Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [HEADSUP] libreoffice versus bison-2.5

[Bill Kenworthy]

On Sun, 2011-05-22 at 19:41 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 16:38 on Sunday 22 May 2011, Indi did opine
> thusly:
>
> > On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 12:10:01AM +0200, walt wrote:
> > > On 05/20/2011 08:24 PM, Indi wrote:
> > > > On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 12:50:01AM +0200, walt wrote:
> > > >> For you users of unstable gentoo: the recent update of 'icu' broke
> > > >> dozens of packages (as it always does) including libreoffice.
> > > >>
> > > >> The problem is that libreoffice fails to build if you have bison-2.5
> > > >
> > > > I have bison-2.5, but am using libreoffice-bin which seems fine.
> > >
> > > Yes, that would be expected because bison is needed only at compile time,
> > > not at run time.
> > >
> > > I would be using libreoffice-bin too, except for a ridiculous change made
> > > about a year ago in the way openoffice charts are scaled on the y-axis.
> > >
> > > I complained bitterly on the openoffice 'chart' mail list, only to
> > > discover that openoffice changed its perfectly good scaling algorithm to
> > > ape a change made in M$ Office!
> > >
> > > Nobody at openoffice.org would consider reverting that ridiculous mee-too
> > > change, so I've been editing the open(libre)office source code to remove
> > > it myself before compiling it.  I was very disappointed to find a major
> > > open- source project following M$ around like a hungry puppy :(
> >
> > It's unfortunate that we don't have small, fast, light, standalone
> > programs to deal with the formats of word, excel, powerpoint, etc but
> > if we did odds are most people would shun them for a big, bloaty
> > office suite anyway. Personally, I'd love it if I could open and edit
> > those office formats in vim...
>
>
> What makes you think they don't *already* exist?
>
>  * app-office/libreoffice-bin-3.3.2
>          Total files : 8138
>          Total size  : 498.24 MiB
>
>  * app-office/koffice-libs-2.3.3
>          Total files : 697
>          Total size  : 19.45 MiB
>  * app-office/koffice-data-2.3.3
>          Total files : 214
>          Total size  : 608.63 KiB
>  * app-office/karbon-2.3.3
>          Total files : 160
>          Total size  : 3 MiB
>  * app-office/kexi-2.3.3
>          Total files : 337
>          Total size  : 8.17 MiB
>  * app-office/kpresenter-2.3.3
>          Total files : 188
>          Total size  : 9.28 MiB
>  * app-office/krita-2.3.3
>          Total files : 783
>          Total size  : 26.10 MiB
>  * app-office/kspread-2.3.3
>          Total files : 337
>          Total size  : 11.62 MiB
>  * app-office/kword-2.3.3-r1
>          Total files : 215
>          Total size  : 7.82 MiB
>
> Small, fast, light, standalone: yeah, they are all there.
>
> Editing them in something vim-alike is highly unlikely to be useful - compare
> antiword. Office suites are gui programs and the gui layout is as important
> (if not more so) than the content. And I haven't even touched on graphics
> elements yet.
>
> So you may be able to modify the content but probably not the layout. Have a
> look inside OOo source code sometimes for a look at what it takes to calculate
> something as "simple" as where on the page some text goes.
>
>
Do any of them actually work acceptably in terms of compatibility with
MSword though? - having a good, lite suit available for the "quick" jobs
would be nice.  

The OO/LibreOffice suits are almost compatible, the others barely if at
all.  Even simple documents fox abiword for instance, and anything
complex is hopeless.

And unfortunately, working in an MS centric organisation means close to
100% compatibility is demanded by the other end, especially on documents
being passed back and forward.

BillK