There Is One Week To Go Until LibreOffice 5.1

[Adarion]

[humorous rant]PhD thesis in LibreOffice?! Such sacriledge! LaTeX is the only proper choice![/rant]

Hehe, well, if you knew how things worked at my place... Tex would have been fine indeed; but you really need some time to get into it - time I never had. Furthermore I was even supposed to deliver the whole thing (and lots of other communication like papers / publications) in MSO formats like DOC / DOCX (... !) and use proprietary OLE objects in it for embedded graphics and so on (...!!!1111omfg!).
I did not. And used LibO and freedom standards like SVG, PNG and such.

In the end I am very happy to have LibO, even though I found a lot of obstacles in the long time I was using it (started in W98 times with the first OOo releases) and also by the intensive work at the long PhD thesis recently (I did my MSc thesis also on Lib... wait... Openoffice).
SVG handling can cause also a lot of unexpected troubles, troubles you do not neet when you work 10 - 14 h / day on your thesis for several months already. The thesis iirc. started in some 4.x release and ended on 5.0.4.2 with the final PDF export for printing. I'll do my talk - as usual - in Impress. (No time to learn Tex beamer I guess; even though I visited a workshop about it some years ago)

[Azpegath]

And the point with your first post was...? You experienced bugs in a 10 year old version and you are still complaining?

Well, my point is still fairly relevant. I still feel that the same type of issues are present in LibreOffice, so called "papercuts" as Gnome (or was it Ubuntu?) called them. Small, minor bugs that annoy people and that tend to wind up never being fixed because they are minor. Wide user impact but minor in its effect.

[dajomu]

Yes, you are correct, I wrote a bug once and the first response I got was of course "we need a document that reproduces the problem" which is perfectly understandable. This was almost 10 years ago (maaaaaan!) so it was an old version of OpenOffice at that time.

And the point with your first post was...? You experienced bugs in a 10 year old version and you are still complaining?

[Azpegath]

I imagine that the LO developers really like bug reports with documents that reproduce the problem. If it's ok to provide them with all or part of your thesis (or an equivalent document where you ran into the issues) I'm sure they'll accept it.

Yes, you are correct, I wrote a bug once and the first response I got was of course "we need a document that reproduces the problem" which is perfectly understandable. This was almost 10 years ago (maaaaaan!) so it was an old version of OpenOffice at that time.

[randomizer]

I did my Master's thesis in LibreOffice and also think that there were some really annoying bugs in it. Particularly when it comes to formatting and handling of text types.

I imagine that the LO developers really like bug reports with documents that reproduce the problem. If it's ok to provide them with all or part of your thesis (or an equivalent document where you ran into the issues) I'm sure they'll accept it.

[tigerroast]

improved Microsoft Office file format support

Easily worth it. The better MS support, the better LO will be in the long run. At least with businesses. I do believe ODF is the future internationally though.

[trifud]

I am very happy with LibreOffice, especially since version 4.4. One annoying thing is the poor performance when you have a lot of data in Calc and move the selected cell really quickly with the arrow keys. Otherwise LibreOffice is great. At work I have Win7 with M$ Office 2016 but I also have LibreOffice alongside it. Libre is better than M$ in some aspects.

[hrkristian]

Here's hoping for a fix to the GTK3 regression in v5.0.2.4>

Azpegath has a really good point as well, horizontal line is still bugged to hell and back and has been for as long as I can remember...

[gQuigs]

I really like LibreOffice's workflow for contributing code. The community is also really friendly..

Oh, and they've made the build process sooo much better than the old OpenOffice one so it's easier to build too

[Azpegath]

I hope they'll also fix some bugs. I wrote my PhD in LibreOffice and well, I did encounter a good bunch of bugs. Some might show up only with certain HW/SW setups but still...
Format compaibility is a long term thing, and yes, it looks like a copy/paste changelog from early OOo but then hardly documented formats (MSO97) or misdocumented formats (MS OOXML) are just a pain.

[humorous rant]PhD thesis in LibreOffice?! Such sacriledge! LaTeX is the only proper choice![/rant]

I did my Master's thesis in LibreOffice and also think that there were some really annoying bugs in it. Particularly when it comes to formatting and handling of text types. Sometimes I just wish you could use something as consistent as LaTeX, combined with WYSIWYG, without having to actually use WYSIWYG LaTeX-editors... I think the XHTML-way of thinking: separate content from layout and design, is completely perfect. Never mess with my layout, without me actually changing my template(s). But at the same time, there are lots of in-between issues, like formatting tables, moving images around, and other things I can't think of now.

I do understand that making a word editor must be a huge PITA. It also makes me sad that they seem to focus so much on edge-case functionality (in my POV) instead of fixing bugs in the functionality that 95% of all users use. But we humans have a tendency to think that our use-case is always the "normal" one.