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Originally posted by Palu Macil
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Agree 100%, this is a net positive all around. LO has come a long way, but it still has a ways to go. I've personally switched to SoftMaker Office as it has far better MSFT file format compatibility, and seems a lot more snappy and responsive in daily use. But competition is good, and so is a freely available office suite, so I do sincerely hope this shift to Community & Enterprise product tiers results in more revenue for the project. -
It does depend on the documents you are handling.Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
All the reviewers have found that softmaker and Libreoffice both go wrong the important part is how.
The textmaker compare there shows the more dangerous problem in SoftMaker TextMaker where items get overlapped that are not meant to be overlapped. Yes club symbol there with the slash rendered though it that is not meant to be the case. This means document is still wrong but its harder to see its wrong because formatting looks right. Yes using SoftMaker you do need to proof a lot more carefully. Libreoffice in a troubled document general format will be out like page breaks not aligning so a lot simpler to see you have trouble in your hands.
This is the dangerous thing SoftMaker Office can seam to have far better compatibility when it does not because the defects are harder to spot. If you are doing a legal document you are most likely safer in Libreoffice than Softmaker Office because you don't want a minor hard to spot defect changing contract meaning.
There need to be two measurements in review.
1) how technically defective the render is.
2) how hard it is to spot the defects.
SoftMaker might be winning on lower defect count but the problem here is SoftMaker has unique defects that are very hard to spot to the point you are highly likely to print out a important document with a defect and think its fine. Its horrible some usage cases like contracts the SoftMaker defects can change the meaning of what is in front of you.
I remember dealing with an Accountants computer system and I asked them what was the most important thing for a Office suite because they were using Libreoffice next to MS Office. The most important thing to them that when you read the document the text was correct no overlapped symbols or the like the complete formatting could be shot to hell as long as the meaning was intact when you read the document. So softmaker overlapping errors means it was not acceptable to them(please note these overlapping errors is not a new failure in the Softmaker Office product).
Fun point Libreoffice was on their system to open documents that MS Office itself had created then refused to open again so the fact the documented opened with broken formatting did not upset them as document that opened badly was better than a document that would not open at all. That experience made me wonder if you should have more than 1 Office suite installed and use more than 1 on critical things.
You have to be really careful recommending single Office Suite there are dragons here. Yes even just recommending MS Office alone on Windows for windows users can be recommending a problem to end users. Yes sometimes what you should be recommending in Office suite should change on what defects are in fact tolerable to the usage case.
torsionbar I would guess you have not noticed the overlapping symbols and chars problem yet with Softmaker Office. Yes this defect really does limit where you should use it.Comment
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This is exactly why TDF advises companies to leverage an enterprise supported version of LO from Collabora, CIB or others and as a direct result LO is now branded as a Community edition to reflect such. The problem at large is a company moves from like MS Office to a "for free" (as in beer) LibreOffice, then complains it has issues which are not fixed (in time) for them by in their free time working individuals on the project. Companies generally do not want to look at the code themselves, but want to have the ability to pay someone to do that for them. Then you want to be sure an issue is fixed or enhanced in a timely manner as an issue is impacting your business. Getting issues fixed in closed software, even if you are a paying customer, is not always for sure (may take up to years) and that is the beauty of open source: you can always someone else to get it fixed or do it yourselves. If you are not happy with the enterprise support of company A, then turn to company B.Originally posted by microcode View Post
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LibreOffice Community Edition. This is a very redundant name, is it not? "Open Source Office Open Source Edition". What exactly is this name differentiating against? Does something just called LibreOffice no longer mean Libre?Comment
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The Community label in LibreOffice reflects there is not just one edition, but also an Enterprise version build and delivered by ecosystem partners (Collabora Office, LibreOffice powered by CIB, etc). The difference is Community reflects to community supported, in practice mostly by volunteers in their free time and without any guarantees. Enterprise reflects a better tested solution and that one (the company or organization) can call someone if the solution fails. A support level makes sure the issue you face and cost your company money gets solved in a timely manner.Originally posted by timrichardson View Post
LibreOffice is still and will always be free as in Freedom to use, but was never (intended), and will never for always be free as in free beer. By that I mean, of course you can download and use the software from the site for free as longs as you can help yourselves to perform such, install and support it on your platform of choice. Then certain platforms have App Stores that will it make it easy and save to get you the software ready for you, but it forces the dev's to follow certain rules and have additional costs (time, software, certificates) to provide that service and inevitably add a fee to the Free use of the software. Obviously that is the IOS and MacOS App Store, Android also (if you cannot sideload yourselves) and also Microsoft will move their platform closer to using an App Store (Windows 10X). While the solution is always free as in Freedom, you may need to pay a fee for the service to be able to leverage it.
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”...The software isn't changing at all. This is a label on the name, nothing else," said Mike Saunders, who does community outreach at TDF...Originally posted by timrichardson View Post
Although the project is under-resourced according to some key members, this is partly is down to oddities in the way it is financed as TDF itself is said to have large cash reserves” [emphasis added].
from
"LibreOffice 7.1 Community released with support for M1 ARM Mac and 'user interface variants'
Community? 'The software isn’t changing at all. This is a label on the name, nothing else' "
Tim Anderson Thu 4 Feb 2021 // 12:13 UTC
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This was very insightful, thank you for sharing. The overlapping error was with SoftMaker 2021 beta, I wonder if they have fixed it in the final release? Do you know where to find that card game document so I could try it out?Originally posted by oiaohm View Post
It does depend on the documents you are handling.
All the reviewers have found that softmaker and Libreoffice both go wrong the important part is how.
The textmaker compare there shows the more dangerous problem in SoftMaker TextMaker where items get overlapped that are not meant to be overlapped. Yes club symbol there with the slash rendered though it that is not meant to be the case. This means document is still wrong but its harder to see its wrong because formatting looks right. Yes using SoftMaker you do need to proof a lot more carefully. Libreoffice in a troubled document general format will be out like page breaks not aligning so a lot simpler to see you have trouble in your hands.
This is the dangerous thing SoftMaker Office can seam to have far better compatibility when it does not because the defects are harder to spot. If you are doing a legal document you are most likely safer in Libreoffice than Softmaker Office because you don't want a minor hard to spot defect changing contract meaning.
There need to be two measurements in review.
1) how technically defective the render is.
2) how hard it is to spot the defects.
SoftMaker might be winning on lower defect count but the problem here is SoftMaker has unique defects that are very hard to spot to the point you are highly likely to print out a important document with a defect and think its fine. Its horrible some usage cases like contracts the SoftMaker defects can change the meaning of what is in front of you.
I remember dealing with an Accountants computer system and I asked them what was the most important thing for a Office suite because they were using Libreoffice next to MS Office. The most important thing to them that when you read the document the text was correct no overlapped symbols or the like the complete formatting could be shot to hell as long as the meaning was intact when you read the document. So softmaker overlapping errors means it was not acceptable to them(please note these overlapping errors is not a new failure in the Softmaker Office product).
Fun point Libreoffice was on their system to open documents that MS Office itself had created then refused to open again so the fact the documented opened with broken formatting did not upset them as document that opened badly was better than a document that would not open at all. That experience made me wonder if you should have more than 1 Office suite installed and use more than 1 on critical things.
You have to be really careful recommending single Office Suite there are dragons here. Yes even just recommending MS Office alone on Windows for windows users can be recommending a problem to end users. Yes sometimes what you should be recommending in Office suite should change on what defects are in fact tolerable to the usage case.
torsionbar I would guess you have not noticed the overlapping symbols and chars problem yet with Softmaker Office. Yes this defect really does limit where you should use it.
It's amazing that the primary function of the "IBM compatible" personal computer was essentially to replace the typewriter i.e. to produce business documents. Now more than 30 years later, we are still struggling to have a consistent experience with creating and viewing office documents. This is why the PDF format is so popular, as it has the layout and formatting baked in, so it looks the same no matter what tool you view it with. Microsoft and their broken proprietary file formats are the main reason for this mess. They've profited immensely from this vendor lock-in strategy. They will milk it to the end of time if they can.
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I am one of those guys and an OpenOffice user since before LO even existed. Doing a search of bugzilla with my email as reporter:"284 bugs found." Of those, only 47 haven't been resolved, all minor interop / feature requests. 81% Not bad for free community supported software. How many bugs have you reported? Searching for some issues that you described. I can't find any report describing those issues.Originally posted by microcode View Post
Your "reading old bug reports" sounds like an excuse for someone who is rationalizing doing nothing to contribute and never reached out to the community. I could make this claim against any open source project with a searchable bug tracker. Yes, the codebase complex. Yet, despite not being a highly skilled C++ programmer, I have managed to fix several of the issues reported for a challenge. As a heavy users, I too have found crashing bugs. But I reported them. They were all triaged with a high priority, and quickly fixed.
In my case, my high success rate is probably because I know how to write quality bug reports, include step-by-step, screenshots, stack traces, etc. I think in your case, it's a lack of trying to engage with the community.Last edited by slacka; 04 February 2021, 01:12 PM.Comment
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Something to be aware here I first saw SoftMaker having the problem of overlapping items that should not be overlapping was 2010. This is not a new fault with SoftMaker its something in the way there rendering engine is made allows the problem.Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
There is a little bit more to MS Office formats being broken.Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
Most common libreoffice problem is font metrics being different. This is where LibreOffice has substituted a font for a font that does not metric match of course this is going to result in document being wrong. Fun point font metric issues the fonts Microsoft uses change over time resulting in slight metric differences resulting in old documents breaking in the same way Libreoffice does in MS Office. So document breaking due to using wrong font/font with wrong metrics is in fact the same between libreoffice and MS office and they break basically the same ways.
Most people are not aware fonts have version numbers for when they have been changed lets look at calibri.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typ...s_10_font_list calibri here is 6.23
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...6-b5fe6ede6adb yet the calibri used by MS Office current is 6.21.
Yes the different version there are metric differences in places inside the font.
Next thing to be aware of your default MS fonts are not free usage for all usage case. If you are going to be using calibri in a ebook you are meant to have gone to fonts.com and paid 132 USD for the version you get from fonts.com is different version again with slightly different metrics again that now means you need to recheck you complete ebook if you were using the MS Office provided calibri.
The reality here the default MS Office fonts are watermarked by font metrics so its truly possible for Microsoft to tell what font you have used and come knocking on your door if you have used the wrong version. Yes being watermarked by font metrics makes them their own form of unique trouble maker for a person making documents
The LibreOffice default fonts can legally be used any document/book you like without having to pay money. Yes libreoffice rendering broken due to swaping font may not be a bad thing it should be more of a heads up.
Really business should be seriously thinking if they should allow using MS Office default fonts at all. Or should be mandating that all documents are made with fonts that they legally can use for anything without cost.
Yes you get a MS Office document that renders broken on your Windows computer with MS Office can be that the party on the other end paid for that font for other usage cases and you are using the one included for limited usage for free with MS Office. Font metrics resulting in broken documents is a MS Office feature worse is that Microsoft makes many fonts the same name that are in fact slightly different metrics.
Yes parties reviewing Office suite normally don't check the licences on the font and how you are legally allowed to use those fonts. Yes the license on the LibreOffice default fonts is a very big difference.
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Why is that redundant? Libre = free (speech). It doesn't necessarily imply that it's a community project.Originally posted by timrichardson View PostComment
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