger and more active development team and can pull bug-fixes and features from OpenOffice as the L/GPL 3.0 is Apache compatible. OpenOffice can not pull features and bug fixes from LibreOffice unless they re-license as L/GPL.
The projects are unlikely to merge. Every major Linux/Debian/BSD distro now ships with LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. OpenOffice may still be more popular on Windows, though, due to name recognition. I don't know what the public numbers are in terms of downloads for the same period to compare.
LibreOffice won, Oracle lost. Game over.
Although it's great to support very old formats, I wonder if it makes sense to integrate this to the main distribution, and thus increase the code size with features few people need. They should have some kind of plugin system to support this.
I believe that the Apache OpenOffice developers have been complaining that the LO guys just cherry-picks their changes and don't do anything. This should hopefully put paid to that complaint!
If you are having issues with it on work documents, you could really help out in having them fixed by trying to replicate each problem you find in a sample document, and attaching that to a bug report. Far better than just hoping someone notices it and fixes it.
This is a personal issue with me, because I lost some face with the owner. I had pushed for OO instead of MSO 2007/2010, but after a partial migration, it was clear OO was not up to the task.
> Port Web Wizard from Java to python. 140 files changed, 5076 (+), 11416 (-). Removed 55 files, 10426 lines of java code (Javier Fernandez)
So it looks like they're trying to scrub out the Java parts (except perhaps in Base). Does anyone know if this is the case?
I really appreciate that they're reducing the amount of languages in the project, makes it easier for new developers to join. There are loads of things that they're doing just to make it easier for developers. Pretty weird reason to prefer LibreOffice because of this, but that's me :P
http://www.ahunt.org/2013/07/firebird-now-in-master/
http://www.ahunt.org/2013/05/gsoc-2013-libreoffice-firebird-...
So suggest LibreOffice, as you can choose what kind of stability guarantee is good for you.
Using yum localinstall, I installed LO4.1 and oOo4.0 on a CentOS based desktop last night along with the native LO3.4 install. At present, I'm finding oOo has scrolling issues (nvidia graphics, proprietary drivers) and the 'use hardware acceleration' option is un-ticked and greyed out on installation. LO4.1 has the option ticked and editable on installation.
This would be a major competitive advantage to Excel, which can only talk to SQL Server, or to others via very expensive plugins.
Just can't find the link to the video..
The ones who need typesetting are stuck with LaTeX anyway.
You might be. Some of us have been moving back the other way, after discovering that doing real work using children's toys instead of grown-up tools is inefficient and frequently produces substandard results.
People have written entire books specifically on how to present information effectively, on top of a vast body of knowledge about graphic design, typography, and the like. The fact that a typical web-based word processor today offers only trivial formatting tools doesn't invalidate all of that previous experience and understanding; it just means that a typical web-based word processor today isn't very good at producing well-presented documents.
Or it could be that for many people, "good enough" is good enough; they simply don't care about the incremental benefits of "well-presented documents" enough to abandon the convenience of Web-based word processors.
It's sort of like the audiophiles who love vinyl record albums and vacuum-tube amplifiers but can only listen in their sound rooms, versus the iPhone users who can take their 10,000 songs everywhere they go.
I don't think there's any "could" about it. What you said is certainly true, and a huge proportion of the most successful web apps have been built on that premise, and there's nothing wrong with that.
However, that doesn't mean those who still need or want something of higher quality are dinosaurs who are somehow being left behind the times. While I understand your music analogy, I don't think the relative differences in quality and flexibility are very similar at all in the two cases.
While I agree that Google Docs are a joke, the damage done by clueless users with Office that could be avoided by taking away all possibilities of custom formatting is not to be underestimated.
I'm mainly talking about captioning images by aligning the following line at its center and creating headlines by formatting a line very big.
God, how I hate these people.
There's no reason why you couldn't do everything within a browser but we don't seem to quite be there yet.
In short, I think your mistrust arises purely from familiarity with the desktop solution; don't let it cloud your judgement, because I really don't think these dinosaurs have a future.
I agree this may be a shrinking number of people, aligned with the PC/Laptop numbers I imagine.
LaTeX is great, but the skill set required in use is high. I find sending people a document in LO/oOo is easier for them to change &c.
Apparently LO does not: http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/5371/is-lo-calc-capab...
http://www.datamation.com/applications/libreoffice-accelerat...