LibreOffice 7.3 RC1 Available For Testing This Open-Source Office Suite

[Paradigm Shifter]

I tried Mendeley out as a reference manager a while ago (I was an Endnote guy) because it supported LibreOffice... but to say that the experience was unstable was putting it mildly. I had other, more fundamental, issues with Mendeley which made me return to Endnote and Office 365. The other thing that made me return to Office 365 is that comments, tracked changes, complex formatting and other such things which now go into the average document prior to manuscript submission to a journal were breaking every time I would exchange a document with my boss or collaborators.

I really should just suck it up and spend a few weeks learning LaTeX inside out.

Anyway, every time there is an update for LibreOffice, they say support for Microsoft formats has improved... but progress isn't just slow on this front, it feels practically geologic. LibreOffice is useful in an emergency, or for simple stuff, but I'll normally reach for Vim/Xed/Gedit/Notepadqq/Notepad++ before I reach for LibreOffice.

[smitty3268]

..is LibreOffice java based running in a vm?

It's primarily C++.

[andyprough]

I really should just suck it up and spend a few weeks learning LaTeX inside out.

You should. Here, Miss Quids will get you going with LaTeX: https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PLzZ0...BZ2tdtZFTuEBZv

[OneTimeShot]

Your posts kind of prove my points exactly. Maybe fast-forward that version history a bit? You might even realize the version numbering has changed between the two. These don't look exactly the same to me at least: https://i.postimg.cc/Vmv3T4MB/diff.png

Wow - so many people are arguing with Wikipedia through me. That's literally where my information is coming from...

[OneTimeShot]

Personal editon is no problem!

They just want to prevent these support posts like "I have a commercial installation which 30,000 users which is 5 years old. We dont have a support contract so tell me how to upgrade my 30,000 installations! Free of charge of course! Immediately!"

No they are trying to fool people to pay them for commercial support. It's implying that 30000 is less "legal" than 1 user, which is not true. In both cases, "support" will go like this thread in either case, bunch of people complaining who don't know the history (that I read on Wikipedia because I couldn't remember why Libre Office split from OO).

Libre Office split from OO because of Oracle, licensing and Apache. The reason for the split at the time was fairly close to the "Personal Edition": they wanted to charge for a commercial edition that was 99% the same.

[Paradigm Shifter]

You should. Here, Miss Quids will get you going with LaTeX: https://yewtu.be/playlist?list=PLzZ0...BZ2tdtZFTuEBZv

Cheers! If I could give you more than one like for that, I would.

[jabl]

As mentioned previously in this thread, LO started out as a set of patches (ooo-build/go-ooo) on top of (Sun) OpenOffice, as Sun was very slow or even unwilling to accept outside contributions. Later on as they realized this was not a temporary state of affairs that was going to be fixed, it morphed into a proper fork, which they named LibreOffice.

I have a vague recollection that after Oracle donated OO to the Apache foundation and it was relicensed under the Apache license, LO did a final rebase on top of AOO in order to simplify the licensing situation and clear the Oracle taint.

But beyond that one time rebase, they are really separate projects. As Wikipedia mentions, LO sees 50x more development activity than AOO, so LO has no interest in what AOO is doing. And conversely, AOO can't take code from LO as LO uses a copyleft license which is not acceptable to AOO.

[quikee]

Wow - so many people are arguing with Wikipedia through me. That's literally where my information is coming from...

Well they are not really, because you said:

I think most code changes get applied to both.

This is what people are referring to, which is your assumption and completely wrong - AOO doesn't include any code from LO as it is not Apache licensed so they don't want it.

Also LibreOffice uses exclusively MPLv2 license for all the new code or changes, all the pre-LO code was rebased from AOO version so it uses the Apache license for that code. There is still a small portion of (L)GPLv2 licensed code, which can be excluded by a configuration script (it's only used in extensions).

[jabl]

As for using LaTeX, I can recommend looking into LyX, a WYSIWYG editor that generates LaTeX. In particular, it has a very nice equation editor.

It doesn't really work if you're collaborating with others that work with a pure LaTeX workflow, though. In such situations I've often started out writing my part with LyX, then switch to LaTeX when starting with the collaboration back and forth.

[Mavman]

You guys really study your history, don't you? LOL

This kind of makes me feel a bit old but here's a few facts:

1. M$ Office documents are NOT compatible between M$ Office versions (e.g.: Documents created in Office 2016 do not render correctly in Office 2019)
2. Compatibility with M$ Office documents are a PITA because even with an open source file format - the OOMXL - (that even M$ does not follow to the letter as they should) they have other proprietary parts - like c-fonts - that force documents to render incorrectly on other suits
3. Go-OO (which i used back in the day) was OpenOffice ("fork/effort" from the SUSE guys) that with a set of patches/bugfixes and features that OpenOffice/Sun refused to apply to OpenOffice (i think no one was told a reason but i suspect there were "other" interests in the middle)... when OpenOffice main developers rebel against Oracle (that refused to give them the OO.org brand and instead donated it to apache) libreoffice was created from openoffice and directly integrated everything from Go-OO (that happened because LibreOffice had the support from Novell at the time - without which we would be with a dead OO.org today and paying M$)
4. LibreOffice devs have done tremendous work with LibreOffice - they've cleaned dead code (granted it's a 90's code but so is M$ Office - if we ever get to see the code), added brutal new features and we do have a great suite as a result of that (and don't give me that crap that "Office XYZ is better because..." there is no "because", because even if they may have - in some cases - an apparent biggest compatibility, they end up missing a lot of other features, so that in the end LibreOffice comes up on top)
5.(edit: ) oh and... funny thing about licenses: LibreOffice can pickup any improvement from OpenOffice for free, but OpenOffice cannot do the same LOLOLOLOL

and a few other things that i don't have the time to get into.

All in all, lets all just agree to only complain that LibreOffice does not have a decent update system, shall we? ( https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/...g.cgi?id=68274 ) LOLOLOLOL

(edit 2: while i typed this, jabl synthesized LibreOffice history a lot better than me!!!)